What happens when a podiatrist who is not learning anything necessarily about natural movement or barefoot running or menilish who's reached born to run the evil book that started this all so we're going to find out on today's 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 starting with those things at the end of your legs I think we call them feet. It's also where we break down the propaganda the mythology and the outright lies you've probably been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or to yogurt cross-fitter power lifter skydiver whatever you'd like to do and to do that enjoy it later efficiently and effectively and I mentioned enjoy a quick question if you've been here before you know I said that because look if you're not having fun do something different till you are because you're not going to keep it up if it's not really enjoyable. So I'm Stephen Sachin CEO and co-founder of zeroes.com and on the host of this podcast we call it the movement movement because we were creating a movement more about that in a second about natural movement letting your body do what it's made to do and the movement part is simple go to our website www.jointhemovementmovement.com you don't need to do anything to join there's no secret handshake there's no membership fees you don't even have to opt in if you don't want to but that's where you'll find previous episodes you can opt in to find out about the new episodes you can find all the places you can find the podcast and all the things you can do to encourage the movement of the movement of the movement natural movement which is share and like and review and give a thumbs up in the place you can do that and hit the bell icon on youtube and you know what to do I mean basically if you want to be part of the tribe please subscribe so let us jump in Alyssa do me a favor tell the people who you want and what you're doing here hi so yep I mean podiatrists and basically I'm here because you know I have really changed the way that I practice and I'm really excited to come on here and just talk about you know sort of the barefoot movement and natural movement as it you know sort of relates to podiatry and how it's kind of evolved my practice well so I started this by saying you know hey someone who didn't necessarily learn about this then Red Borne to run so do you want to talk about what they were or weren't teaching you in podiatry school and then how do you then decide to read that book and what happened when you did? yeah so actually decided to read it because I had friends from college who were really interrunning and they were like this is an amazing book you should read it so it really had nothing to do with that ietry um I was reading it like during a summer break I think during my first year of school so it was completely unrelated to academics um and so yeah I read it and I loved it and I was like this is just a really cool cool idea and so I remember coming back to school in a fall and actually asking some of my professors about it and I basically just got the kind of typical podiatry response which was like you know my first year was the worst thing that's ever happened to the ietry and I had to feed and nobody should ever wear them and you know all we see our stress fractures now and you know it's awful and horrible and I kind of shut down basically just a ton of conversation so I want to pick some of that apart so why were they think I mean somewhat ironic actually it's the worst thing that happened to podiatry if they're suddenly getting more patients but I'm intrigued by that I mean I only half-joke then in the early days when in 2009-2010 when the running shoe companies were terrified they were literally never gonna sell another running shoe because everyone was gonna go barefoot they were putting out articles that may as well have said if you run barefoot you're gonna step on hyperdermating you know you're gonna catch you ball at your kids won't get into college your phone will stop working your morning trade will go up your car will run in a gas I mean it was just getting crazy so was there any more that they said to justify why they believe these things?
no not really there wasn't a whole lot of justification and you know at the time I was I was a bit naive because I was kind of in the early stages of anxious school it was a lot of um just kind of didactics we weren't really learning about feet yet so I didn't really have it you know I didn't have a lot of information to really go back so I kind of just trusted my professors and I was like okay you know maybe this is really bad and maybe they don't really know what they're talking about so you know it kind of just maybe almost like stop asking questions I was kind of like all right you know let me see what I learned in the next couple years and maybe make no decisions about it all right so you had this like oh my gosh I got to share this you shared it they shut it down and what happened next is clearly it didn't stop there yeah I mean you know I would say that the interesting thing about archery school is that there really isn't a lot of education around shoes at all um we actually had one lecture in my entire four years um about shoes which is really scary um I can remember really clearly we actually had you know we had a lecture and we had like one slide and it was like a picture of like an old timey dress shoe and like the professor kind of labeled the parts of the shoe and like that was really legit like we really didn't learn anything else about shoes so yeah I was pretty big bar it's funny I had a friend who was going through physical therapy school and when they started getting two feet she was calling me saying did you know like the guy who made up the idea of orthotics like made it up I said yeah I didn't know that he was why don't people know this one yeah I'm not going to I mean so they were teaching about shoes at some point I assume somewhere in there um somebody came in with the idea about orthotics and how to use orthotics in some way and they I'm guessing they spent way more time on that exactly yeah that was really where the emphasis was so I think it kind of just translated into you know orthotics are really where it's at so any shoe you recommend is just whatever you can really get it on your side you know that was kind of like the way people cooperated and they never suggested that uh different kind of shoes and how shoes would wear out of her time would change the effectiveness of an orthotic if it's affected at all I don't think oh you know I don't recall anybody ever talking about that which is really just crazy and I remember getting out into practice and just being like I don't even really know you know I don't really know what to recommend and I remember just thinking like yeah just go to the shoe store right like you know just go see a shoe specialist because I don't actually know this information which is really scary all right so going through the chronology this again all right read the book oh my gosh shut it down nothing about shoes a bunch of orthotics and again like I'm just so fascinated because let me preface it this way you know it's a rare person who is willing to question what they believe yeah and so this one I'm so curious to see you know again what the next step was for you and how that continued to evolve yeah so from like a personal standpoint I was always kind of I kind of gravitated towards not like barefoot shoes technically but more minimalist shoes I always kind of liked that feeling so I really like how are you defining the difference so you know I would say at the time like this would be back in like you know 2012 time frame so I were like Nike free runs and like not that there's a minimalist but some characters out there they felt kind of good to me right now you know yeah and to give them some some credit but not very much when I put on the Nike free it was amazing because with the articulated soul you felt the ground more but still you know massive I like to tell tons of fish names for your soul point of toes the whole thing but at the time it was somewhat revelatory and of course they made that shoe inspired by the Stanford running team who who trained barefoot and the idea was let's make something that's akin to barefoot and it's nothing like it so exactly but back in 2012 okay I have to figure out what date is so you went for Nike free there was stuff out there we hadn't yet shoes yet but there were a couple brands that had at that time yeah and I really wasn't even like aware I didn't really know at the time I was just kind of like oh you know this feels good right I'm gonna go to a regular story gonna shoe I would typically gravitate towards just sort of more minimalist I would say and so I kind of stuck with that you know even like my regular every day shoes I would go with like like columns like flat shoes I just like just like that and I never saw problem with it and then as I went throughout my throughout school and throughout my career I started to get more and more kind of like feedback for people being like those shoes are horrible you should never flat shoes like that you know all this kind of stuff and no we ever had a reason no we ever had like any explanation as to why I think you know it really just seems like it's like a very ingrained dog I think within podiatry that you know whatever the supportive shoe is that people talk about it's really just people tell you over and over again right you need the port you need the port you support so I kind of got drilled into my head and eventually I was like yeah I need the port like you know I just have wearing all these like you know flimsy shoes and get some support on me so I sort of started to go in the other direction because I had heard this this for so long and that's when I started to run into trouble with my own feet uh-huh so yeah I mean what did you switch to and then what happened yeah so probably like two years into private practice I was like okay you know what I should be a good example of my patients right and I should probably get you know one of these expensive shoes and you know something that's really supportive and often so you know anything like a Brooks ghost and yeah they felt okay like comfortable right whatever I got to interrupt the irony just hit me it's called the ghost because they kill your feet exactly but not ladies and gentlemen I'll be here all week I love that yeah no it was so funny I mean like everybody in office would just wear like you know either Brooks or e6 or any balance those were kind of like the top three and so I kind of started trending towards that I was like all right this is really good I should wear you know our support and then it probably was like a year later that I started to really get the pain in my left foot I was like oh my gosh I'm starting to get all this stuff all of a sudden and it was really frustrating I was like yeah you know I'm kind of like doing all the all the things and I'm wearing these for shoes and like you know I really never wanted to wear a bodix and so I was like I'm not gonna wear a bodix but even though I prescribed those to patients I just really never wanted to go that route for myself so it kind of reached a tipping point where I did a ton of hiking one summer and all of a sudden it got really aggravated and I was like oh no what am I gonna do now and that was like literally a bit just that made me kind of like it's like a lip unoff and I really had to actually do some actual research like figure out what's going on and like why was I even recommending shoes to people I really didn't know I just been told so many times and I started to realize that it wasn't actually helping my feet so you know maybe it wasn't helping my patients so when you started doing the research what you bump into who do you find who did you read what you discovered yeah so I was really resistant at first which I think is funny because now I'm like wow I can't believe that I was long and so I actually started just kind of looking around even just my social media I started seeing like different pounds and people were talking about this stuff and honestly I was like no this is definitely good you know it can't be true it's only a while I think that's a great bit of cognitive distance I want to see what the research is but then I see it no that can't be right exactly it's actually like this is what you know even again I'm so intrigued and I love that you're able to walk through this frame by frame but it's like even when you get the idea to do it the natural inclination is to look at the information and just reject it and stick with what you believe even harder usually is what they're facing yeah absolutely I was like looking at the count I was like oh no people are like it was it so wrong but eventually it just it kind of kept hitting me and I was like I need to I really figure this out so I did start researching I actually found Emily Slickill and she had a lot of great information and I reached out to her and started to you know research and um but where science had a lot of really good articles and I started looking at this at that I looked at some of the research from Benonig and different people and how this is a whole other perspective that I had no idea like no clue and eventually I was like this is really cool you know like this is really cool stuff and so it just kind of snowballed and then I started to really get into everything that I could get my hands on and finally I decided to try you know try something with myself and kind of go through that transition process and then the rest was really history well okay yeah we can't do the rest of history because there's a bunch of stuff there you got something truly minimalist put it on and what happened yeah so I was a little bit careful because I'm taking away I don't want to jump into it too quickly so I ended up going you know kind of mid-road I went with like an ultra like a low level ultra which you know it still has a decent question but at least you're getting that nice you know barefoot kind of shape and everything um and I mean I loved it like this is amazing so I basically you know kind of put myself here like a little transition period where I started just going barefoot as much as possible I would like start doing like little exercises around the house I was like filling up my foot strength um just kind of walk on different surfaces or like doing everything that I could and then meanwhile using the ultra for like long walks and like things like that so I wouldn't you know go too quickly and then basically once I felt comfortable with that I think it took a couple months before I really was like okay I'm ready to you know kind of dive into barefoot shoes and once I did I was like okay there's a really no going back or gear just it felt really good and at the same time and it did take some time and it did take a little bit of specific rehab as well but I really I was able to completely get rid of my foot pain that I was having which was really cool for me to see because I never really had that perspective for myself what was the difference I mean because of ultra-gufference mind so I'm not throwing them under the bus when I asked this but they could look at them under the bus when I asked this in fact they used to say you know we think ultra is the gateway to something like zero shoes and I said one he puts an ad for us in your boxes which I think they did not agree to but what do you feel was the difference when you went from and all for two something truly then was it definitely felt like I almost like I had a little bit more control right like I was like okay I'm not I'm no longer relying on this kind of cushioning and now I can really feel for me it was really feeling my own gait cycle where like I can feel what I'm doing now so much I know before like I just could not I could not tell and so during that kind of ultra transition period I was really trying to retrain my gait cycle and really focusing on you know getting getting through correctly and when I got into a national bearfish you I can really do that and now it's just like it comes in naturally that was before I wouldn't really know where I wasn't big I wouldn't really know like what was going on so that's really got a huge huge difference for me and how would you describe the differences in your gait you know sort of before during after yeah I think before like everything was kind of wonky and of course it was kind of like I got a medical term when I got into that up and it's very technical but you know I kind of felt like making almost like all over the place right like I was like repulsing properly through my toe joints and like I just really couldn't tell when my feet were and so now you know the morning I can feel right then I'm going into that like my tiger push off my big toe and for me that was important because I want to make sure like I'm really getting you know big toe extension and everything so not jamming my toe and you know I'm envisioning my future like needing a big toe fusion and I'm like this is horrible I can't I can't have that happen so now every time I walk I'm really just cognizant of it and so yeah I can feel like hotter and I can feel that it's much better I also noticed that you know as soon as I got out of foot cushioning I was like really like wow I'm very like aware of my boots now and I'm aware of like these other muscles that I really just never felt so never thought about it but she's very cool it's my favorite thing I mean my wife has this great story where after I made her the first pair of sandals back in 2009 she was like okay and then put them on in one for a couple weeks and then the first thing she noticed was how she was slamming her heels into the ground and walking really hard like she was a high-powered chicago attorney late for court and we're heading down the farmers market boulder and then after a couple weeks she put on like a regular quote unquote sports handle a healthy quote unquote sports handle and her immediate thing was I can't feel anything when you're doing that that's not okay and just toss them away so that transition to big thing but now you know you're in the more interesting position and I should have brought this up earlier because even deciding to research this you are at a certain level risking your professional persona if you will and this is why you know most people aren't most people who are health care professionals aren't willing to look at it because if they've been recommending something for years to then suddenly say to their patients I'm gonna ask you what you said your patients you know that alone would stop them from making any sort of changes so so you made you made the shift for yourself how did that then translate into your practice and what was your what was the response from your patients yeah so I was definitely really nervous just in general because it is really a big shift to go through and everybody kind of looks at you funny when you start to say things like this so it actually worked out pretty easily for me so I was working in a private private practice they're just doing very normal kind of dietary stuff and that's when I was really starting this but I actually ended up leaving that job and deciding like I can't really talk this way anymore like now that I kind of see a little bit of this information like it just collected I was like wow I actually believe it's a completely changed the way that I practice and it's not going to work to have these like little time and visits with people and like you know kind of be rushing patients in and out and you know maybe send them home with a shoot like that was kind of the best I could do before and really try to cancel them as much as I could. So I ended up completely shifting gears and leaving private practice and starting just a virtual practice so that I could at least be with people one-on-one and spend at least an hour with them and really talk them through things so it ended up working out well because I didn't have to necessarily like go from you know regular to put I drew stuff and then try to convince those people to then you know change was a little bit more now I'm tracking people that are a little bit more open to this so that was really helpful yeah that's too bad it would have been much more fun if you had amazing stories about people telling you you're completely full of shit. I know I know I kind of wish I could do that. I mean it's a fascinating thing I don't know if it's like this in the podiatry world but there's something I've seen in the physical therapy world where certain ideas show up and they've seen goofy and sometimes they are goofy sometimes they're like an infomercial product like the shake weight of all things and then five years later every physical therapist has one and they're using it and yet at the same time something like I was actually at physical therapy the other day and they had a copy of Born to Run on the shelf and everybody in that physical therapy office was wearing some big thick pad of shoe.
Oh my god. What do you think of that book? Oh my god I loved it. Did it make any difference for you?
What do you mean? So you know it was that gap is fascinating to me. It really is yeah it's crazy I mean I can't even imagine now like going back and I feel the same I see people there still being that I'm like my gosh like what are you doing you know but I also know that it is really hard and just think that sometimes it kind of conceptualize it and really take it in and even talk something else for so long. Given what you know now if you had said to your professors oh my gosh you know you got to check this out and they gave you those answers that they had given you how would you respond to them now?
Yeah I mean now I would just I would show them some research I'd be like well what do you think about this? Oh you're so naive. You think they showing them research would make a difference that's so? I mean not that it would but I just think it's funny that you know I cannot think of a single example of anybody that's showing any research to the country or been like you know hey this is why you should recommend this to people who just say you know oh get a new balance you know it's really good that's all people would ever say so.
Yeah when I do not do that when I've been on panel discussions aka debates with people who other footwear companies who do you know quote normal looking shoes I just asked them the same question over and over and over and they just never have anything to rely on and they give amazing excuses they say well you know having a study to prove that what we do improves injury would take a long time be really expensive have a lot of confounding factors and I said one of them yeah if you could make a shoe demonstrably better than the guy sitting next to you it's worth billions of dollars a year and you're telling me you're not doing it because it's difficult. Right exactly but then of course it's less me you know why do you do it I go well because the study that I'm talking about would cost about 10 million dollars. Right. There's no one in the minimalist world the barefoot world who has that kind of cash right now.
Hopefully in the not too distant future but even then you know I wonder how much if we had the perfect study we took a thousand people a third of them staying in their regular shoes a third of them switched to something minimalist a third of them switched to something minimalist and get some instruction and we track them over the course of a year or maybe 18 months. I'm curious what you think my position is if that study showed unequivocally that minimalist barefoot is better people would still ignore it. Yeah no I think they went and I think it's just it's like you said earlier it's like it's so ingrained in your mind and you just can't I think it's really hard to accept that and even if you see it's like oh I don't think so yeah I don't know I don't know what the world would respond to that but. Well it's like there's an article on our website about orthotics and barefoot running and it was inspired by a New York Times article from a woman who has I think my favorite name in the world it's Gina Kalata and and Gina's just a brilliant science writer I totally love her work and it couldn't have been more clear to say and even Ben O'Nigchanden and said yeah orthotics are really just for recovering you should be doing foot strengthening along the way and then get out of them as quickly as possible and that's and there's no evidence that they're helpful at the time there wasn't the research showing that they actually make your feet weaker right yeah for times article and as far as I can tell made no impact whatsoever yeah and this is the part that just amazes me and I do you have any sense of what it would take for this the somewhat paradoxical change of tides and I say paradoxical because part of 1974 everything looked like what's on the wall behind you right you know these things that you're reporting this common common knowledge was not common then it wasn't acknowledged then it was marketing so exactly so you know but to also your point we've been living with it for 50 years so two generations by then it's quote you know what everyone believes I'm the one who's in the airport today so you have a sense of what it might actually take to change the current change the time yeah I mean I think that education is really important especially in the schools and I think that's where everything kind of starts and so I really think it takes getting enough you know enough people like let's say enough psychiatrists or you know facilities or whoever to really start to understand this and then you know if that information can get into a little bit of the education you know we make a sure even if you have one lecture you know something anything because like you didn't have anything and we're supposed to you know kind of go up about that so I think anything would be helpful that can kind of be in that sort of preliminary education because I think it's just very tough when you're trying to go against like you know you've had four years of school that have taught you differently so even if you're just introduced to the idea as like maybe this could work or maybe this could be okay versus you know this is awful and it's dangerous I think that's kind of what we got we got it it's too dangerous I know we should do it and as a practitioner like you're putting yourself at risk we've been recommending it so it's just that I'm so intrigued by the two dangerous thing because we've already got 50 percent of runners 80 percent of marathoners getting injured every year so what are they comparing to exactly yeah that's so true and I would say in my patients all the time like where you know they're already in orthotics they're already in supportive shoes and they're still coming in with new injuries constantly and I'm like this doesn't get any sense great they already have orthotics they're supposed to be the treatment so something's wrong here you know that's not adding up I'm curious and I'm not gonna ask for a number but I'm kind of asking for a number how much let me I'm gonna ask it hypothetically if some practice with a traditional practice were to stop selling orthotics today how much money would they lose over the next year yeah I mean it's a huge part of the practice you know it depends I think everyone's a little bit different but I think for most practices it's one of the few things that you can consistently charge for you know high amount of money for and most most states insurance doesn't cover a lot of it so you're looking at you know out of pocket peanuts so you know I'm not sure about the exact number but it would be a lot it would definitely be a big chunk of the income and that's so that's a really big factor I think it's gonna be tougher people to wrap their mind around that and losing a big source of income and also kind of losing an idea that you're helping you're really helping everybody by giving anything well that's actually another thing I mean if you're doing something where you're getting people a solution that actually helps them and gets them out of your practice right that's another thing you just lost a couple of appointments so that's a fascinating thing I mean I think the education is one thing but the mind I mean the mindset has to go along with not just accumulating patience and upcharging them for various things yeah boy that's a high bar yeah I think another big thing too which is a huge barrier to me insurance because when you're in practice and you're battling insurance companies you know all they want to see you the diagnosis right they don't care you know what's causing the pain they don't care what's going on they want to know the diagnosis and then they want to know what your treatment is and so you know with a lot of these more natural movement kind of things you know you're not necessarily going to be giving some an injection or giving them medication or giving them an orthotic you're gonna actually be sure to do something you can't over that well you know I think you just gave me another answer to my question of what do you think is going to change and on the one hand I'd like to answer on the other hand I know that this answer is fraud apparel and my answer is we've got to start the insurance level and the fraud with peril part is a couple of pieces one is that we would need a body of research which I would argue there already is but we would need a body of research that would convince insurance companies that a body of research and a semi-reliable protocol for people to follow yeah and but the fraud with peril is I friends who are selling for example ballast programs for the elderly these things demonstrably work I mean insurance companies are already spending money on ballast programs for the elderly because people falling down breaking and dying is really expensive which is happened to my dad and the most incredible expense was that when he died he had no personal assets and so the hospitals and the insurance companies never just had to eat the cost of him being hostile for 10 days on the way of dying but my friends who are developing demonstrably beneficial products and they're going the insurance route they've been doing this for years and those ships turn so slowly that on the one hand again it could arguably be the solution on the other hand we're moving faster than they can possibly can yeah absolutely yeah it's very tough I don't think a lot changes very quickly when it comes to insurance but yeah I mean unfortunately that really does dictate what you know positions or any practitioners can do and if you're in a traditional setting it's tough I think it's very logistically difficult even if you're starting to really embrace this yeah I just realize as I said that someone that I know his family was in the insurance business his father started insurance company his dad ran it for years and unfortunately he retired so I don't know it would be interesting to talk to him or get through to his dad and say oh well how could we do this and he I'm sure he would just say okay good luck I'm literally gonna have to reach out and that conversation never occurred to me yeah I know it's fascinating to yeah to hear because in my mind you know doing another court of public opinion is the sort of the best thing to do but but I don't these aren't usually exclusive kind of a top-down and bottom-up approach is more likely to be valuable I said I did a pitch to some potential investors a little while ago and I said look I'm going to tell you why almost everything you believe out footwear is wrong and there's science behind everything I'm going to say but you're probably still going to doubt me and I want you to a wonder where your beliefs came from because they probably started if you track it back far enough from a shoe company that told some guy who was selling shoes how to sell the shoes and and is was promoting features that I'm about to show you demonstrably don't work but more importantly you know if you have doubts that's cool because our almost million customers they had doubts too until they tried to shoe on and then that changed everything just the experience what sells it so I said so your doubt is really a market opportunity a certain point as this idea grows we will hit a critical mast where there's enough people wearing barefoot shoes that the doubters go and miss will try it and that's when you're in the shoes so yeah and a lot of patients get to that point where they're like I can try every shoe in the shoe store and there is nothing left so they might get to that point and the next step is to try their foot and that's what works that's a really way I'm writing that down seriously if you've tried everything because one thing people don't realize is that the biggest well most people don't know this is an option because it hasn't been an option for the majority of the last 50 years and but I never thought to really suggest if you tried everything else why wouldn't you try this right you have nothing to lose at that point yeah and that's what interesting there's another you know I was in a little bit of research on walking shoes so I was contributing to an article that was happening about them and I was thinking about what are walking shoes right and so I did research and I found this article from I think it was from 1978 maybe something around there it was so funny it was basically like you know running shoes sales were down and so the shoe companies were trying to figure out how they could market walking as a sport because they're like you know what we need to sell walking shoes not enough people buy walking shoes and so they started this kind of program to like make walking with a cool sport and then that's how he started selling walking shoes wow this is really crazy well it was a similar thing that happened with aerobic shoes and in fact our product designer was part of the company that really kicked that off and they had a very simple marketing plan they just gave away shoes to everyone teaching aerobics and even if the people teaching didn't have to say anything it was just everybody wanted to be that person right the early influencers yeah yeah they were the original influencers but that's incredible it's like we're not selling a running shoes so let's make walking a category yeah this came up in a conversation actually with our product team because walking shoes it's a popular category they said we need to make a walk issue and I said every shoe we make is a walk issue exactly and walking is not a sport you know it's like you walk out every day you walk everywhere like so why would you need a shoe for that it's gonna be fun you know i'll tell you we better one do you know um it was a guy named Simon Bartol I think when he was written in the basics do you know what he recommended for a six do you know what he recommended for a six different walk shoes different shoes for that women had to wear when they're on their period versus not on their period oh my god wow i did not know that one that one that one blew me away when i heard that it's sort of like i mean that's my joke because some of these companies they want to make and they really do they want to give you a shoe for every possible thing you're doing like here's a shoe for when you're walking into the bathroom leaving the bathroom because i don't weigh as much oh my gosh you're just eating it really i mean i get it because fundamentally you know you don't really need much i mean we got what 25 shoes behind me but that's evolved because of special special use case yeah it's like i need a winner boot i need a you know something for work i know that looks fancy i need my looking at hiking boots you know i'm going to but we're not doing anything that's based on something ridiculous like you know a shoe for when you're in your period or a shoe for when it's the third Thursday of the month yeah it's honestly just really about that it's a full yeah it's a brilliant idea i got to write that one down actually third Thursday is the very important day that's the tts shoe people were saying their Thursday holy crap because what we saw that you know on the third Thursday the moon is in a different space and so the tides are different and you know your water is your body's made of mostly water so that's a shit i mean this would be so easy to do it's gonna be awesome it's gonna be awesome it's gonna be awesome you know actually i'm gonna do that is a i'm gonna do a spoof ad like that thank you we've now planned my next april fools ad is gonna be something just like that the shoe you have to wear when it's a full moon because the tides have changed and your the water your body has moved so now the now they have this virtual practice how are people are people coming to you because they know you're a hip to the natural movement idea or they come into you and discovering that and what's your experience with the clientele now well as a combination um some people are very already kind of changed about and they've already made exhausted some sort of traditional podiatry situations and they're looking for someone that you know has a different perspective and then some people are really just coming to me and don't really know that much about it or maybe they're just a little bit interested in it and they kind of want to learn more so i'd say it's definitely a mix of types of people which is great but the common denominator i think is that everybody who i see is very motivated so it's i'm not tending to see people who are like you know because of virtual i'm not gonna be offering people really quick fixes i'm not gonna say i can give you a shot i can give you this because i can't do that over you know through the computer so it tends to naturally bring people that are willing to kind of do something different and willing to do some work on their bodies make it better which is really cool well let's start with a fun thing you're doing virtual podiatry so are people just sitting there with their phone pointed at their feet yeah so that's a little tricky um basically what people do um before their visit is they'll have them do a couple gee videos so i'll have them um basically video to themselves walking and then we'll get some photos we can see like some like still pictures and then during the session we'll go through and do like some assessments um and then so i'll kind of make people like you know move their computer around everywhere and tell their free now and get up on their uh you know their toes and stuff like that but um but yeah we're kind of okay you know i thought it'd be really hard i never thought this would be possible but i figured out a process that works pretty nicely so yeah it's cool when um do you have some explicit instruction you get people for something as simple as walking um it depends i think some people definitely like i'll watch their video and like there's really obvious stuff i can just kind of cue them into like either you know sort of the way that they're walking to see maybe like the just like the cadence things like that that they can just easily start to use um but most of time it's more like we'll start with exercises to kind of like wake up because most people come to me and they're like you know they're feeders pushing other they can move their toes um they're kept really stiff so kind of like the first thing i'll do is really start to work on those areas getting mobilized like just kept moving a little bit and then we'll start with like really more integrated movements and then kind of like retraining those those neural pathways and like getting into the game movement so that they can actually run with that feel like and then okay now i can kind of entropy this into my eight cycle um which is potentially cool another you know crazy thing about the ichery that just maybe think of it is that this is another barrier i think a little bit to the more natural movement is that um we're like feet only like when you're in school it's like you are responsible for the feet up to like you know right above the ankle like that's like your zone and so you just kind of miss like a whole rest of the body that's um i mean it's amazing and i'm going back to what you said earlier is that when you switch to a truly minimal shoe you started feeling other things working including your glutes which obviously for people who don't know um are a major controller of your feet and vice versa yeah and the fact that you would not get that information in a four-year post-graduate educational program is i mean the number look i don't know if people aren't watching this number of times you said something in my chin is at the table hi and that's one that it's never occurred to me that you wouldn't get a more i hate to use work holistic i don't want to make that sound way even more comprehensive right right yeah absolutely yeah and it's very frustrating and i used to feel you know very limited by that when i was a practice because i would think like you know i don't really know like i'm not really looking at their hips and their pelvis and you know what kind of movement is going on there and now you know now that i actually do look at that and i do how people are like wow you know i'm just thinking about the number of people that just kind of got stuck with orthotics and you know kind of told to go home and all i needed to do was kind of a realignment of you know higher up their body they're not even kind of a problem right there just kind of how about you know um maybe a problem where more like a public issue and you know i think all the people are just kind of flying under the radar because they're just coming in for their foot and maybe their foot that hurts their hip might hurt you know it doesn't really matter where the pain is it's always coming from from something else right it's uh it's uh someone i don't know if this is true or not um but someone apparently asked Freud like if he had to sum up everything he knew in a sense as he was dying and there was i think two lines one was um secret to make you sick and the other was no one's upset for the reason they think they are and that would be relevant here for pain it's it's rare to think itself but i'm really fascinated um uh i'm imagining like in a clinical session in school someone comes in and they've got let's say quote flat feet warrior quotes um and then the whole conversation goes to prescribed orthotics etc and if you were there and said to someone yeah can you just uh squeeze your glutes and watch what happens to your feet where they try to avert and they don't so that builds an arch in your foot and you would watch people's heads explode absolutely yeah i mean totally like there was this never any discussion about that um which is just so funny i don't know i only think even when i was a student i just i had a little bit of an aversion to orthotics i just didn't i never really got it i was kind of like this is a weird concept they always bothered me so i never really loved to use them and even i was in practice i did prescribe them but i i just never i could never fully get behind it even though it was you know all we really learned so yeah i always felt like there was just something that saying i didn't know exactly what it was but now like wow and again you know like you know like you said like you just look at the research and look at the information there's no evidence that a custom made fifteen hundred dollar orthotic is any better than a twenty dollar than a twenty dollar than a doctor shoal thing you get a target they have the same outcomes and that alone and people go huh something is uh something is a right here but the other one that cracks me up and you'll love this i saw um i got a free chiropractic session i have anyway we don't need to go into my post-fire practice but more importantly the guy says well you know uh i was having a bunch of injuries when i got back and sprinting fifteen years ago and he says well you know you need a three-quarter orthotic and i said but when i'm sprinting the only part of my foot that actually hits the ground is everything ahead of that orthotic so what's it gonna do and he said well you know like when you're slowing down or walking i said are you out of your mind i mean what's it gonna do and and the guy just he couldn't get there's no way he could get the saying oh yeah um i was mistaken this actually that won't work for you that's funny yeah that is really interesting because yeah i don't think what people really do know like we don't you know i don't really know how we're not like anybody really knows you know we kind of think we do but you know you know when you're into research it's like well it's actually not doing that you know it's not doing what we do something you know look if somebody's getting a benefit from it i'm not going to say no but i will say if you're putting your foot in a position where it's not moving you want to do like you did get out of it and move your foot use your foot as much as possible when you're not doing whatever it is you think you need that shoe and orthotic for um and then in fact oh wait here's not i just realized you'll like this one too i was at the international foot and i go by mechanics conference and there was a guy there who will remain nameless to protect the guilty who was one of the top researchers about orthotics in the world and so he put on a pair of our shoes the pre-owned fact behind me and he says you know take a look and tell me what you notice when i'm walking with my orthotics or without that's what you notice he goes well nothing if you're really good i said okay well here's what i saw your right foot was pronating a little more because you're um you got a lot of weakness because you haven't been using your feet but here's the kicker a you didn't even notice it and b if you actually use your feet that would probably go away yeah and so he walks up to Irene Davis um the the grandmother if i said that her face she'd shoot me the godmother the anyway most important person then most of the users he came up to her and said you know i really like the shoes i'm going to put my orthotic in it and he thought he was just going to you know rib her but then after a couple weeks like shave it down some and then after a couple more weeks shave it down some more and then after a couple more weeks throw it away and he's like oh like that makes sense or pardon me for giving you all these but there are very few people who understand these stories with the same impact i was in the lab with dr bill sans he was the former head of biomechanics and engineering for the u.s.
Olympic committee and i'm watching what he would do when people would come in his lab is he would have them try on every different pair of shoe that they had and put them on a high speed giant treadmill and filmed them at 500 frames a second and what he saw is that for almost everybody except for elite runners who mostly land on the ball of their foot and midfoot that changes what i'm about to say their gate changed with every shoe and when he showed me this i just looked at i said oh my god that means orthotics are ridiculous and he starts to laugh he goes why do you say this because they would need a different orthotic for every shoe based on their gate and not altering gate and he just started wow that's funny and i said and you'd be and you would need to measure the orthotic based on how they're running in that shoe or moving in that shoe and you'd have to get a new one every time you know the foam started to break down or something started changing the all the geometry of the shoe so you would need like if you had five different pairs of shoes over the lifetime of their shoes you would need like a hundred orthotics there's a good business model right there i said i said if anyone figured that out they'd make a fortune by selling people things they don't need i think the good thing store has maybe done something like that because they have kind of like they have like a three-tier system of orthotics that they sell people i think it's like $1,500 and they give them like three different pairs i don't know what like what you're supposed to wear them for but it's like different activities and it's very bizarre but yeah they really you know you can make a lot of money convincing people that they're special little snowflakes and here's something just for you in fact that one of those panel discussions i was on has some brooks and guys were needed one of the last questions you know what's next in footwear and the guys from brooks said because everyone's a special snowflake they didn't say that way because everyone has a unique movement pattern which is not really true then you need to make shoes with special out soles to adjust for their movement pattern and the guys from adidas said well because everyone's a special snowflake and has a unique movement pattern we're gonna make special custom made mid-soles for them and again my question to both of them was where's your proof that that's going to be an anyway beneficial and they had no response i mean that's that's crazy but like people would totally go for that because i know people coming in and are like you know this robotic it's i'm looking at my foot it's not molded carefully and like i want it to be you know that people wanted to be like an actual imprint of their foot like that's what they want and so yeah i mean that's like that would sound really well so really well that's kind of funny um there are a number of companies that have made products that's like here's the thing that's based on the imprint your foot one guy was trying to make sell a business it was a sandal product where they had like a template like a block of foam multi density foam and you would they would scan your foot and then it would use a computer controlled cutting machine router basically to make something that was just a shave your foot and then you put a strap on it and i said um are they actually more comfortable or not he was like what do you mean it's made for your foot i went well i mean it might not want something that's made your like your foot especially with that much foam as you're walking the shape of the thing is changing to not the shape of your foot exactly so what do you do about that and you know again his head exploded a lot of explosions going on that's what well you know i think it would have to be given what we've been talking about how much people just believe these things that are patently false yeah yeah it's so it's become such like a catchphrase to you like you know people just use these terms like supportive shoes and art support and they don't it doesn't really mean anything it's just it's just what people hear and they think that that's what they need i've seen so many articles where people are like you know what are the best support issues and what kind of art support you do look for and usually i write in those articles and you know tell them they don't need support and then people get really confused but you can say that you also say um by the way i'm now selling supportive gloves yeah i can't write didn't you know that your palm really needs support you shouldn't be putting it like directly on things we have this great support of hat that we're starting um that it's going to support you're just going to support you're having better thinking um or i'm sorry here's the here's the risk age of if you know where this joke goes i'm at the age where i think i need support of pants even though that means but it could sound if you take it that way support just sounds good everybody wants support anyone support and they want to be special yeah what the thing that's made for me just like the fact that we all fundamentally have the same kind of human body um right i i wonder um you know there's a weird variation on that like when the burling wall fell when uh and when the Soviet Union fell as well when these communist countries who had very few options suddenly were able to travel and solve these myriad options they were overwhelmed to the point of you know paralysis practically and uh and in fact there's a thing called the paralysis or paradoxic choice you know too many choices too um so unfortunately we are so attached to this thing of having all these choices the freedom to get the thing that's right for us that most people don't realize that you know you'd be fine if it was just the one right thing or maybe the four right things absolutely yeah that's so true it's like there's just so much like people just don't even know what to do so yeah so one other thing um oh heading towards our time but what else what else have you discovered from sort of since you made this transition and have this virtual practice that you really never imagined or expected what's a big surprise for you yeah i mean so many things i would say probably the biggest surprise is you know really just from my own learning i feel like since i've kind of started down this route i almost like gone to like my own you know fellowship or something like just kind of relearning and so some of the things that kind of like you were saying like everybody everybody looks really different when you just look at one thing and when you really focus on maybe their feet you might say like everyone's really different we have these different patterns but when you really break it down kind of like you're saying people have very very similar patterns and even when people make computations the computations that are being kind of similar and you can kind of track these things and so it does kind of make it so that you can actually fix people like actually never not be people but you know you actually like kind of was groomed to believe that like you actually couldn't fix these things like oh someone comes into your office and they're like you know let's say they're back it's fully extended and they're kind of like cobbling and i would probably like that person's like oh my gosh like nothing can do about that right like there's nothing to fix it so just brace it and that's kind of like the real theme i think for a lot of medical specialties and that was the biggest i opener for me is like holy cow there's actually like easy ways that we can fix a lot of these problems and i really just didn't know it was possible one of the reasons that one of the things that gets us all out of bed in the morning here is that we hear from people all day every day saying oh my god this changed my life and i have to keep pointing out no no we just got out of the way yeah like you go back to normal and i'm be meaning to do a little podcast rant when people say something like um well you know this minimal issue hurt me it's like no what hurt you was getting in the shoe that screwed you up everything you've worked a lot of years it's how do you do what normal humans in other parts of the world that don't have those stupid shoes can do you're not different than those people and they don't get it but here's a weird question given that you have this non-normal approach to your practice how do you answer the question and talk about what you do when you're somewhere assuming that people go out and see other human beings that they never met before post-covid how do you answer the what do you question yeah so it's a little bit different i mean i will typically still leave with that i'm a podiatrist um but i'll usually start to you know talk about it a little bit more right and i'll talk people i'll usually talk people that i have a virtual practice because if you're a question people ask it's where you know where you work and that usually goes people's minds that that's even possible so then i kind of have to go and explain to them you know what it is that i do um and so then i'll kind of go through you know hey well this is actually the sort of method and the things that i use um and so all that can actually be done virtually or the vast majority of it so you know then it kind of gets people's minds spinning and they get really confused but at least get some thinking about it um and you know a lot of people have been very receptive i do like i do like pretty much everywhere you go if your podiatrist people will ask you for shoot by so you know if you just tell everybody that asks you you know hey this is what you should try to do um you know people some people listen not everybody but um you'll get some people that will be interested enough to kind of try that and then it kind of gets people in the door so yeah people are receptive which is cool yeah i do think it really in my mind it really is just a matter of time and enough people to have the experience it just becomes something where people can't ignore it and to be totally candid i literally hope that it happens in my lifetime not because of any personal benefit but because i think it's so important and i would like to see it happen you know somebody yeah i'd like to see the effect i'd like to see what happens when that happens um and somebody said to me well what would happen if you know one of the big companies ripped you off i went then we won absolutely yeah that's that's so true i love that yeah i mean one of the cool things that i saw happen um is that we have a shoe store it's one kind of over for me that's kind of like a worth of a shoe store that i used to send a lot of patience to and last year it got um purchased by a new owner and so i went in there and they actually had we had their issues and i was like oh my gosh what is going on i was like it was really cool i was like wow something's going on here because you know the whole rest of the store is like you know our store shoes and stuff i just even seen that it's just like wow that's that's very cool so that that just gets people interested to see stuff i agreed i mean you know there we have some people send us pictures from our eye stores where there's just our sandals and our shoes are just taking up a giant chunk of wall and um and they're selling not because we're pushing it and not even because they're pushing it frankly there's a lot of their people on the footwear floor don't really know what to do about our shoes yet but people just try them on and go oh my god and that's what's making it work and i'm just hoping that we can do more just make more of that happen just give more people the experience because again that's the that's the one thing you can you can believe whatever you believe but then if you have an experience that argues with that it's really hard to keep that belief coming yeah absolutely well this has been a total total pleasure if people want to get in touch with you and find out more about what you were doing or find out how you might be able to help them will you please tell them how to do that yes absolutely so you can find me on my website which is dr arc so d o c t o r a r k dot com and then on instagram at dr arc dot t p m beautiful i really look forward to people taking advantage of that i want you to tell me what happens when they do absolutely stories and um you know and just i'm back to the whole idea of sort of that critical massing i think part of that critical mass is people who have traditional medical training starting to wake up as well and at some point i'm going to put this bug in your head although i mentioned it's already been there you have got to find a way to be lecturing at podiatry schools i know yeah i think that'd be really cool so that's definitely a goal that i have especially since there's only that one lecture right i think it would be kind of easy to speak in maybe like a half hour lecture after that at least just you know a 20 second something give me like a big picture let's just open the door a little bit see what happens i have my fingers crossed so once again thank you and for everybody else thank you for watching oh again pleasure um so by the way right quick reminder if you want to find out more other than finding a list of then you can find out more about the other episodes we've done in the movement movement podcast and there are a bunch of them so go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com and you'll find all those and if you have any questions or some suggestions people you think should be on the show people who might argue with me and think i have my head completely my butt because i have a case of cranial reppler reorientation syndrome happy to have that conversation to be very entertaining you can send me an email i'm at move m-o-v-e at jointhemovementmovement.com and until then most importantly just go out have some fun and live life be first