I like to say that feeder your foundation, but if you're going to build a house or something, you have the foundation, then you have the next layer, and that's just as important. What is that layer when it comes to your feet and ankles? It may not be what you think, and what you need to do with it for optimal health may definitely not be what you think. We're going to find out more about that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast where people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, but now we're going to move up a little bit.
It's also where we look at the propaganda and mythologies and sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to run, walk, height, play, do, yoga, crossfit, dance, revolution, what do when you get there, review, like us, give us a thumbs up, click the bell icon on YouTube. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let us jump in and find out what is the next floor, if you will, once we get from your feet. Butch, give me a favor.
Tell people who you are and what the hell you're doing here. My name is Butch Fels. I'm a functional massage therapist, and many times when people hear that they think, well, you're doing massages, but I really focus on the mechanics of the human body from the muscles perspective. I also have a degree in aging sciences, so I've studied how the human body ages over time from age 25 to death, and it's interesting as I put these things together, how the muscles can control so much of the x and pings.
So I spent the last 20 years working on my own body originally because I had severe back pain at 40 years old, and I was able to solve that, solve the problems and stop the pain and so I've been teaching people every since. I love the first thing you said about muscles and movement. Have you ever heard Joe Rogan's comment about what fighting is? I have not.
His line is fighting is the art of using your muscles to throw your bones at people. I'm exactly true because there's a scientific law that says that the bones follow the muscles. And what people forget is that without the muscles, the bones would just kind of fall to the fore like a dish rack. Let me think about water, please.
You see what I'm saying? And so it's like when people talk about their bones for many times, it's the muscles creating that. It's amazing. You give me a funny flashback.
I was a street performer. Oh my God. Holy crap. 40 years ago.
And after I was done, I was bit a lot of tumbling on the street and a bunch of other things. And my knees were killing me. And I went to various doctors and they would put me on a side-ex machine or something. I would like max the thing out.
You can't max out a side-ex machine. But I'd be crazy strength. And they were saying, well, you're seemingly fine. Did you notice I could barely walk in here?
I mean, they never understood that what was going on is something in the muscular system where even though I was strong, I wasn't strong enough in the right way and so things were out of whack and I figured it out somehow and it was fine ever since. Well, sadly today, I run into the same thing on a daily basis. And what happens is understanding that the muscles cross the joints. In other words, all the muscles on the lower leg crosses the knee, the upper leg crosses the knee.
And when those muscles get tight, boom, walking from thinking because muscles are very emotional. Okay. When they get tight like that, it puts pressure on the joint, squeezes out the synovial fluid, which is like a WD-40. That's a cushioning agent at a lubricant in the knee.
And when you do that, now you start to hit bone on bone into the knee and damage in the cartilage in here. And so when I work with doctors all the time and it's like when we're talking about it, the same thing in my background education, nobody really teaches us about that mechanical impact of the muscles from the movements that we do. Most of it, if you look at peer review studies on muscles, most of it is about strength training. Interesting.
So Dr. Isabel Sakam-Brazil, she did a study, she took a bunch of women who were 65 plus who had knee astroarthritis and put them in a super cheap minimal shoe. And over time, the amount of pain went down, the amount of medication they were taking for pain went down from any of them, the knee astroarthritis went away. And I asked her, why do you think that happens?
She goes, the muscular system got stronger in the right way, took the pressure off the joints. And then we were joking. It's like when they do research on knee astroarthritis with animals, they'll take a rabbit, extend his leg, kid his heel, so he's putting force into the knee joint until it gets arthritis. Then they'll test whatever drug they're testing, but the control is the original rabbit, where they just stop hitting his hand foot.
It's actually everything gets better over time. Exactly. Well, and if anything to keep in mind, and I just read an article by Dr. Ritten the other day in the newspaper, and he was talking about our training is about how do we alleviate the pain, not find the cause.
Interesting. Yeah. That's how I was talking. You reminded me of another one.
There's a sprinter slash sprint coach, this is embarrassing. I'm blank, his name is not popping in my head at will at some point. Anyway, out of the UK, he calls strength training the thing you do after you're done working out to get your body back in balance. Yeah.
That's it. It's like you're going to get a lot of whack when you're sprinting or running a marathon. Exactly. Back in shape.
Exactly. Because again, when you look at the mechanics of the leg, the mechanics of the foot going all way up into the hip, you've got so many stabilizing muscles around those joints that in a particular sport. You're not going to get into a football, basketball and baseball, but in a particular sport, you get into a routine and a habit of going one direction. Right.
You're shifting, you go to a different sport, which you realize is you feel like you're out of shape, even though you're not used to using the muscles in that way. So when I went from football, which was pushing and shelving people to jumping on a basketball court, I was using two very different sets of muscles, you see. And that's exactly right. Yeah.
It's a thing. People talk to you. So when a sprinter, people say, well, in the winter, you could be a cross train. I went, no.
There's no carryover from riding a bike or whatever else to sprinting. So no. And we don't think about it. We think about people just being in shape.
You know, in a different place, or are there any other Wynances like this? When the three muscles in the hamstrings, when you're doing something like golf or essence or tennis, you're going to wind up with back pain when they're tight. I've never met a golfer with back pain. They didn't have tight calves and tight hamstrings.
And the thing is, is the way we stretch them, where we, you know, put a heel down on the floor, we lean against the slam board or against the wall or we're doing our hamstrings, we lay on our back with both legs flat out, we pick one leg up. We're not stretching those muscles. We're doing strength training exercises because the brain plays a huge role with that. So I got some things to think about.
So first of all, we've already hinted about what I hinted at at the top of the call, which is, you know, what's the floor above the foundation, if you will, that horrible analogy of Patrick Foote, it's going to be the calf. So we're going to talk about the calf. I want to put a bookmark on this one. There's someone else I don't remember.
I did have him on the podcast, John Call, AKA Juji Mufu, Juji is famous. He's a bodybuilder, strength trainer, and he's famous for being on America's most wanted and doing the splits between two chairs while holding Heidi Klumover said, and he taught, and he and other people talk about flexibility as not being about stretching muscles, but about strength. So I want to talk about flexibility and strength. But let's start with the one floor above the foundation.
You hit one of the elevator, if you're actually if you're in Europe and number two on the elevator, if you're here. So let's dive into the calf and the importance thereof and what people don't understand about the calf. Got it. Continue.
Okay. So if we started that first level, we're looking at a foot with 29 muscles, 26 bones and 33 articulations. Now above that coming from the calf, we have four calf muscles that make up the calf area from the back side of that lower leg. The calf muscles are responsible for the foot on that lateral supination or pronation on the vertical.
You're listening. So people who are listening for supination or pronation, a mat, put your hand out flat and then just tilt it left or right. Like you're pretending to be an airplane flying, you're tilting left or right. It doesn't matter which one's pronation or supination because that'll kind of wish for you looking at.
So just know that that's the lateral motion we're talking about. Exactly. And then the third thing that it does is rotation. So when we're rotating our body, we mostly think of our hips rotating.
You know, for golfers, talk about it, for tennis players, talk about it, baseball players, talk about it, the rotation of the hips. But the problem is, is that the calf area has not been stretched properly. Then what happens to the little rotating muscles and the hips over work, fighting with the bigger muscles in the calf house, causing back pain. Now the calf's role, when it comes to walking and what we do every single day, and this is where your shoes play a role, is that when the calves are stretched properly and the ankle can bend properly beyond the 90 degrees, what happens is that now when they push off, if the shoe can bend, if it's pushed off with their foot, they're going to push off with their toes.
But if you watch most people walk with thicker soul shoes that don't bend, they're going to walk with the upper quadriceps, which is up front of the thighs. And when the front of the thighs get tight, you'll wake up tomorrow morning with a stiff low back almost every time. So interesting. People don't think about the role of certainly the quads or the hamstrings when it comes back pain, but even moving up closer, they don't realize what the hip is doing.
You're back. Way back when I just started zero shoes. Someone gave me an e-book and I wish I could find it, but organization is not my thing. That was basically all about getting rid of back pain and it was all glued exercises.
Yes. Yes. And so the lower back pain and that's what got me in trouble. And that's how I got in this business was that I had back pain so bad at 40.
I just lost 105 pounds at 37, worked out like a fiend like everybody else. And I got so stiff and so tight that I had back pain that literally dropped me to my knees. I'd get out of my car, put my hands out to walk out of my car and he grabbed my handles on my car door and pulled me back up. And everybody kept looking at my back, but there wasn't a problem there.
And what I found out was that my upper quads and the rotating muscles in my hips had hardened. And when they did, it tilted to pelvis forward, increasing the compression in my low back. Holy moly. So let's go back to the calf for a bit.
So let's talk more than about what the calf's doing from a rotational perspective, what the problems people might have that might maybe they could self diagnose this in some way. And you know, what you're actually doing with people to restore natural function. Exactly right. So my whole issue back to what I was doing with the back pain literally started with my calves because the calves didn't move properly.
It forced me to use my hips and my thighs to walk. And if you watch most people walking back, most of my clients, they'll always laugh because I say to them, watch your friends walk. And when they walk across, look at one of their feet. And if you watch their foot and the typical shoe, it bends just around the toe area, but up around the arch area, there's no bend.
There's no give there. So the ankle doesn't bend. So the foot literally stays flat as they walk, but it forces them to walk with their fun with their thighs, which are the quads, especially the upper part of it. And if you go even further up the line, you'll see their head is out in front of their chest.
They'll lead with their nose and not their belly button. You know, I wonder if this is related. I've seen this a bunch of times. The research shows that the best way to engage the arch of the foot for all the reasons that's valuable is landing sort of all your foot, basically lifted, but you're probably for depending on your doing it.
And some people say, well, can I just run like that in regular shoes? I was actually watching someone on the trail this morning and she was landing forefoot, but she's in a shoe with a big, thick. And so she's not actually letting her Achilles stretch and provide all that rebound, you know, spring like action. So how does just being a higher healed shoe impact the calf in a way that then talking about?
So there's a study that was done in 2018 at Harvard by Dr. Daniel Lieberman. And he had the same guy on the treadmill that was running barefoot. He was running with minimalist shoes and he was running with normal running shoes.
What he found was that the sticker, the heel on the shoe, the more we'll get to the heel toe type of a walk. Well, so when you have that heel toe and you step that into the heel, it drives because as soon as the heel hits the ground, it stops you for that moment. And it drives your weight straight back up through your skeletal system. So in hitting where you're hitting right around the ball of the foot or actually just behind the ball of the foot there, that arch then flexes like a shock absorber, allows the articulations and the foot to literally give to add cushion from the impact to the knee.
And then the calf muscles by allowing you to bend more than 90 degrees, allows you then to use your muscles in your feet to push off with your toes into your neck step. And so when we talk about letting the foot be more than 90 degrees, the idea is bending your, having your toes coming up towards your knees, not pointing your toes. Right. Right.
That's exactly right. That's the exact direction. But, but that's the thing is that, and when I got into this business, I never really thought I'd get into feeding cows, but it's more thin for that. Okay.
Yeah. I get a lot of people down here who were in their 70s, 80s, even 90s with joint replacements. And once you start to find out is that once you free those muscles, now all of a sudden they can go back to just about full range of motion. Fair.
So back up a little bit for people who want to self diagnose about whether their calves are causing their problems. What could they do? So there's a couple of things. Number one is when you take a stride and you walk, have someone to take a look at your ankles to see if they've been beyond 90 degrees.
It's the easiest way to do it. Number two, if you're sitting on the floor and you have no one to watch you, take like a yoga strap, a piece of rope or a towel, put around the ball of your foot. Now as you're sitting on the floor, have your hips and back against the wall so that one leg is straight out in front of you, take that yoga strap or rope around the ball of your foot and just gently pull the toes back towards you. What you will feel is a tightness up behind the knee.
But more importantly, when you look at your ankle, you'll see how little the foot actually moves from the ankle. And that'll tell you. And the mistake that people make when they're trying to stretch their muscles is that they want to pull as long as they can for as hard as they can because they think that the muscles are mad with them and want to fight with them. But it's really their brain fighting with them.
Okay. Because the brain is designed to protect you. And so once you pull for a longer time and you create pain in that muscle, then what happens is the brain will contract the muscle fighting with you. And now you're doing a bicep curl.
So what you want is you want the brain to as you breathe out while you're doing the stretch, relax the tension in the calf muscle. And as the brain sees that it can easily do that, release it after about five to six seconds hold and then come back again. And what you'll see is that the foot then will move just a tad further than the first time. Is it valuable to do?
It's not reciprocal inhibition. What is it if you're so you've got the tolerance of foot? If you're trying to put your toe as hard as you can and then release and then pull and stretch. What's that called again?
Okay. So I can't remember the name of that. But I understand what you're talking about. The idea behind that is that as you push the toe downward, you're contracting the calf muscle, which puts it into a form of fatigue.
Then a fatigue allows it to relax and the idea is not like a pull it back and it will relax. But here's the problem. The muscles are more emotional than they are physical. So the brain itself, if it doesn't know that it can do that without pain, won't let you do it.
That's why your brain won't let you jump off the side of a building without a parachute. And for some of us, even with a parachute, my brain still won't let me do that. Okay. But the thing is, is that the brain then as you start to stretch that muscle, the brain is anticipating there's more to be pain because for most of us, we've always been taught about stretching is that we're going to create pain.
What we really want to do is release the tension in the muscle itself. Well, so now when asked actually about your superlimitivision, so in that case, you know, you'd be instead of just passively stretching by pulling on the towel, you'd be actively pulling your toes towards your knees. So you're actively dorsiflexing. So you're using all those posterior muscles in your lower leg.
And the idea being that when you're doing that or doing that under load as well, I mean, if you do that load using the TBLs that way, then that's that could relax the calf as well because of interesting more. Because what will happen is this. So when you tighten the TBLs anterior, the peronus muscles and the shins themselves, if you tighten it, trying to stretch the calf back out, what you'll do is, is pretease the shin muscles, which will wind up with a knee pain just below the knee cap. He hurt his hands once.
Yes. Well, well, so the thing I'm going to toss in the question is, so there's another friend of us, a guy named Ben Patrick, he's known as the knees over toes guy. And he developed, he developed, he developed the first device to be able to do loaded exercise for the posterior tip. Yeah, interactally.
So is there value in strengthening those muscles, which typically get any attention? Yeah, absolutely. There is because you want to keep your muscles strong and you want to have the stamina so that you can walk as long as you want to run as long as you want without having an injury. I always say to my clients, think of stretching and stretching like gas a hole in your car and do two very different things.
But if you leave one out, the car is going to stop. All right. So the same thing happens in the body. So you want the strength training so that you have the strength and the stamina to do all the things that you want to do in your life, no matter what your age is.
But at the same time, if you don't have the flexibility and your body, now what happens is that you use part of that strength just to move from A to B. Right. So we've done our test to see what our calf is able to do and hold the cramp on, send another flashback. Actually, this is a reciprocal inhibition flashback that you will get a kick out of.
So when I got back in a sprinting 15 years ago, I was getting injured all the time. And I pulled a calf muscle repeatedly and I just had a lot of this all right now. And I went and saw this one sports medicine guy and he had me do the classic calf stretch. I'm facing the wall, I step back, I lean into the wall and see how far I can stretch.
But then he was having me do the reciprocal inhibition. So while I'm stretching, trying to push my foot into the ground, my toes into the ground without letting my heel off the ground and then relaxing and stretching more. And I got like way, way far, like crazy far down. And then I couldn't walk for a week.
Right. Right. Because of the reciprocal inhibition. Yeah.
Yeah. So that was a crazy thought. But anyway, so without doing something stupid like that, and my God, if I list of the number of stupid things I've done to my body and then maybe I'd be anyway. So we've identified that there may be some calf tightness that we want to address.
And again, just to reiterate, part of doing this is to take the pressure off of the hip and the upper thigh, which will then take pressure off the back as well. So that's our goal. So what are we going to do short of coming to see you? Right.
Work on that calf. Absolutely. So the couple of things I'm going to do it and I'm going to set up my landing face. I got a landing pick set up that your listeners can go to that actually see the videos of these stretches that I'm going to talk about with the calf stretch.
What we want to do with that is if you can sit on the floor, have your hips and back against the wall, one leg straight out in front of you, use something like a yoga strap or rope. It'll be right there. What's the other leg doing? The other leg is just laying off to the side.
OK, got it. You can bend it. However, you feel comfortable there with it. Now, if someone can't get on the floor, you can also do this in a hard back chair, like a dining room chair with your foot up on an autumn and you can do the same thing.
Key to it is something solid on your back so that your back doesn't go backwards. But you put that strap or that rope around the ball of your foot. And what you're going to do is you're going to pull the toes back towards you with your hands. Do not use your leg muscles, but just use your hands.
You're going to breathe out as you pull your toes back. Let that tension relax for five seconds. Let it go. And you're going to repeat it 10 times.
Now, the five seconds, the reason for that is not to kick into stretch reflex because once you hold it beyond five seconds and there's pain, the brain will contract a muscle to get you out of the pain. The 10 time repetition is to allow the brain to see that I can do this and I didn't die. So that's because it's the 11th one that kills you. We are the right.
It's exactly right. And so once you do the 10, keep the strap in the same place, but roll the foot inward. And when you do that, now as you pull the toes back, instead of feeling the stretch in the middle of the cap, you're going to feel it to the outside of the cap. You're going to do it 10 times.
Then you roll the foot outward, do the same thing again, but this time you're going to feel it on the inside of the cap. So anyone who's dealing with supination, pronation issues, those inside outside calf muscles will help you in that realm and also help you in rotation for that. That's one of the best calf stretches I've found. And here's the caveat with that too.
Things like plantar fasciitis, no lie. I have seen people stop their plantar fasciitis in two to three days and even stubborn from months. Well, I've written and talked about this a lot. The majority of people I've met who claim to have plantar fasciitis actually accept type calves from the plasma side.
You don't recognize that. I want to highlight something on this rotating foot. I mean, we'll give people the landing page to look at, but I'm guessing that you want to be careful when you're doing this to not be rotating your entire leg. Rotate your leg.
Rotate the leg. The whole thing. A whole leg. Yes.
You want to rotate the whole thing. And the reason for that is that the hamstrings, which are above the calves, or the three hamstrings are tied in with those calf muscles. And so one of the rules I have with the stretching is always do your calves first and then do the hamstrings for that reason. Fascinating.
I am playing with this. I don't have a strap, but I'm just like, I like playing this and it's like, yeah, there's a there, there's a there, there's a there. That's really fun. Well, in fact, when I'm doing so when I externally rotate, when I rotate my legs and my toes are pointing out and I start just pulling them back, then I start actually feels intention in my hamstring.
Yeah. Yeah, you will. You will. And so in fact, when people have tight calves and tighter hamstrings, what they'll find is they start to pull back, you may feel it all the way up to the hip joint.
And so is there anything to pay attention to if you're feeling that or is that just that's what comes along with that? That's a normal thing. But the thing that most people will make a mistake on and the way we've always been thought to do this is if we start to feel it, we want to pull really hard. So a little bit of good, a lot is much better.
And it's like, I always say to people, that's not how this works. What we want is we're showing the brain literally, we're showing the brain that if we pull this muscle and allow it to release that tension, it can like, oh, so think about it this way. If you take someone who's passed out, given that drinking was your friends and somebody passed out, they're like a disiract, you could pull their legs apart, put them in splits and spread to do whatever you want. But the minute the brain comes back online, they can do it.
So the thing is, is that it's the brain that stops people from really stretching well because of the fear of pain. Two things. One, did you just admit to something you didn't college that no one knew until right now? Yes.
I was actually, I was not much of a drinker in college. I was a boring kind of guy. But that's okay. That in line, the other thing about that, again, this is one of those interesting things about flexibility and what our friend, Judy Mufu, talks about is like, if you're going to do splits, if you can stand in front of a table and lift your foot and put it on the table and then switch legs and do the same thing, there's no muscles crossing your hip that way that prevent you from just doing the splits.
So on the one hand, it is your brain telling you what to do. People, I know that people really give credit to the brain. Sorry. It's an ECM or Phillips joke or a Mitch Hedberg joke.
I think it's an emo Phillips joke. Either one of those who's saying, you know, the brain is the most important organ in your body, but look who's talking. So, but the people don't really think that how much of our movement is actually not a limitation of our muscular system, but of the brain and the signal you're getting. So back into Judy doing the splits or doing one of these things, you know, one of the exercises that he talks about doing is strengthening the upper quad.
So you're lifting your leg up, which is not about reciprocal inhibition as much as getting the strength to allow you your brain to recognize that it can relax, the hamstring enough to then get into the more extended split. I mean, keep in mind that saying, babe, how many people in the country can't lift their leg and put their pants on? You know, I run into people every day that part of their goal is to be able to set it in the chair across their leg and tie their shoes. Wow.
Well, that's an interesting question. So who are the people who are typically coming to you for help? What's the range of that population? It's kind of funny.
Pre-pandemic it was usually, I would say to you is people between 65 and 60 and older. Now, since the pandemic has dropped down to about 45 and older, but they're typically people who are trying to improve their lives. They want to, they're in the football not football, but go off in tennis and biking, running and so forth. And they want to improve their bodies and reduce their risk of injuries.
And so what I do is I study the sports that they're doing, understanding the mechanics of how each of those athletes are moving their bodies. And then when you can start freeing those muscles up, it's amazing how quick they can change and run. And in fact, many of the runners themselves have taken up on the traditional run issues and actually got them into wearing shoes that are more flexible, that help their feet. And I see where she was one of the ones I always run in.
But as a plug for you, but they do switch it out and all of a sudden they're running much better with less injuries. Yeah. I was talking to Dr. Irene Davis, who's now down in your neighborhood, Ish.
She's now at the University of San Florida. And she was talking to some guys who were like on a track team back in the 70s before the advent, maybe the late 60s, when we had been to the modern athletic shoe with the pointy toe box and big kicky, et cetera. And he said, you know, we just never saw anyone get injured. It just didn't have.
I saw that interview with her, by the way. Oh, yeah. Exactly right. When when I work with ultra marathoners who use a minimalist shoes and they're used to running barefoot, they don't have near the injuries that the marathoners have.
Is same thing. One of the most successful coaches in history was Arthur Lydiard out in New Zealand and a coach, more Olympic and world champions than anyone else had in the country. And he was a shoemaker and his shoes were like ours flat in white toe box. And he did a whole lot of training.
It was all really about foot strengthening. Basically, having people run out mountains, that was his thing for strengthening, especially the foot. Yeah. Absolutely.
Because everything about your balance, everything about your power is pushing off. Everything's coming from the muscles of the foot. And like I said, the foot and into the calves is what stabilizing the rest of the body. And so when people have weak feet, you know, we're in our supports and heel supports and a point or two shoes, you'll see them more and more of those people with bunions and more than the Romans on their feet.
And so what happens is it's undermining the foundation to the body. And so now they start to compensate with their thighs or compensate with their hips or they'll start leading leading with their nose. So they get the momentum of their head literally going forward, right? Not realizing that all of those things coming down there, smart that they're dealing with started down their feet years before.
It's, I wish I could really name it this book. It's basically about how we think about the world based on our physiology and ways that people don't think about like our eyes are in the front of our head. And so we don't see what we look like behind us. And so we're not, we don't pay attention to the whole posterior, everything, if we had eyes in both directions.
And that was really interesting. I think about when people talk about running in minimal shoes or barefoot running, they say, well, you have to shorten your stride. And no, no, stride length is a function of how fast you're running in your cadence. How many steps for me you're taking?
It has nothing to do with. So yes, if you pick up your cadence and run at the same speed, you will have a shorter stride, but there's just this misunderstanding about, you know, these, these things. And the reason I bring this that up is because you can't see your stride behind you. So you don't have a sense of what the length is.
If you're reaching out, you go, Oh, that's longer. But if you watch really good runners, their stride is all behind them. And they have this long stride. Yeah.
Because because if they're running really well, that stride behind it allows it to push off with those toes is where the power comes from. That was the thing about Daniel Lieberman's study was that you could see the same person on the same treadmill running the same speed and just the changing of the shoe changed everything. And it was just amazing. I was in the lab with Dr.
Bill Sands, who was the former head of I think by mechanics and engineering for the US Olympic Committee. And what he would do when you came in his lab, he put you on this super big treadmill. It was like five feet wide, 10 feet long. It was really fun.
In fact, it was really fun because they put you in a mission and possible harness in case you know, to keep you from face planning, in case I'll help her up lose. So the first thing you have to do is practice not falling on your face, which is super fun. But anyway, so he has you run in your favorite shoes and he's filming you from behind and from the side at 500 frames a second. And then he has you try on every other shoe that you typically wear or run in.
and people completely oblivious to the fact that every shoe they wore changed their date in some very noticeable way. And of course it changes even more as that shoe wears down and it's all the phone wears down and they're not aware of it all. It was like it was shocking to see it is fascinating. When I was at university of South Florida, I did an unofficial study with some of my fellow students where we measured the pressure on the ball of a woman's foot in a high heel and we used different heels from a flat to a two inch three inch and four inch.
And at flat to a two inch that pressure only increased on the ball of the foot by 10 pounds by the time we got to a four inch down on an average woman of 123 pounds, the pressure went up to 85 pounds on her ball over foot. Holy moly. I mean, I ended up the shoes were pointy most of the time. Then what happens is it cramps the toes and with all that weight down on the ball of her foot.
And so if you'll notice anyone with pointy toes shoes or toes will slightly splay outward and they'll push off at the inside of their big toe. Well, as you do that over time, you start to develop the bunions in the foot and also in between the joints of the toes, you'll wind up with things like more than their own. But more importantly, as you get older, the muscles in collapse between what's called the metatarsal bones, it's what you can feel in your foot. And then as muscles collapse like that, the foot becomes thinner.
It becomes more difficult for bounce. This is a my analogy is, you know, you don't squeeze your fingers together to push up to spread them out because that's all about balance and strength, production, same thing for your feet. And it's actually the number one thing when people ask me about what I do, my typical response is I looked at other shoes and go, is that the shape of your foot? And they go, no, what are you doing in the shoes?
Thank you. I do the same thing with my wife won't even take me to shopping with her and work. I go in and she's like, you see these shoes that she like and I go, I don't see a shoe in this store. I put on her foot.
I'm sorry. They were not made for your foot. Laina, my wife had had a similar complaint. She goes, you know, I hate that we have this company.
I said, why? So she was the inspiration for, you know, improving our women's lines. She's like, I got to go out and raise money or do whatever I'm doing. I need footwear to wear.
Yes. But I've done that with a lot of my clients when they bring either shoes and they're like, what's wrong with my shoe? And I take it up and I'm like, it's your foot looked like that. No, anything like that.
You know, and so they'll talk about, this is a lightweight shoe. So I've got pre-oz I wear and I've got the Hanne help I wear, you know, and it's like, I'll take one of my shoes off and I'll say, now, hold mine and hold yours. I tell you which one is heavier. They're like, oh, here's the way anything.
I know. First time I got a box and I picked it up and I think I forgot to put the shoes in. It's so funny to say that we just did it. We did a TikTok video that was that idea.
It's like, I can't believe it. I got these, you know, someone showing the box in front of their doorstep and the packaging has been open. I can't believe it. Someone ripped off my shoes.
The box is like, I just bought these and I ripped them off and then he opens the box. Oh my God, they're still in here. I love our SaaS 14. When I fold them up, I'm like, you want to shoot them and do this?
And they're like, what? And I'm like, yes, this is a 14. I said, you were like cast on the bottom of your feet. Yeah.
Yeah. Is that the only reason people put up with some of the stuff is it's just been going on for so long. They didn't have an option. They think this is normal.
They think you're supposed to hurt. They think all the stuff that just makes no sense and no small part because the big shoe company is AKA big shoe and the variation for that. They have been basically their message has been our shoes are great if you're having a promise because of you, which of course has led to the multi-billion dollar aftermarket industry of orthotics and insults and cushioning of various kinds that you would add to it, which you would think that people would eventually realize if there's all this other stuff that I'm supposed to add to the shoe, why can't they just fix the damn shoe to begin with? I mean how to make stuff, right?
What they don't. Right. Well, I mean, back to what I said before, you know, the shoes to alleviate the immediate foot pain. Right.
What it doesn't do, what it doesn't tell you is that, yeah, we might get your arches to stop hurting, but they're going to atrophy over time. Not your knees gonna hurt, but that's not our problem. We sell shoes. I said that to people when the maximalist shoes came out, however long ago that was, it was maybe about eight years ago when that really kicked in nine years ago.
I knew a bunch of successful runners who were switching to those and saying, I can put in more miles. I mean my feet feel great. I went into your knees are going to be shot. No, no, no, no.
And they just argued with me. And then two years later, they were all entering different sports because they were knees were shot. Well, and the other thing is, is that the sicker, the soul on a shoe, I mean, you have like 272 nerve rings on the bottom of your feet. There are sending messages to your brain about the change in the gradation of the ground.
So what happens is that the sicker, the soul, the harder you're going to hit the ground because the brain is trying to get those messages from the bottom of your foot. Not only is it not bending so that after fees of muscles, but you're messing with the nervous system on the bottom of the foot as well, it blows my mind. But you know, all of our lives, people say, well, good shoes have good art supports and heel supports and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and that's just not true.
There was a guy who went to Kenya, I believe in the 60s, podiatrist, to study the Kenyan army where these guys all grew up in bare feet. And that's a funny phrase in bare feet with bare feet would be more accurate because in bare feet, that's a dream. So they, you know, they came into the army with really strong and flexible and functional feet. And the podiatrist is reporting for studying the guys in the army was a podiatrist of a broken country.
Now things have of course changed because sadly, people have gotten the idea that what you do in the West is somehow better. And therefore we need the issues and to status symbol and et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, no, well, yeah, I've had actually had conversations with a couple of podiatrists.
And, you know, they would say, I tell all my patients ever walk across hard services and bare feet. I go, really, I do it all the time. My answer is my answer to that is, do you really think that we're not able to walk across a hardwood floor and bare feet that that's that's normal? Yeah.
I think that's normal. That's me and Todd. Yeah. And then I said, one of my friends, and I knew that he was fairly religious and I laughed.
And I said, so you're seeing God made a mistake. And it would be really funny. He goes, what do you mean he doesn't make a mistake? And I go, well, apparently because without the other shoes, how would we go up?
What was his response? It'd freak him out or he just. He'd be really funny. He goes, huh.
And he just kind of walked away. People, you know, when you back people into a corner where their own logic has them unable to reconcile it, the cognitive dissonance is so severe. It's so rare that you actually hear someone go, Oh, at best, they do what you just described like, huh? And then they walk away.
Maybe they'll think about in the future. But I was saying to some of the people who were here, I were sharing boots. He was on one side. I was on the other, which was kind of an odd match.
But anyway, and I was sharing with people that, you know, the arch of the foot should be a solstice of palm in your hand. And if you think about how the foot works is very similar to the hand and when the foot is solid like that, think of your hand was solid. You couldn't open the door and your house to get out. And so when you look at the foot, if it's as soft as a palm of your hand, now, all of a sudden the foot can go back to work properly and walk in barefoot is no longer a problem.
I remember when I first started going barefoot, we had in our next driveway, not, I don't know what to call it, gravel, but it was bigger than gravel. It was, you know, a decent size, rocky things that at first, I could not walk across at all. It was, you know, super, super painful. And it's not like I went and tried it very often.
I just didn't know what I could have couldn't walk on. So I was just walking and so that's not good. And then some of them, like a year later, I walked across it again, just not thinking no problem. And I mentioned that to somebody, I said, Oh, your feet, you know, they become insensitive and they're, you know, your skin is got really thick one.
No, no, no, no, no. Check out the skin. It's basically the same. And I would contend that two things are happening.
One at three. One is I'm putting my foot down underneath my body. So I'm able to move and shift as necessary. Two is that my foot's got more flexible, I think.
And the one that I, the biggest one that I can't prove that I wish I was smarter and had thought to record some of these things from day one is that I think my reflex heart has improved. I think I just step off of things more quickly if it's painful because I'm more sensitive to it and more aware. So it's, you know, I brought up with the brain. Once the brain, once you do it a few times and the brain goes, Oh, that's not bad.
That's not bad. The brain then goes, the lessons, the high alert, because the first time you see a lot of talk to your brain across the brain is like, Oh, that's not hurt. And then all of a sudden it goes into fight or flight, but then the muscles become tense. Oh, and so it's, and that's what I said to you all the time, your thoughts in your head control the muscular system in your body.
And so think of the brain, like if you think about the brain like in the head of the octopus, but the muscles are like the tentacles. And so when you hear people talk about, well, they have muscle memory, you know, what about muscle memory and I laughed and I said, so a general one time who worked with with arc patients and I said, so you see a stroke victim to have a stroke. They lose use of their arm and a leg. So if the muscles have memory in my arm and my leg, but my brain gets damaged, why would my arm and my leg remember how to keep going?
And he was really funny. He's laughed. He goes, I hadn't really thought about it that way. Well, you know, I'm thinking about this.
That's something in two other ways. One is one bit of muscle memory. You see this with like bodybuilders or weightlifters who got really big and then they stop working out and then they start again and they get back to pretty much the same size pretty quickly. So that's one version of muscle memory.
It's just that. But the other one, I just had a flashback to watching a videotape of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter. Let's ignore the fact that he got busted for steroids and let's ignore the fact that the thing they busted him for was one that he didn't take because he tried it two years earlier and didn't like it. And let's ignore the fact that the guy who he said doped him when asked, did you actually dope Ben Johnson said, maybe I didn't let's ignore all of that for a second, which is the most amazing vision for her.
But Ben, who's about my age, there was a video of him sprinting just and you know, he's always 50 pounds more than he did before. But just coming out of the blocks, if you didn't know who it was, if you didn't know that he weighed that much, I mean, just looked perfect and gorgeous. And so this, the muscle memory is just getting those patterns in your brain so that you can't do it wrong. Right.
It's the real pathways in the brain. And so, and the second thing is again, the brain is not afraid because he's done it. Yeah. Well, essentially, you said that I just realized so back when I was getting injured a lot, well, when I was getting injured a lot, there were a couple things that happened when I just got back in springing.
It took me two years, I realized maybe two and a half years till I wasn't afraid to go full speed. Yeah. And then when I was getting minor injuries, my entire way of thinking about whether the injury was resolved was not how the muscle felt was am I afraid to go full speed or not? Exactly.
Exactly. And I never thought about that. That's also like, well, it's also like, well, it's also like, well, it's also like, when you see, there are a couple of times, because I've got to screw it up spine, there are a couple of times with sprinters in particular, you know, you'll see, like, I remember watching, oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing that I can't be names right now. Tyson Gay, who at the time was the fastest man in the world before using bolt.
And he was in a race and in the 200 and coming around the turn, just like, it looked like someone shot him. He just exploded and fell in the ground. And I could feel things similar, like, similar in my body when I had problems, where it was very clear that the nervous signal, the impulse didn't make it to the muscle at the right time. And then then the brain just went, oh crap.
And just, you know, see everything up. And I remember, I remember I could almost feel that the message wasn't getting to the right place at the right time. And when I saw Tyson Gay blow up, it's like, that's what just happened. Yeah, exactly.
It's like every time you stand up, the brain knows exactly which muscles to recruit so that you balance and don't fall down. You take a step and it's exactly what muscles to use. And so the thing is, is once the brain understands, and that's the importance of stretching, this way, once the brain understands that the stretching, like we do in a stretching release technique, once it understands that, now it lets it go and there's no longer a fight. Love it.
Which this has been a total, total pleasure. We mentioned the landing page that people could go to so they could see how to do this castor as we talked about. So I'm going to ask you to make sure you mentioned that. And, and, but how else could people find you to find out more about what you've been doing so they can have your healthy bodies?
Great. Perfect. I mean, I can find me at the muscle repair shop.com. I have a newsletter comes out every Tuesday.
And I always put in two videos of stretches, talk about specific things that can go wrong with your body. So that's something you can continue to follow with that. I have a YouTube channel called the muscle repair shop. I have 60, 70 videos already on there and I'm putting new ones out every Friday.
And again, we're showing specific things of how to solve those problems. And with the landing page, it's going to go to muscle repair shop.com slash movement movement. And I'll have not only the stretch, the cast stretch video, but I'll put in the hamstring video and the tennis ball massage. All the side is one that as I had one doctor say to me one time, he came in and he had American Express because I told him put it in the sock and he had American Express written on his sock and I said, what's up with the American Express?
And he goes, I never leave home without this thing. And he said, I've got one in my car. I've got it in my office, my house. But it'll show you how to use the tennis ball on a sock against the wall and using your brain to soften your muscles so that your hips can be nice and soft and you can move better.
I love it. I'm going to have a hard time finding a tennis ball to use because we recently got a dog. Yeah. Tennis balls are missing.
They're totally MIA. He hasn't figured out fetch yet. He just likes to take him somewhere. I don't know where.
But once again, total, total pleasure. I'm looking forward to hearing from people who take advantage of checking out that site and see what you're doing and seeing what the results are. So and we'll stay in touch about that. So for everybody else, thanks for being part of this.
As always, a reminder, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can interact with us. If you have a, some of you want to ask or something you want to say, if you've got a request or a complaint or someone thinks you'll be on the show, maybe someone who thinks I have my head completely at my butt because I've been known to have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome for. Have you have that conversation?
You know, we can hack it out and find out what the truth is. So you can send an email to move M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovement.com. But most importantly, no matter what you're doing, go out, have fun and live life feet first.