Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body. Remember your body was meant to move. Now here's your host, Stephen Sashin. If you are a barefoot or minimalist runner, you have probably tried to talk some of your friends into also becoming a barefoot or minimalist runner, and they have probably provided some resistance.
Well, on the podcast today, we're going to be talking to someone who might have met more resistance than you will ever hear about, and look at the specifics, but let's dive in on the Movement Movement podcast. In today's episode, I'm Stephen Sashin, your host for the podcast, where we will discover the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy body and strong as well, starting from the first. We're going to get rid of the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that you might have heard about what it takes to walk, to run, to play, to cross it, to be yoga, by letting your body move naturally, hence the movement movement. In fact, we're creating a movement.
We want natural movement to be the obvious, better, healthy choice the way natural food currently is, and we want you to be part of that community. So if you want to be part of that community, you know what to do, go to jointhemmovementmovement.com, where you'll find all the different places that you can interact with this podcast, and you can like and share and subscribe, and if you're on YouTube, hit that little bell so you hear about upcoming episodes, and leave reviews and all those things you know how to do. I don't need to explain it to you, so let's jump in. I'm going to be talking about Dr.
Mark Cukuszella, and Mark, I don't want to even do your intro, because I won't do it justice. So do you want to tell people who you are, what you do, where you are right now, and then we'll jump into the whole natural movement story with you. Well, I'm in a God's country here, Stephen, the other God's country here in Boulder, Stone Boulder, so I'm in the right outside of Boulder, where I've got actually, probably being in Boulder is right up against the foothills, you don't get to see them, so we're right outside, so we have that incredible vista. You know, away from all the people, so I'm in West Virginia, so we're a town of like 3000 here, it's what maybe Boulder used to be, right before you and I were born.
So, again, I would say, you know, my claim to fame is I'm a friend of yours, you know, I remember. Oh, yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Barry, not to Governor's Island at the New York City Barefoot Run.
That was the first time I met you, we talked on the phone. That was like seven years ago? Years more than that. I saw a picture of that, my kids looked about nine years younger than they do now, so it was a while ago.
You may know this, but I'm going to... You guys in 10 or 2011, something like that. Yeah, I'm going to confess to something that I did there, so I wanted to be one of the sponsors of the New York City Barefoot Run, it was the first big barefoot run that anyone was... You just had your little do-it-yourself kit then.
Well, all we were selling was a do-yourself kit, and I wanted to be one of the sponsors, and the guy who was putting the event on, who's now a friend of mine, said that I couldn't be because one of our now competitors was already a sponsor and was actually a good friend of his, and so they didn't want me there competing. So I just showed up at the suitcase full of do-it-yourself sandal kits and was just selling them underneath the tree. Yeah, I remember. Yeah.
And then they slammed my wrist. You can't do that, and I just totally feigned in a sense. Oh, really? Oh, man, I didn't know.
I totally knew. I was just trying to get in there and do what I could. So I was hustling. That's what I was doing.
I was hustling. I got to learn a little at your back story. If you've disclosed your stand-up comedian, I'm like, how did you get into this field? Because your video is at that time.
That's the fun you did. I'm one interviewing. I'm not going to answer any questions about me. So let's do you on that.
Actually, I'll do the quickest how. The quickest how is simple. I got back in the sprinting. I was getting injured.
Someone suggested I try running barefoot. By doing that, I learned why I was getting injured and how to stop getting injured. I wanted to have that natural movement experience as often as I could. So I started making sandals based on this 10,000-year-old design idea.
And then you remember Michael Sandler, right? Yes. I was in the book that was coming out called Barefoot Running. And he said, if you had a website, I would put you in the book.
So I rush home and I pitch this idea to my wife who tells me it is a stupid idea that won't work. And I said, yeah, you're probably right. So after she went to bed, I built a website. And here we are nine and a half years later.
We're under there. Yeah. It's gone from a do-it-yourself sandal kit to a wall full of shoes and sandals that people use for everything from taking a walk to running ultra marathons. And speaking of the wall full of shoes and sandals, wait till you see the new stuff that's coming out for 2020.
And for those of you watching or listening, Mark will have access to this before you do because he's going to be at certain trade shows. Dude, this stuff is super, super amazing. But again, enough about me. So I introduced you as a doctor.
What kind of doctor are you? Tell the humans. So my day job is taking care of hospital patients in a small rural community hospital where 24 bed is called a critical access hospital serving a rural community. And then I also do a lot of work with type 2 diabetes, kind of the same way you and I are trying to fix people's feet.
You know, and get rid of the injuries. I try to fix what they eat. You know, diabetes isn't really drug-able, but it's foodable. So we try to treat them with food.
This is type 2, adult type diabetes. Right. All one is different. So we have a whole cohort of people here getting rid of sugar, which should be pretty obvious.
You know, losing weight and coming off of medication. So it's a little disruptive. I'm not sure what the rice diet is. Are we talking just rice as in rice products?
Who's the rice diet for something? No, you've got to look this up. So the rice diet was, and there's a woman who, Lane and I, a door named Denise Minger, she wrote a book called Death Life from the Pyramid. Denise was the, was the, the bell of the ball in the paleo and low carb community because she was a die-hard raw food vegan in her teens and then was having a bunch of problems.
And then she went to disaster. Right. And she went to disaster. And she went to disaster.
And she went to disaster. And she went to disaster. And she went to disaster. And she went to disaster.
And she went to disaster. And she went to disaster. No, no, no. No, no, no, no, but, but.
I'll get to the interesting part in a second. While I was there, one of the people who was there to do the rice diet was Buddy Hackett, the comedian Buddy Hackett. And he, one day, had a big Cadillac drove over my foot as I was trying to cross a, uh, I was probably going through a crosswalk, and he ran the stuff and ran over my foot. There were dominoes pizza guys who were making $1,000 a night by surreptitiously delivering pizzas to people on the rice diet, but that's not the important part.
The important part is the rice diet, and I might be getting this a little wrong, but the gist is correct, all you eat is white sugar, fruit juice, and white rice. Yes, it's a disaster. Yes, it sounds that way, but it was the exact opposite. It cured people, literally cured people, like morbidly obese, type 2 diabetics, cured them of diabetes, dropped them down into reasonable BMI's.
Like, many people who went from 400 pounds to 150 pounds, kept it off, had no problems afterwards. And the fundamental idea is that it was basically forcing your pancreas to go, oh geez, and start working correctly. But definitely not for everyone, really, really hard to be on. The point that she makes in actually a blog post that she did on her blog, and I don't remember the name of it, you'll have to look up to me to find it, is that she has this theory that what works for human beings when it comes to dying, especially when you need a big intervention for health reasons, is either going extremely low fat or extremely high fat.
And the in-between thing is where we have problems. And I know that you're a low carb, high fat dude. I would actually agree with Denise, and I think it would make sense. So basically, if you did anything to someone who's eating the Western diet, which is two thirds of it is processed oils, vegetable oils, added sugar, and refined flour, anything you did to detox you for 30 days, 60 days, so you could not eat, you could eat meat, you could be a vegan, whatever you did just to get you out of that mess, but then ultimately you got to eat food again.
Absolutely. Because this is an interesting thing. This is the interesting thing about the rice diet is that they maintain these results, even if they transition back to regular food. And I can tell you something from my experience, just for the fun of it.
And again, if they had broken their food addiction, like when they transitioned back to real food, probably try something. I'll tell you something fun. So, you know, as a sprinter, I don't know any sprinters who are on low carb diets or any power athletes. I think they should be.
Right. I've never heard of one, never met one. The only time I went super low carb, I called the guy who was monitoring me while I did it after a couple weeks and I said, hey, dude, I just did something in a workout that I've never done before. He goes, what's that?
I said, baled. You'd have a very difficult time doing a glycolytic workout. Exactly. But about a year and a half ago, I deliberately went on a very high carb, very low fat diet, just because it's closer to what I've been eating my whole life anyway.
And I was curious and it had a really surprising side effect. I completely lost my desire slash cravings for sure. Yesterday was my birthday. They brought me all these cakes.
I've had like slivers because like, that's just too much, which is really interesting. And I'm not on that diet any longer, but that was a year and a half ago. And it just, you know, something changed in my system from doing that was fascinating. But that's not why we're here.
Although that was really fun. So, so the bottom line for those listening. Absolutely. You don't have to talk food and the rest of it.
You're this car that I got a streets itself out, but you're someone who's in the more lean, insulin sensitive side. So, you're a well person, you take people who I see are on the 6 spectrum, they're a little bit different than you metabolized their sugar steven. So they're yeah, they have to kind of experiment a little different. They're already so far down the road of sickness.
They're their recits a little bit tougher. But that's for another date. I get all kinds of... Well, to that point, so your day job is playing doctor, but you were also, you have another day job as well, which involves location that you're in right now.
So, would you tell the humans about that? Yes. So my, this is part of my job too. So I do a lot of SportsMed running rehab, gate analysis, trying to get people to solve their plantar fasciosis, resolve their running injuries.
We have a store here called Two Rivers Treads, we're at Year 9 now, which is cool. So we were the first store, I think, none other popped up on the radar. So we were the first store that really opened as a true natural footwear store, meaning when we opened, it was kind of when you started your business and we started chatting because we had no shoes with elevated heels, narrow toe box, structured shoes, all the shoes that we opened with worked functionally with a human foot. So some were more minimal than others.
So when we opened, I think Vivo Barefoot was around, Vibram was just starting to get on the rage, Newton running was around, Salkany made a shoe called the Kinvara, New Balance made a shoe called the Minimas and that was it. That was the wild. And then Len's came along, they used to be called Stem's and that was like the first lifestyle shoe. And then when the sandals started coming along, you know, I'm Luna and you guys, Zero Shoes, so yeah, now it's all the walls full of multiple brands and with brands like your spectrum, you know, you got the boots and the lifestyle shoes and the sandals, but all built on the same principle.
Well, you know, one of the things that I've noticed and I'm curious what your take is from the retail side. When you talk about the Kinvara, which is gone, when you look at the Minimas, which has changed from what used to be a good Minimas shoe to not, what's been your, what have you seen from the retail side about how brands are dealing with the whole idea of true minimalism and how the general public is. Yeah, so I think everything, like everything, pendulums kind of shift from one direction to another and then they end up back in the middle where they should be. So when we opened our store, you know, not everyone was convinced the world should be super minimal and I wasn't either.
A lot of people do need some protection, but everyone needs to strengthen their foot. So the Kinvara had cushion, Newton had cushion, you know, some folks were dabbling in people barefoots, which had a shoe called an Evo, which had no cushion, Minimas had a little cushion. So you see where people are and what their goals were. We never put people coming out of a big bulky asix tiger into a five finger that would be silly to do that.
So people had trouble. I would pause there because this is a conversation I've had with Irene Davis as well. And Irene actually will put someone into a shoe like ours right away, except that she'll do it after they've done a bunch of strengthening a bunch of other things first. Yeah, do it correctly.
Yeah. Well, that said, in my argument again, I did an episode about this, that the whole idea of transition shoes is just complete nonsense. It was made up by companies who work in a go to a true minimalist shoe and they wanted something to sell. They wanted to capitalize on this idea.
So they made up this concept of transition shoes. And from my experience, just now with hundreds of thousands of people, if you do, you can make that switch directly, but you just need to build up slowly. And what's, I don't want to say intelligently, you just need to be paying attention rather than this kind of begging the questions I asked you is that one of the things that I noticed is that some of the bigger brands, including Vibram, they kind of positioned the whole idea of natural movement as just put on this new shoe, you'll be fine. Yeah, you need training.
Exactly. So what you're saying there's actually really important. So the people that I would do exactly what you said. So the people that were broken ran horribly, shin splints, guess fractures.
I would get them to try to run completely barefoot on the street. Yep. You know, not a lot. 50 meters.
That's the only way to really retrain the gate. But then say you had someone who came in who was an efficient runner already, wasn't hurt, was in a big bulky shoe and preferred a little cushion. Sure. They just pick what's comfortable.
They had injury issues and wanted to fix those injury issues. Yeah, you can't just put a transition shoe on and hope it all goes away. Yeah, they really need to. That's how I discovered it too.
You've seen me running on barefoot on the streets and it teaches you something every time you go out because your feet give you messages. So and then you see what does the person want to do? You know, not many people are truly willing to just throw type A, you know, Stephen. They're like, okay, I want you to, I know you've had eight stress fractures in the last year.
I want you to like run 15 minute miles barefoot. Yeah. It's like, like, it makes them crazy. So like you're crazy.
Then they do it. Right. Oh my God, this works. I used to tell, I haven't told it in a long time.
It's been so long that I'm blanking on the name of the woman. It's a couple here in Boulder and they're both Olympic distance runners. And when she had, I think two kids, maybe three kids and then after having kids like went back and became an Olympian again. And when she was pregnant, she was, some people like keep working out when they're pregnant.
She just couldn't. She would just take the whole time off. And after she would have the baby, she would get back into training again. And the first month was just walking.
And then the second month was walking in her spurs with really slow long distance. No, no, no. It's not very long. You know, and it would take like nine to 10 months just to get back up to speed again.
It's like, if this is what an Olympian does to get back up to speed, why do you think you can do it way better, faster, different? And people just think that, you know, that they can make these massive changes instantly. And granted, there are a couple of people who do and they just ruin it for the rest of us. But it is amazing that people are, the lack of patience is fascinating.
It's like, I've been doing it wrong for my whole life, but I should be able to figure this out instantly. Yeah. We really try to teach patients, you know, similar to folks who need to lose weight, you know, they need patience and do it correctly. But that's by Cara Gautier, if you're out there without him, Gautier, because she lives in North Carolina.
It wasn't Cara. It wasn't Cara. When I go to the track, you don't have to pregnancy, all the fascia is loose. Just that easy slow jockeying versus walking.
You know, you're training that spring again, but adding very low stress for that adaptation. But then when they finally decide to dial it up, the fascia is ready to go and they won't get hurt. So that probably does take a year, I would guess, after delivering a baby to get everything back to normal, you know, normal tension, like for fascia, you know, because it's all detentioned. It's an interesting research experiment.
Like when is the fascia back to the point that it could take the stress that it did prior to pregnancy, you know, the same way? That is not known. And I wonder if it could be accelerated with something like prolotherapy or anything where you're just a palki diet, you know, eat bone broth, you know, stuff for your collagen. I don't know.
Interesting. So one of the questions kind of in this, in the same vein, what was your experience and also what's your take? One of the things that really put a crimp in the whole idea of natural movement was, of course, when there was a class action lawsuit filed against Vibram because they made an unfounded medical claim saying these things were going to make your feet stronger, which there wasn't some explicit study that showed that, but there was enough dots you could connect where obviously if you're going to use your feet, they can get stronger, they get weaker. Correct.
Yours is now showing that is it. I know. Well, you know, there actually was then too. It was a year before Vibram on the Nike free, which was about as minimalist as a pair of stills.
But regardless, it was more flexible than previous shoes and the study showed that by wearing that shoe, you built intrinsic extrinsic foot muscle strength compared to a regular shoe. And I think that's probably one of the- It was an advertising error, not an unfortunately. I mean, they didn't lose. They just settled.
They didn't lose it. No, they never said anything. They were wrong. They didn't lose, but the media took that in a way that was completely opposite.
And it was like a minuscule amount. I mean, like, I've got so much- It was $3.75 million after about a year and a half. And so it was absurd. And my theory, and I talked about this in a previous episode- I'm not going to lose it for major companies.
Well, I had the toning shoe. The claim that if you wear these toning shoes, it's going to make your butt look better. I think that case settled. It was re- people aren't following the Google search minimalist blogs.
They just come in and want to get in a shoe. And they don't come in. It's kind of nice about being here. I don't think I've ever had some.
Because we're not in suburbia running culture where no one's coming in and said, I've always worn a6 or I've always worn this. They just try on shoes. They don't have- They're not so brand wedded. Yeah.
And I mean, maybe someone said this trust me. I'm a doctor or something. I've seen that on people's shirts. And for some reason, our staff here, they're very well trained.
Highly educated staff. And so we take time with people, we listen to them, we look at their feet, we show them where their problems are. They don't like it. They can bring it back in 30 days.
So I mean, I think that's how it worked. It didn't really affect us at all. I think what we were doing was right. And it's no different now than it was nine years ago because this is all just the basics.
We're on posture. We're on the gate. Slow down. You want to train some hard?
Oh my God. I try to get runners to take one day off and do some strength training. And they act like I'm telling them I want to sell one of their children. Yeah, and I do my strength training.
We have kettlebells here in the store. You know, like, yeah, learn all that. Have you seen, I made a video. I'm going to have to point you to it to my favorite new exercise device.
I'm like, we have one here in the office. It's called the K-Box. It's an eccentric flywheel device. Have you seen one of these?
No, no. Oh, super cool. We're always looking for cool stuff. Oh, it would be very cool in this show.
We'll talk about that after we get off show. Yeah, it's super cool in this store because it's, well, we'll get into that. That's a whole thing. So if it fits in your backpack, it's not quite, but it fits in the back seat of your car and gives you all the resistance you could possibly need for all the exercises you want to go.
Oh, man. Yeah, they're super cool. We'll talk. So on the other things, so one of the other things that I know you do, rather than just asking about this, and this is the teaser that I did at the beginning of the episode, you have done a bunch of work with because, oh, so let's back up.
Not only are you a doctor, but you have military credentials. Yeah, just retired after 29 years. Congratulations. Air Force Doc.
And I know that because your email has that built into it. So one of the things that I know that has been a big concern slash mission of yours is to get people who are in the military for whom running is a big deal to do that safely, more effectively, more efficiently with fewer injuries. Can you chat about that? Yeah, actually, I just wrote a book.
It came out last year called Run for Your Life, and that would explain the whole story. But yeah, it's injuries in the military, whether it's Air Force Army, Navy, Marines, the musculoskeletal injuries are huge, costing the taxpayers, you are listening billions and billions of dollars of direct cost of the care and lost duty days, early retirements, disability payments. And it's all self-inflicted, meaning if you go to combat and you get injured, I mean, that's the cost of doing business. But if we're supervising you being hurt, doing physical training, we call it PT, physical training, that most of these injuries are happening under supervision of cadre leaders, fitness trainers.
So it's broken. And I went on a six month assignment. They assigned me, left my job for six months to dive into the fitness test. It was to evaluate the injuries.
And I came in to that with some hypotheses and I learned a lot of new things because I wanted to just throw everything away that I thought was true and kind of look at people. I traveled to like 50 bases. But I, you know, describe it in the book, but it's all the basics of what we teach here. You know, slowing down aerobic development, proper form.
We're still working on the shoes and we're getting really close. I have a good colleague down at basic training. You know, so now we're looking at getting a neutral shoe with a little drop and a little bit of cushion and lightweight. So we are close because the military still gives these 18 year old enlistees this big 15 ounce bulky trainer.
That's posted and you would hate it. I couldn't run a step in the damn thing. We wonder why they hate to run. So this is the thing that I was teasing at the beginning.
I mean, you would think that given the literal and figurative cost of all of these injuries, that the military would be highly, highly motivated to make a change for something that works. Now, I'm going to throw out a quick thing. I know that Irene Davis, who's a mutual friend of ours, who's a doctor at Harvard, Irene was trying to get funding for a study through the military about to see if switching to a minimalist footwear would be helpful and they wouldn't give her a grant money. It's like, why wouldn't you want to spend a couple of dollars to find out something that could be better for people and they didn't do it?
Again, you would think that they would be highly motivated to find better solutions, but that doesn't seem to be the case. You would think, but this is how it is really, I think in any institution, whether it's in healthcare, large hospital systems, the DOD, the US military, changing institutions is very difficult. What does it take for an institution to change? I mean, I think that's the unanswered question.
So if you take million army troops that do this way and this is the way it's always done, for that big, it's like turning a school of fish. It's a level of change. So you and I are like, why didn't this happen yesterday? It's crazy.
All these people are getting hurt, but you're talking about changing an entire culture. Yes, so. Yeah, I like that. But it's cool because now we have made change in basic training.
We just, the footwear is the last domino to fall, so they slow down, dynamic warm up, we teach running form, all the stuff that you and I are teaching outside of we don't have the right shoe there yet, but man, this is going to be the holy grail. We get this shoe and then we start to look at data. Then okay, well, what are we doing? Is this helping?
You know, because you got to get data too, but people are listening, it's just not as fast as you would think. That's why it's working at the small hospitals, nice because we got sugar doing inside of my hospital. It's a 24-bit hospital. But if I walked into a 3,000-bed hospital and wanted to do that, they'd throw me under the bus.
I'd be like taking away their human rights or something. But it's all wisdom of the crowds and the people that help change. It's interesting. One of the things that I found, and I'm curious if you've had the same experience, is the one place where I've had no resistance.
And what I mean is that I just keep hearing from this particular group of people over and over about how they made a switch and then we'll just footwear and even our original do-yourself sand look at special forces. Yes. I mean, those guys are like, they can do whatever they want, they recognize it. I mean, they say it hasn't just filtered down from them given their experience.
A little bit, but you have to look at those folks and I've worked with them with running clinics. They're like athletes. Perfect form, perfect strength, perfect biomechanics. They could deadlift you and I and your wife.
Dude, I could deadlift you and I and my wife. Okay, I can't. But they would, okay, think of the Jeff Vernon. Okay.
So that's a whole different story. Jeff, for people who don't know Jeff, a friend of ours from TrueForm running the mid-this awesome curve, non-odirized treadmill, and Jeff is a beast. He was a pure muscle. Yeah.
So these guys move perfectly. So they move perfectly. So the vibrant five-finger or whatever type in that seal star, there's that one picture of the, I think it was a seal or some other special ops guy jumping out of the helicopter with his dog in the five-finger. Oh yeah.
Maybe we could find that one and post it. He's not a water. So that shoe, the original KSO was like the rock star shoe for those guys because all they do is they ask the person who has survived X-number of missions, hey dude, how do you do that? Why are you wearing those five-finger things?
He explains it simply while they make my feet feel good. I can run through water and, you know, knock a shot. And, but look at, there was an article yesterday in the military times about the military now looking at low-carb diets. So which group of the military do you think have been on low-carb paleo type of diets since before the word, Paleo even existed?
Right. Special forces guys because they, that's how they work. So they just ask the cadre, you know, the guy who's the senior instructor now, you know, who's been on X-number of missions. And it was fun talking to those guys like seven or eight years ago on this topic, you know, because you just like, what do you guys eat when they drop you out of a plane and you got to go market target and come back, you know, and maybe that's like two weeks later, you know, and they carried like knots and jerky and things like that.
They didn't understand that. Well, that's like a low-carb keto. Yeah, they just needed the most calories in the smallest amount of space. Yeah.
And they didn't understand that ketones gave you mental clarity. They just knew that they worked for them and they weren't hungry or hangry when they have to have like, I mean, yeah, they have to have this immense attention and clarity. But yeah, it works for them. But now they're looking, you know, Jeff Bullock is studying that, but that's not a study.
And they're just individual, but everything is learned from human experience and science launches up. It was just physiology. But there again, they're different animals. I took an 18 year old new recruit.
How do you think those guys move? Do they move like a seal or do they move like your average high school kid who's worn big bulky shoes, they run horribly. So those folks need to be trained. So for them, that's when it's hard to train, you know, a thousand people at a time in running form, like 12 true form runners now at Air Force basic training, which is really cool.
Like since the vision will run on the true form. So when you're working with them or when you're working with people in your store, and I'm going to ask you to kind of modify this slightly for people who are watching, listening, what do you teach people or how do you teach them to make the gay adjustments that are basically back to what's natural? Yeah. What people have actually done is gone from natural to something unnatural and now they're unlearning relearning.
So what's the process that you do for that? Actually pretty damn easy, you know, not to be an advertisement here for true form. I'm not funded by him in any way, but we give people some cues. We teach them posture.
We teach them arm position. We teach them rhythm just the basics. So let's pause there. So talk about what, you know, when you say teach them posture and teach them arm position.
Same word about what that is specific. So, so running, you know, so think of it. If you're really tall, like when there's really long foam rollers, you're like, there's 36 inch foam rollers. You know, if you throw it down to the ground, it's going to ping bounce back up nicely.
If it's all bent and crumpy, you know, you throw it down to the ground, it just doesn't come back. So a good posture is going to be the body's in alignment, starting at the feet, jumping rope. So think of it, if you were to jump rope as effortlessly as possible, you know, you don't want to burn calories jumping rope. Just imagine you had to jump rope for two hours.
What's the most efficient position? And you'll find it that it's just tall and a lot of people aren't that backseat because they've been wearing heels, you know, so they're in that kind of shoulder back position. So we kind of teach them to compensate a little bit forward, which feels weird, but they have to feel that. So teaching the basics of posture, rhythm is just the spring, right?
So we get them jumping rope. Now if their feet are all kind of jacked up and the toes are caved in and the arches are collapsed and they try to like they hit the ground, you know, like you're right there kind of like that. So okay, let's get your foot in a better position. That's wide natural toes, short foot posture.
Now, you know, spring. Okay, now it has that feel. So that's kind of the rhythm arm position is pretty easy. We even use this little kind of sling.
It's like a little yolk that kind of attaches your thumb almost right to your chest, you know, so as soon as your arm flies too far in front, I'm sprinting it probably you need to because you're generating power. Actually, no, if you look at your hands, tights, sprinting like tights. Look at spinner's the final hand position is I mean, they call it cheek. And it's literally.
Okay. So it's very similar. You're actually it's a little different because with distance running, you know, it's similar in kind of where your elbows are. Yeah.
Because of the amount of force that you're generating, we're sprinting your elbows don't you know, don't your elbows coming too far forward, but your hands are basically coming sort of up here more rather than getting a little more. Yeah. So you want to kind of soften the landing, but you have to be stable. So we get them to get that body position, but then we put them on the true form runner and for those, you know, we could link to it, but it's a little slightly curved treadmill.
It doesn't have a motor. So you have to make it go. So if you over strive, I think about like you got a little curved treadmill, but you know, Fred Flintstone style, you have to make it work. If you're super tight in the hips or you're over striding, you know, it just comes to a stop, you know, you can't make it work.
So then we just like maybe you're going to a driving range and you can't watch a video and go like hit the ball, you got to go like slow and practice and get, you got to feel it yourself. You're slow, make a few adjustments and they usually, whoa, like they'll find it. You get out of the way. Don't overcoach them.
Give them a few cues, you know, get them to try to fire the glutes open their hips so if they can't make it move, we'll use like the little sled drill, you know, we'd touch a bunch of their waist and get them to the sprinting drill, right? Like drive away, you know, so that's okay. You feel that using the glutes or if they're super tight in the hips, we'll have to do some mountain climbers. Now get back on the true form, you know, you're trying to feel a little tweaks.
So I'm going to pause there and just highlight something. So what you're just talking about with mountain climbers and the sprinting drill for people who are glutes and slashing or back to the whole idea of firing your glutes, it's an amazing thing. The biggest, one of the biggest muscles in your body is your glutes and your hamstrings, your lacer also there too. But like more of those for a moment, these are things called prime movers.
They are the things designed to make you move and from, for many reasons, it's the one set of muscles that people don't seem to use when they try to run or walk even. And so just, and it's not that you can't, it's just that you've sort of turned it off enough and you need to feel that again to have that sense of, oh, that's what it means to use these things. And so these, both of these drills, the only way you can move forward if you're having some resistance, you have to lean forward, you have to push out of the back is if you put out a, you can't pull hard enough. These are the ones I've been trying to tie.
We even have a little tire with a, with a, like a little strap, you know, like a wedding strap. And let's put it on the curb and, you know, get it. No, no, no, you just maybe think of something. The last time you and I saw each other at the running event, this trade show for running shoe stores, there was a guy opposite me who had a tire to drag.
He had some, yeah, this elastic thing that made it so it didn't bounce too much. And I watched all these distance runners who like could barely pull a thing. And so then I had him give me the heaviest tire that he had and I'm a sprinter and it's like, whoooh. He could sit in the tire and you would support it.
But it was, but again, it was just because for sprinting, you have to use your glutes and your hands, right? There's no other way, but there's a lot of people who are distance runners, they would call themselves accomplished runners. They found a way to move. Yeah, they compensated.
They've totally compensated. They're not. These people have another gear. They could get so much better.
Yeah, agreed. They wanted to. I mean, it's, it's people come into the running store just wanting to get healthy, get off medications. They're not really, they could care less about using their glutes under 5K time, you know, but then another group actually wants to get well and, and, and, and, and, so you kind of, I just want everyone not to get hurt, you know, and learn how to, and when people run correctly, it's more fun.
You know, it's like, wow, this is fun. Well, in terms of not getting hurt as well, I mean, that's, it's another reason to actually learn to use your glutes and that's going to support your lower back. And so people having back injuries actually using your body correctly can help with that as well. These things work if you let them work.
Yeah. So people should just check out. I think the true form runner now has a model that's a little less expensive. It's the same kind of quality, but it's a little more light that you could have for like a home.
Yeah, yeah. It's actually talking to Jeff about that just the other day. In fact, I'm trying to get him to give anyone. So I, but yeah, it's, it's a great device and it is one of those things you get on it.
And you're feeding the right place. It just, it clearly feels wrong. And then there's, when you kind of get things aligned, it just, it suddenly gets easier. It just feels more fun.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, go outside. I think, gosh, I mean, everyone had something like that. He was having issues, you know, run for three to five minutes on the true form, just like you're going to a driving range and get the seven iron blade and just get your swing dialed in and then pull out the big earth. So like just warm up on it, you know, get the rhythm.
And then most people I prefer being outside and then go outside. You know, but it's a, it's a good thing to do that with too. There's a guy that we talked to a couple of weeks ago, friend of mine here in town named David Clark, who's a crazy, amazing ultra runner. And he did a 48 hour run on a treadmill and it was just on a regular treadmill.
I can't remember. I think we talked about true forms and I know he's using the loves of, but I wonder what it would have been like if you'd, if you'd done that. It's a little more work on the. Yeah.
But that's part of it. A lot of work without a lot of loads. So like you say, say you really wanted to do kind of some strength running without loading, you know, and there's a guy in South Carolina actually got some data on it. So the faster you go with that, yeah, you've got to, you use a lot of metabolic equivalents, but the load on your joints compared to like going to the track and running 200 meter repeats.
Right. Far less. So you said, you know, since you're the one moving the treadmill, even with perfect form, it's not just gravity making a move. You're having to use your glutes and your handstrings.
And the first time I was on one of those, I got off and banned my whole poster chain, you know, from my calves through my handstrings and my butt, which is on fire. Yeah. He doesn't send me one free treadmill after this contest. I'm a little dumb.
You send your little demo there for your studio or something. Well, we're doing a little renovation. So we're going to have some some rooms and we can get people on things like that. We're really excited about that.
So anything else. He's already got like five pairs of my shoes. So that's the easy part. Anything else.
He's crazy big like that. We'll think of something. Anything else that you can think of in terms of just the tips and tricks for getting started with really starting to understand experience natural movement? Yeah.
So the other thing, if you're not afraid to do it, I don't think anyone should be. So we've got this beautiful, smooth sidewalk right in front of the store. You know, they just did a whole streetscape thing. It's part of the reason we moved our store here from our past location.
And like today is a beautiful day. You know, take your shoes completely off and we do a lot of little run clinics and just go run softly down the sidewalk and your bare feet and it's people start smiling. You know, it's like, wow, this is just chosen. They can land painlessly in their bare feet, but they go like super slow.
Yeah. You know, for one, it's okay to do this just down to the curb and back. Yeah. Super soft and it's fun.
You hit my favorite thing. I often say you can spot a bear from a mile away because they're smiling. Yeah. Yeah.
If they have a grimace on their, if someone has stress fracture, it wouldn't make them do it. But most people who are just learning how to run again, you know, a little plant or fashiosis, they can, they can do that. I'm going to come back to plant or fashiosis in a second. But before I do that, the whole idea of running and landing softly, I read and I talked about this.
I've seen people do something that I never imagined they would do. They've read or heard somewhere that you're supposed to land on your forefoot. So the thing that they figure out about how to land softly while landing on their forefoot is still reaching their foot way out in front of their body and pointing their toes and kind of like gently getting their foot down, but then kind of pulling the ground underneath them. I'm assuming you see the same thing.
I'm curious what you do. Yeah. People just want to learn. They just need to practice the body will teach them.
So certainly like if you, if you had a minimal shoe on, you could stab into the ground really hard while moving forward and create a lot of friction, you know, and friction's bad. But if you had a shoe on, like everyone has wear patterns on their shoes or creating friction. But if you take your shoe off and say you're kind of, imagine we're going like 10 minutes a mile or something and you're going forward to 10 minutes a mile and you stab your foot into the ground going forward, you're going to leave some skin on the pavement. Right.
But you just kind of let that foot land softly and just get a little bit of push back. You know, you're kind of bringing it back at the speed you're going forward. You know, you can't overthink this. You have to feel it.
Your body will naturally just let your foot do the right thing. You just have to go do it, but start like really, really slow. Yeah. Really, really slow.
Yeah. I say 20 seconds, 30 seconds tops. And they feel it and let the heel come down. You know, don't prance.
Just let the heel come down. You know, whether you touch gently and roll from the heel or touch gently on the forefoot and then your heel touches. The best runners have the most variability when they film them through races. I'm going to argue that one because, I mean, there is variability, but there's two factors that one is that a lot of these runners are training in a higher heel patted shoe and then racing the racing flats.
They've already developed a certain movement pattern. And the other thing is just when you look at video analysis, it's very deceptive because watching where someone lands on video is very different than what happens on a forefoot where you see where they're actually applying for. They're loading it like what part of the deck? I mean, I don't know.
I've read stuffy, I've read stuff and it's probably, it depends. It's the only thing that you watch the Elite Pack at the Boston Marathon, for example. So like at mile seven, Tom is shot at some amazing video. Yeah, they're touching and they're touching pretty on their heel and they're rolling forward because at mile seven, they're just trying to cruise along and try to conserve energy and they're just going to probably mix it up.
And I kind of do the same in marathon races, kind of going downhill, you modify a little bit and that's a problem. Absolutely. Totally everything. Yeah.
And so it's hard to know when you see that film is completely flat, but what you see is about a mile to go or half mile to go, those who are still in the money, the rest of them are done. Those are the money, then they get on the ball of their foot just like the last lap of the track. So not all of them, but most of them would when you see it, that's like the last lap of a 10,000 meter race because then they're like all in at that point and they could hear less that they trash their fascia because they're applying so much power because it's half mile from the finish. Well, you just raised another point that I've also commented on, which is people love to use elite athletes as the example for Hey, here's what you should do.
These are often people who are just trying to find the best way to make a living frankly, to win a race and they don't have a lot of concern for, you know, will I be able to do this when I'm 40 or 50 or 60? And the other thing is, you know, someone says, well, you know, someone said this particular marathon or does the following and I say, I don't want to be the one to break the news to you, but you're not 105 pound Kenyan. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure.
I mean, so yeah, we're talking about the elites for the average runner. I don't have them focused that much on what part of their foot hits the ground. That's why I like the true form. I just want them to develop a movement pattern that's correct, that soft.
You can't pound into the motorless treadmill. It stops. Right. Most people prefer a little bit of cushion, you know, because that's like they're making a couple of ranges.
Actually, I'm making growling noises, but it's not, but I'm just for fun. You know, there's, there's, how do I put this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's cushioning in your cushioning, let's say that way.
So, you know, and there's also what feels good when you're just standing there versus what feels good when you're running or what affects you running and what doesn't affect your running. And these things are all very different. And there's been a lot of confusion, I would argue about what's good. I mean, when I watch people go into a store and they put something on their feet and go, well, I like all the cushion.
It feels really good. It's like, well, yeah. You have to run. So, yeah, it's too soft.
It's a bad thing. When we teach, the type of pedic mattress feels great, you know, when you push up on it. Same thing about running. They actually have people stand on an Eric's pad, you know, which is super soft and they're like, oh, this feels good.
But how would that feel at mid stance? Yeah, it doesn't work. There's a pad where there's listening. It's like a PT pad, you know, when you're doing an ankle rehab, it's like a big, big soft.
Yeah. Yeah. It teaches you kind of to train your body to deal with instability, which is not what you want when you run. You want to land on stable surfaces.
Yeah. The whole instability training thing is another one that makes me crazy. It's like, hey, you're training to be unstable. It's like, no, actually, you can get stronger if you train stable because then you can run on some trail and that'll teach you.
Yeah. Honestly, but this made me maybe it's good for business, Steven. But to be honest, but most people don't want to buy, you know, two pair of shoes, you know, I don't know why, but they go by racing by a training bike. They all buy all these other crapshues are inexpensive and like yours last 5,000 miles.
But I think if everyone got like a true minimal sandal issue and something that they may take on the trail and mix it up and then go out as a recovery day, go out and it's not on a big, sharpie trail, go out and run and sandals run barefoot super, super slow. And then the next day you want to kind of load it up a little bit and you just want to you know, you want to pound the ground a little bit, you know, put on something a little bit of cushion, whatever your practice is. This is something Irene says as well. It helps.
Irene says look, if you're going to be an overspreading heel spreading runner, get some cushioning under your deal. You say that way, but if that's what you're going to do, then do it. Yeah, have a golden parker. I like how he explains it.
You know, you've got three feet of spring, you know, which is pretty much your hip down to your arch or an inch of cushion. Right. What do you want to utilize? Yeah.
Well, my version of that I say, so which you think is going to be more effective? A piece of foam that starts breaking down immediately upon use that is basically tuned to a particular weight and speed of which you are neater or an almost instantly, infinitely adjusting spring like mechanism that evolved over a very long time to handle pretty much anything to throw at it. I mean, yeah. Oh, it's a lot of.
Yeah. And then for, you know, I'm 52 and you know, by God, was that how I know yours? Yeah. I know yours.
I'm a distance guys. I've got like 120,000 miles on my legs. I'm a sprinter. I've got like, you know, 120,000 tons of force on my legs.
Yeah. It's probably pretty equal when we have it now because you put nine Gs on your frame. How many steps are 100 meters? For an elite athlete for like, you know, Olympian, 41 to 43 for me.
I think I was somewhere in 48 last time I checked. I'm not sure. And that doesn't seem like much enough. I was like, you know, five or six steps, but I mean it's everything.
You know, time, intensity, ply metrics, you know, get a single like bound for 10 steps, you know, one like bound. Most people are trash themselves. It's completely insane, but I can't think of anything else. So back up to your kind of a plantar fasciosis, which most people think of as plantar fasci itis.
So we do do do two favors and talk about why you say osis and not it is. And also what from a natural movement perspective is the way that you talk to people who come in presenting those symptoms, you know, for whatever they're going to do to deal with that. Yeah. So it is just going into medical terminology means a true inflammatory condition.
And most of those things are going to either be infectious or autoimmune. For example, something like rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune attack. You've got hot red, swollen joints. There's actually active damage going on.
So an osis is more a degenerative, you know, hit and repair type of process. And most back disease, you know, is degenerative. So there are occasional things like discitis, which are infections or things like that. So most plantar fasciosis is degeneration, you know, thousands and thousands of steps in micro terrors and the plantar fascia.
And it hurts the repair process becomes dysfunctional. But there's no active attack on it by your own bodies immune system or infection. So it's an osis doesn't sound sexy, doesn't sound durable, right? Because because they lead the industry wants you to think it's an itis, which means there's which is drugable by an anti inflammatory.
Now the truth about those are they will inhibit the body's repair process. The body has this innate repair process. Like you say, how many years have we evolved? You know, more of that than I have.
How many times that's all I got? How many zeros of yours? Okay, we've evolved with a lot of the imperative a lot. You cannot treat a degenerative injury.
And you can't treat it to make it repair faster. You can only support what's going on and reteach it while your body repairs it. So people think you can kind of treat these injuries like you take something, you inject something, you know, put some magic widget and it's going to heal faster. That's absolutely not true.
It's hot tubs. Nothing will make it heal faster. That's just the way it is. Drugs will make it heal slower and they have their own list of side effects.
So when I was in college to share stories, so we all were broken. You know, I was running in college and we took all these anti-inflammatories and aspirin's and I was just doing like my freshman year and I'm wondering like behind you as a white wall and my roommate looked at me one night. He says, you're looking kind of pale. You know, you're okay.
And I said, I don't know. I feel like shit, you know, I'm like, can't keep up and practice anymore. And I got this stomachache. You know, I don't know what it is.
You know, I just felt like shit, but you know, you're knucklehead 18 year old college and he calls his dad who's a pharmacist. He says, yeah, my roommate doesn't look too good. He looks kind of pale and his dad says, well, is he taking any medicine? I mean, I'm like, well, I'm not taking any medicine, but they give me the stuff at the trainer's room and then asked me what it was.
And it was like some kind of ibuprofen thing. He said, well, he better go down to student health. And I went down there. My hemoglobin was six, which is a third.
So I'm like running to, you know, go to practice with, you know, half to a third of my blood volume, but at least I was like, oh, at least I'm not like psycho or something. That was my last, you know, and then they did the upper GI, you know, your swallow, the rock and I had like hundreds of holes in my stomach and duodenum. That was a rough year. You know, I mean, I lost all the iron.
Yeah, I don't know why to get back to just feeling well again, you know, when you've lost because it took a while to lose all that blood, but yeah, just don't take ibuprofen. If you're listening and if you're taking ibuprofen for a running injury, don't repeat that. If you're taking ibuprofen for a running injury, stop right now. It reminds me of when I lived in Manhattan from 1993 to 93 roughly and I lived right around the corner from a health food store and I was in there every day and there was these two, I now say young guys, they were in their thirties.
They were older than I was who ran this health food store. And one day I'm checking out and they had some packet of, you know, some supplemental thing sitting on the counter of the register and I was looking at the ingredients in more energy, more vitality, more whatever and I'm checking it out and one of them slaps it out of my hand and the other looks at me because you don't need that. You need a nap. And it's the same thing with for runners like, you know, what can I take for this?
Time off. Time off and sleep so it was powerful. You need to rest a little bit. So when people, when people have a fasciosis, anyway, I did a thing about plantar fasciasis.
I didn't know. I didn't even know. I was to share the ebook out. We did it in a previous podcast, but there's a story that I tell the guy who said, well, I've had plantar fasciitis for 20 years, but you can't have an inflammation for 20 years.
That doesn't work that way. So what do you say to people or what do you do with people when they come in presenting plantar fasciosis symptoms? You look at their feet. That's the victim and what's going on.
You know, if they have, we use a ton of correctos because if you have a, you know, how it's albus, which is the big toe pointing in when you, yeah, your foot's just going to kind of roll in and that puts a lot of sheer stress on the tip posterior and which is the muscle that acts kind of as a sling on the inside of your ankle. So years and years of constant stress, so that muscle is going to become dysfunctional. So when that muscle's not firing correctly because it's overstretched and overstretched, the plantar fasci is going to take the load. So trying to get them into like a neutral foot posture and aware of that, we use an insult.
I love this insult called barefoot science. It's not a support, but what it, I think you've seen those. It's a little, oh my God, they're magic. They're like little, it's an instance, like a three quarter insult, but it has a little pod that sits under your arch.
I'm just like a metatarsal pad, but it just cues you when you're letting your foot collapse down. They just help you kind of just reshape and lift your foot. So it's kind of teaching you to use a short foot posture when you're walking and get that foot more neutral. So over weeks, they actually add a little more of that pod, which again doesn't support the foot with an external.
The opposite is posting. You're doing opposite. It's teaching the muscles to support the foot, but they ultimately walk their way out of plantar fasciosis. And I don't have a randomized trial of this, but I could give an experience.
I think we've probably sent out a couple thousand pair of correctos and probably at least a thousand pairs of these barefoot science insoles for plantar fasciosis. And people have 30 days to bring them back if it's not working. So we say, you know, try this 30 days, if it's not working for you, bring it back, they know where I live. It's a small town, but you know probably not to get single one of those insoles ever, ever, ever come back.
And people come in and they're like, Oh my God, thank you. My plantar fasciosis is gone. You know, get them in a functional wide toe box shoe. So you're looking at just fixing the foot and you know, all the little widgets, you know, so if you have a stand up desk and you know, get some kind of, you know, roller golf balls, that's just pretty effective too, just to try to break up all that, you know, kind of disjointed fascia, you know, and restructure it.