Because the woman I'm going to be chatting with in this podcast, we're doing the stupidest research in the history of human biomechanical research. And what can we learn about natural movement from people who don't move naturally at all? Well, we're going to find out both of those things. On today's episode of the movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with the feet first, those things that are your foundation.
We're going to break down the mythology that probably again to sometimes get out right lies that you've been hearing about what it takes to dance, to run, to walk, to hike, to move to anything you can think of while feet first, but doing it enjoyably and healthily and efficiently. I'm Stephen Sash, your host, and the CEO of zeroshoes.com. If you know the drill, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. That means go to jointhemovementmovement.com.
If you don't know where to find us, where you can then like and share and click the bell if you're watching on YouTube and leave reviews. And if you have any questions, drop an email to jointhemovementmovement.com. Anyway, let's jump into the woman doing the stupidest research in the world. Sarah Ridge, it is such a treat to have you here.
Hello. Thank you for having me. Oh, no, of course, it's my pleasure. I've been trying to make this happen for a while.
And we're going to have competition today for who has the biggest flyaway hair thing. I think it's going to be me today. I don't know what to help you. If I were still on the East Coast, so totally.
I mean, I had short hair on the East Coast. Now that it's doing this, I look like bozo the clown. It gets very difficult. What do you do, do me a favor and tell human beings who the hell you are and then we'll jump into the fun.
All right. I'm Sarah Ridge. I am a faculty member at Brigham and University in the exercise science department. I teach biomechanics classes and I do research.
I do biomechanics research, mostly concentrating these days on the foot and then also on injury prevention and like overuse injuries and things like that. Cool. Well, we're going to jump into your stupid research in just a minute. But first, I like to share a movement thing that people can do.
We talked about this before we jumped on them and I suddenly thought of one that I want to do. So I'm usurping your opportunity to share a unit thing with people and I'm going to do this one. So if you're anywhere that you can do this, cross your arms, you can do this too. Okay.
Simple. No, we deal with that. I've been thinking. Now here's what I want you to do next.
Cross your arms the other way. Come on. You can do it. Hold on.
Hold on. I was the same way. Hold on. Hold on.
I think I have a secret for doing it. So my arm is right arm is the one that's further out. So I take it out and then put it underneath. Yeah, there you go.
Left hand and put it under. There it goes. It's the one that's being out. This is one of these interesting things.
We get in these very simple movement patterns and we don't even think about what it takes to do something really, really simple like cross your arms the other way. I've actually gotten the point where I can't remember which is my normal way. The other one you can do is put on your pants the wrong way. I don't mean backwards facing forward, although that's pretty entertaining.
But I'm normally a left foot first person. So try doing right foot first. I'm such a right foot first person. How's that possible?
That makes sense. Why would anybody do that? I know, right? So try these things.
Basically look for anything you think you do habitually. Try the other way around. Try eating with the fork in the other hand. Try using your knife in the other hand.
Try these other things I can think of that you would do with one hand and the other. You can do the other way around. I'm not going to talk about it. But when I had my shoulder surgery and I couldn't use my right arm, I got good at some of those and you're making up the story of what you think those are.
So suffice it to say I will give this one. If I'm in a public bathroom and the toilet paper is on either side, it doesn't matter anymore. It's so good to be adaptable. It is.
But it's fascinating to me how we do lay down these neural pathways for certain really individual movements without everything about it. One of my favorite things, I thought that everyone tied their shoes the same way. I've now watched thousands and thousands of people and I have seen thousands of ways of tying your shoes. Yeah, I'll have to record these someday and show.
I'll tell you will undeniably think that all the ones that aren't like yours are ridiculous. Super weird. Yeah. Like why would you do that?
That makes no sense whatsoever. I'm really curious now, because I can't imagine more than maybe three ways to tie your shoes. Okay, well here's one that you probably ever thought of. So you take each lace independently and make two loops, separate loops, and then tie those in a knot.
Isn't that the bunny thing? When you're teaching a kid and you make bunny ears I think that's, yeah. Oh yeah, that probably is. Yeah, so I mean, I don't do it because I think that's more complicated, but I feel like that's so pretty.
I think that is a one year method. Yeah, but then right. And then the normal way. My normal way.
That's right. And then the normal way. Well, here's another one. Look at how you tie your shoes in the same way with crossing your arms.
Look and see which lace you put together and switch it and see if you can do it. Yeah, yeah, that'll mess you up. I want to hear from people who try this and whose lives I've ruined by just pointing out that there is another way. And if you're a Republican, you definitely do it right over left.
If you're Democrat, you do left over right. So cross my arms again. It's a little bit of a genius. And that's not even going to start on which leg we cross.
Right, right. I want to jump in and talk about your stupid research. Here's why I call it your stupid research. And this will not be a surprise of you.
One of the things that made you well known in the natural movement community was the research that I'm going to ask you to talk about about foot strengthening and natural movement or just minimal issues, truly minimal issues versus a foot strengthening exercise. And the reason I call this the stupidest research ever done is because it's amazing that we have to try to do research to demonstrate something like if you use your feet, they can get stronger. And if you don't use them, not so much. In fact, do you know, yes, I mean, Davis about this, someone's got some research coming out where they took normal people, put them in an orthotic and they're shoe and saw the exact opposite of strengthening AKA weakening.
Yes. You know who I'm talking about? I cannot remember who I should be able to remember the author but I don't. But I know what paper you're talking about.
And the gist is not surprising. You don't let your foot move. It gets weaker. What a shock.
But we have to prove this for incredible reasons. So talk to me. So talk about what your research was and what you discovered. And then I just want to hear like, how the hell is you got into all this?
And why are you doing this? Who are you Sarah? So yeah, so I often think like, do I really all know about this research because it seems so obvious. Like, why wouldn't you think that your feet would get stronger if you allow yourself to use them?
So but what we did was we took about 60 healthy runners. And we don't want to pause right there. I just love that you had a cohort, a sample size, that was something decent. You know, most of the research that I've seen, that sort of anti-natural movement, we took six people who are habitual barefoot runners and they weren't.
You know, they're people who've done some barefoot training, but they're not anybody that I've ever met in that barefoot world. So I love that you've got like a real group of human beings. Thank you. It took that long time.
Oh, really? It took us probably, I'm going to say, it took us a couple of years, I think, to get everybody. Now, we had an eight week training protocol. Right.
And well, maybe I'll step back and I'll outline the study and then I'll tell you why, you know, part of the reasons that it took us so long. But so we had 60 healthy runners. We split them into three groups. So we had a group that just did their normal running, wore their normal shoes, and really was not bothered by the study whatsoever, other than coming in and checking in with us and weekly.
And then at the beginning of the study, doing our testing and our measurements. Then we had another group that did specific progressive foot strengthening exercises. So they started a foot strengthening program that was developed by Irene Davis in their lab. And we'll get into that later.
And I'm hoping to show us what a link to what that is. Perfect. And so over eight weeks, they did more difficult exercises that were targeted specifically to the feet. Is it hard to find tiny little barbells to use with your toes?
It's really hard. But they're really cute when you get them. And then our third group was the minimal sweatwear group. And what we did with that group was we just had them replace a certain number of steps that they would normally take in their regular shoes with steps in minimalist shoes.
Just walking. Yes, there nobody ever ran in the middle sweatwear. And nobody changed anything about their running over that eight week protocol. Because we actually were not interested in the running part at all.
We just used healthy runners because it's relatively easy population to get around here. And because the study that had led to this was in runners. So we kind of kept with that population thinking we may go to figuring out a transition protocol to running in the middle sweatwear. But then we decided that, well, we'll get to that.
I'm sorry. Nothing is happening. Yes, it's very exciting. Scoot over here because, OK, this is Wayne Johnson.
Another author on this paper that we were just saying. There's a reason for your existence. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, welcome, Wayne. And do you want to do a quick intro of who the hell you are? OK, yes. I'm Wayne Johnson.
I'm a professor here at Brigham University. And my background is in physical therapy and the rotation of the research with Dr. Ridge on the foot for the last number of years. Do you make everyone call you Dr.
Ridge? Yes. Miss Rissel, I'm a mechanic. Very nice.
I'm a respectful. I'm a couple of people. I actually do the opposite. My dad was a medical professional.
And so everyone I knew who were doctors, we never called them doctor or anything. So when I deal with all of my doctors, I refer them the way I would refer to anybody who's roughly my agent, called them by their name, which makes their employees very uncomfortable. There's another reason I do it. It's very entertaining.
OK, so backing up then. And you can jump in whoever wants to talk about it. So we've got three groups of runners, one group who just did whatever the hell they were doing. Did they get paid the same as the people who were actually in the interventions?
I want to be getting paid to do nothing different. I know, right? Because of the walking minimal shoes. Oh, yeah.
People who did the foot strengthening program, people who just walked in spent some time walking in minimal shoes. And then what happened? What did you discover? We looked at foot muscle size and foot muscle strength from baseline before they started the study until they were done eight weeks of intervention or not as a controlled group.
And we found that both the minimal footwork group and the exercise group increased foot muscle size and foot muscle strength just about the same amount in fact. So and then the control group didn't, there was no change in the control group. So either intervention resulted in increases in foot muscle size and strength. And this is something that I love.
So some people misinterpret that. And so well, you know, then clearly there's no benefit in wearing minimal shoes. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but the only thing that's happening in the world is that you're getting a strong, you're getting a strong, you're getting a strong as you get with a concentrated exercise program. Did you think in advance to do a fourth cohort that was the combo?
No, what the hell? Well, why did you help with that? We wouldn't have had to get 20 more people. So talk to me about how difficult it is to get 60 people to put in a first study.
It was not easy. We had a lot of dropout. I mean, I guess our dropout rates probably weren't that much higher than most others. So it was 10, 15% for an intervention study for two months.
Yeah, but things, I mean, people would drop out and injured for other reasons. Right. And then obviously that means they have to drop out of the study. Or, I mean, we already, we used a lot of college students and they got really busy or something.
Like this was not a priority anymore. Well, at BYU, there's nothing to be a lot of college than to drop out because they were drunk or... No, no, not very many of those. But yeah, they, you know, there was, I'm trying to think of other reasons.
I feel like we lost people to unrelated injury. It makes sense too. I mean, they're healthy, active people. So, you know, like...
Well, that's an interesting, I mean, I'm sure you don't have the data on this or I imagine you don't, but was it the control group and the non-minimalist group? Were there, was any group getting injured more often than another? No. We don't need that.
So... Yeah, I didn't think you were wondering if anecdote... Of the people who withdrew from the study, I don't think, I mean, we know what groups those people were. I don't think there was anything really different about the groups.
So, let's talk about, I mean, again, I find it utterly amazing that we have to do research to like, oh, you think you're going to get stronger? Yeah, and how did you, so let people know, how did you measure both the muscle size and muscle strength? So, I'll let you do... So, muscle size, we measured with ultrasound imaging.
We have a protocol that we developed. We also did some MRI, but that was for another reason. So, we measured that with ultrasound imaging with the cross-sectional area change in most of those muscles. And then strength test...
So, I'm just going to pause there. So, basically, what this is, I'm doing the English translation. So, the gist is, you know, what you're seeing the cross-sectional imagine just a tube and now the tube just got wider. Yeah, so, yeah, I'm not going to die out of it.
So, okay. Yeah. And then strength wise, we have a device that we developed that measures toe flexion strength and the doming or short foot action. I'm dying to know what this seeming...
in my head, this is a torture device. What is it... What do you do? How's it work?
Go ahead. So, with a toe flexion, you put your foot... let's see, we just have a foot in like... it's kind of a wood device.
I can show you a picture if you want to link that somehow or whatever. But anyway, you put your foot in kind of this wood frame and then we have a force transducer on one end and then we use various devices to connect that to a carabiner, which then you grip with your big toe. And then tighten it enough. You're gripping the...
you're holding the beener with your toe. Yes. And then we do one, that's great toe flexion only. And then we do another one where we do the same thing but we have a different connection.
So, that one is like a bar. Right. And then that one goes between your second and third toes. And then you're pulling on that bar with your...
generally two, three, four, the pinky toe doesn't usually get over that. Yeah, so much. So, who's the crazy person who thought these cool devices up? Yeah, we...
The bar goes horizontal. Five fingers. So, you're pulling this on the bar. Right?
Fingers. Yeah. Like that. So, you're trying to do another device where they put their foot in like a rannic device, like a shoe-sizer.
Right. Okay. So, put their foot in there and then we have a strap that goes over top of that. Okay.
They lift up and that strap then pulls on the load cell. So, basically what they're... just say again, just right. So, you're contracting your arch and short foot is something that we shared with people a number of times on this podcast.
But if you haven't heard it, you're basically trying... it's like a nice metric thing in a way where you're trying to pull like the ball of your big toe towards your heel but you're not actually moving anything. When you do that it engages your arch and it makes the top of your foot lift up. So, and it's a great exercise to do if you haven't done it.
So, you can do it everywhere, sitting, standing, etc. etc. So, I'm dying to know if anyone has tried to commercialize either of these devices. So, I'm not sure how much of a call there is.
Very small market. Yes. But very committed. Not what people who want their feet to get stronger and people who just like feet.
Yes. We've been working with a company in New Jersey to have them make this device and like take it over because we actually made one for Irene for their lab. But, you know, like, I don't know, it's hard to standardize. Right.
Engineers were not like, you know, salespeople, whatever. And so, I'd love for this company to take over creating them and standardizing them and selling them to whoever it is that wants them. There was a, there was one early barefoot running pioneers whose name is escaping you right now. He was running barefoot in Boulder in the 70s.
Physical therapist. And he developed a device that basically just wraps around your entire foot and ankle and has like four places where you can hook bungee cords so that you can, that you then attach to the door basically inversion, eversion and, you know, flexion and it's a really clever thing. But it really is like a weird medieval torture device we have. You know, there's, you know, there's that issue.
Yeah. Do you any given the results of that? Well, let me just throw out this way. After you published the study, what happened?
I mean, there's definitely been interest in, you know, in the results, I think that to me, the biggest thing is that we really started looking, when we started the study, our intention was to look at the transition to running in minimalist footwear. Right. But I think over the course of the time that we were doing the study and then after the study, we've really been more now looking at, hey, clearly just walking in these shoes changes your foot. So what is that going to do for normal healthy people?
We're not healthy people, but like, what can walking do in, you know, or what can strengthen the foot period? Like what is it, what will that do to hopefully prevent like foot pathologies and things from developing? Yeah. I mean, this is the magic question is if, and this is the thing that people, it's funny.
So first thing, I want you to prove anything. Now, of course, the things that, I guess the elephant in the room, if you will, is that had your study been done, oh, a couple of years earlier, there would have been no lawsuit against people. Well, you know, at that time that there was a lawsuit against people, we were doing our first study, we actually had people transitioning to the bebrums just the way that like we didn't actually really prescribe too much of a transition. Right.
It was like the web page said. Yeah, it was there 10% for a couple weeks and then as comfortable with anything. And that study we found bone stress injuries in the foot of people, or in the feet of people who were transitioning. It was about half of the group that transitioned to minimal to the bebrums.
It's an interesting thing. Yeah. Which is a majority of women that got the injury. Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. I mean, I don't remember that protocol very clearly other than when I first looked at it. I remember thinking, well, that's not good. I mean, it's funny because like we went, we published the muscle size.
So we put, we looked at the bone stress stuff using MRI. And then a few years later, we got, we published the muscle size changes from that study because we did see that the minimalist footwork group increased muscle size. Right. 10 to 15%.
And so, and when that one went for review, one of the reviewers was like, how can you do this to people? You should go to this protocol and you're like, okay, we didn't. It's exact same study. You know, like it's just a different data set from this previous study.
Oh, that's just right. But yeah, nobody would do that. Like even within that span of those like two years. And as we were doing the first study, that's one of the people who lost it was happening.
And yeah, so a couple years later, nobody would have done it. Yeah. So, no, no, no, it really is outrageous. But I mean, so like the first thing is, okay, is there any value?
And the second thing people want to know is, so is there going to be any value in terms of injury prevention and or recovery? And people don't realize, I mean, look, you had such a hard time just getting 60 people for the study. People don't realize how hard it would be to put together a good study that's long enough to really determine, you know, what the story is about injury prevention. But of course, the thing that people are overlooking is again, it's not our job.
You know, we're not the intervention. For the first 9,950 years of human beings were making footwear, it looked like, you know, something minimalist, something to protect or something to hold that on your foot. So I always say, like when I was at the American College of Sports Medicine, I kept asking the guys from Brooks and Adidas, like, well, where's your proof for anything you just said? And that's where the topic changes.
So it's amazing that again, we're having to prove things about what bodies do naturally when the companies that do unnatural things are not held to the same standards. Yeah. When they are, the research does not land in their favor and somehow people just don't hear about it. Yeah.
I don't know if you saw it, but at that ACSM thing, the guys from Brooks and Adidas both said, well, we don't research the backs up some of the things we're saying. We're not going to slice. Well, here's 40 studies about natural movement that show the value of that. Yeah.
Studies that show that extra padding does not actually reduce impact forces or all the various things that are against what modern shoe companies say. It's like, I don't know why you're not quoting this stuff. Yeah. Well, and I think that there's so many different situations that people are testing in.
And one of the things with the footwear companies is, you know, everything's proprietary. And so like, even if they, whatever research they are doing, you know, they do share very little of their own research. So, but yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Like when you look at how running footwear had developed, right?
Like in the 60s and 70s, like how it kind of develops, which is a little bit of happens down soon. Well, do you know the story of how we ended up with with L.A. and padded heels? I'm questioning the question deals.
Yeah. Do you know how that happened? Yeah. I feel like it was something kind of random, wasn't it?
I can't remember that. No, it's actually better slash worse. So some Nike was in a building that they shared with some, I think orthopedic pediatrics or sports, but I trust and barrowmen is getting runners with Achilles tendonitis and you know what we do. And they said, oh, well clearly they're Achilles have shortened from wearing higher heel dress and they're doing their daily life.
So we need to pad, you know, L.A. and put some padding under there to protect their heel and their Achilles. And of course, you know, your heel is, well, once you do that, you can't avoid, but land up, you can't avoid landing on your heel. Your calcane is your heels of balls and now your unstable is now your motion control.
By the time your foot hits the ground, it's fully extended. So your plan are faster and a weak position when you do them be strong. So basically that one intervention is sort of the cause of everything. Now, the footwear industry, I can tell you is just a bunch of copycats.
If something starts to sell, everybody tries to rush to make money off that same idea because they don't want all the money to go to that guy. And really, if you look in the last 50 years, the only things that people have been changing is the type and amount of cushioning. I mean, it's still the same basic idea. Elevate your y'all cushioning motion control, et cetera.
And so there's a guy that I know who was at Nike for a long time who was at a track meet with one of these podiatrists and said, you know, so your idea has become the de facto standard for wear. You know, what do you think? And his response was a biggest mistake we ever made. Wow.
Yeah. And this is, you know, it's a smoking gun. And people don't know this. And now everyone's just like, at this, again, this ACSM thing, the guy from, one of the guys was, you know, what's in the future?
And both the guys from Adidas and Brooks had the same basic idea, which is, you know, everybody's a unique special snowflake, so we're making something just for them. So Adidas was, they want to do their 3D molded midsole or their 3D printed midsole, some form of cushioning. And then Brooks was, you know, some special outsole where they practically admitted that their goal is to give you a different shoe for everything you're doing. So you need a special shoe for walking into the bathroom, a different shoe for walking out of the bathroom and probably a different shoe for taking a dump.
So, you know, that was really, and I think one of them even said, you know, it's kind of a marketing thing. So, yeah, I'm going to shock. So, but I mean, it's quite like, like, Beno Nigg, they both quoted him at the very beginning saying, well, everyone has a preferred movement pattern, and it's really impossible to change that. And I spoke to Beno's son, Sandro, and I was about to kind of rip him one about this ridiculous idea.
And he said, well, what my dad meant was, yeah, if you're in the same basic shoe, you're going to move the same basic way. Being something that's a 12 millimeter heel drop versus 8 millimeters is not a big difference. But my dad would be the first one to admit that if you just switched a barefoot, something's going to change. So these guys, it's just, you know, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and wondering why, you know, nothing has really changed.
And the biggest one that amazes me, and I don't know how this one happened, is pointing toes. What the hell? Who thought that idea up? Right.
Like, I mean, it clearly became fashionable somewhere at some time. Right. I don't know why. Yeah, that was a mystery.
Did you get any feedback from big shoe people or anyone who's sort of anti-natural movement? Not really. I feel like it's been pretty, I don't know, maybe people approaching this as the students' research ever. I don't know.
I think it's been pretty like, okay. Yeah. I think it's actually the opposite. When there's any research that somehow comes out seemingly in favor of what's called the modern athletic shoes, it is put out by companies who have a lot of money who can push it through.
Like, there's something in the paper today in Oransina.com that I think it's Papa John's has a new dough recipe. This is news, who gives a crack. But in the same vein, you know, any big national or multinational company, when they have some new product, suddenly that's news for some reason, because there's enough people using the product that, you know, it's a thing. Yeah.
So, but on the middle of the side, you know, there are no companies that are big enough that we have enough sway with media to make something newsworthy. Right. Yeah. So, we've got a lot of our research or Irene's research on, quote, partial minimalist shoes, stuff that the big companies call minimalists that really aren't , or Christine Pollard showing that more cushioning is actually worse for you.
You know, these things don't get any attention because there's no money behind it to get the word out. And of course, many, many places that you want to get that published are getting advertising dollars from big shoe companies. Interesting. Yeah.
I mean, we'll say like, so, our, the vibram study, when we get that one, the running transition. Check out attention. Check out attention and then, this one really did. Yeah, I mean, it's what it is, but like that other one, like, it did and like, you know.
And again, you know, like the thing that, and correct me if I'm wrong, but, but mine, did it matter which V-mercy they were wearing? We had the all, we had the mostly the same style. It was like the original, it was like the lowest end one. Okay.
And then some people had, some people had, so those had like a big opening. Right. Some people did have one that covered the top of the foot. Okay.
With the vocal strap. Yeah, but I don't want to. Yeah, yeah. You know, the thing that, I've noticed some interesting things in that product, more than any other that I've seen.
And this is the thing that, I got an argument where someone said, well, your argument is gonna be that it was about their form, not their footwear. And I said, yeah. Like what? No, that's definitely my argument.
Because I saw so many people who would get in that shoe and do one of two things, either continue running the same way they were in regular shoes, or worse, where they would still over-stride their foots about to land way in front of their body. And then they would just point their toes, plant their foot, you know, you're supposed to land on your foot. And so they're landing with all this mass force on those metatarsals, which is not the way you're supposed to run. So it's like, unless you're controlling for form, then what you're pointing out really is that this transition program sucks.
Right. Not necessarily that the shoes suck. Right. Exactly.
We can't even tell you if it's good or bad to run in the middle of a swimwear, because the transition is so important and not, and that was not defined at the time. Right. All the other things that came out of the distance increased muscle size. It muscles more.
Interesting. Interesting. One of the other things with that study. Hold on, wait a minute.
Do you know if the incidence of stress, fractures or stress related events would be higher than it would be in a control group in a normal population? We had a control group in the middle. We had one injury, the other group had nine or 10 injuries. Got it.
The other thing is these injuries are stress injuries that rendered it necessarily feel, there were two stress fractures. Two, right. But some of them were injuries where the runners didn't kill them, but because we were doing MRIs, Oh, interesting. All of them.
And the radiologists, we had three radiologists to read them. And they all said that if they had seen that on an image of a patient, they would have told a patient they needed to alter their training or whatever, alter activity somehow. So that's what we qualified as an injury. Oh, interesting.
To fail from zero to five. And anything to, wait, was it two, three, I think two, I think two, I think it was over three. Oh, zero to four, that's right. That's five, five, five, I'll try.
And two, three, and four were considered injury, even if the subject would not have said that. That's fascinating. I wonder if those subjects who weren't having a personal experience of any problem, if they adapted over another, well, it's another eight weeks, and actually that stress incident would have vanished, basically. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that was one of the things that we really don't know, especially in that like two level, was that the good response that was going to lead to the strengthening at the three level, they would have, they said they would have told the person to stop what they were doing, not like, I think the two level they said they would modify activity at the three level, they would have told the person to stop activity before it was a stress fracture. So, stress is an interesting thing, especially muscle stress or bone stress, because like you were just alluding to, there is a, can I think of the word I'm looking for? Well, there's a hormone response, so basically, yeah, there's a response, you get a certain amount of stress in your body response that I had a DEXIS scan a while ago, and my bone density from like the pelvis down is just through the roof, because I'm a sprinter, so I'm supplying tons and tons of force, but I'm sure at a certain point when I was just getting started, it would have looked like I was going to end up, you know, osteoporotic or in shape, but now it's the exact opposite. And it's an interesting phenomenon.
I want to jump ahead to the other thing that I alluded to, which is, you know, what can we learn from people who are not doing anything resembling question movement, and this is something that you've been wanting to study for a while and are now, and that is figure skaters, which could not be further apart or further away from minimalist where wears, unless you know, you took like one of our shoes and stuck razor blades on it, and that would be kind of close. Has anyone ever tried to make an ice skating shoe or something that would allow you to skate that wasn't anyway flexible? Yes, in fact, really? That colleague is not here too.
I would call it a double. Wow, that's really cool. Our colleague Dustin Rameen, who also actually might have been on that paper. Anyway, Dustin's master's thesis was developing an articulated figure skating boot.
So like ski boots have the hinge of the ankle, he went through, he and our advisor, Jim Richards went through and figured out like sort of access or the rotation of the ankle and then told this boot company where they should place the articulation. There are a number of issues because the, it's not like, it's not an easy access to all. And so they went boot company built a bunch of these articulated skates. They had skaters training them and skating them for a little bit, and they did see a lot of the skaters decreased their landing forces when in the articulated boot, which makes sense.
You now have an actual reflection range of motion. But still had support on the sides so that you wouldn't have media-ledder motion. But there were some interesting things with that. So they used experienced skaters mostly and a lot of them had a really, really hard time transitioning.
And like, I skated and I'm sorry you close the figure skate away back in the day and I skated them a couple times. And it was weird because you're used to being able to support yourself by pushing against the boot. And now I couldn't do that. So there was definitely some issues with that.
The other thing was they actually, one of the national champions wore them. She had been getting injured a lot and then she wore these articulated boots and she did really well. But I think there was also some, as I said, design issues and difficulty with placing the ankle joint axis right where it really should be. So the boots would break because you're so much sore that they would pop out and things.
And so eventually I think they sold them for about a year or two and then they stopped selling them. I'm assuming I'm working on this assumption. I remember with speed skaters, they were using this sort of blade. But they're not wearing anything that provides much ankle support.
They're wearing something that looks more like a spurring spike with the bat and razor blade on the bottom. Which is why what people don't really get, I have a couple friends who are speed skaters. And every one of them has a story of I fell down, hit the pads and the skate hit my inner thigh and a femoral artery and I nearly bled out. It's like, oh my god.
Yeah, that is like a whole good thing. They're wearing skates that are not providing quote ankle support. Is there anyone who's actually tried figure skating in a skate like that with a shorter blade obviously? Not that I am aware of.
I think, you know, so skating is such an old school. It's a set of sport and the things have to look a certain way. That was actually one of the other reasons with your particularly to do it. So some people, especially with these tiny, skinny little girls, they're like, you know, they're like, this big and then the food is like twice as big, you know, but you know, so the changing the aesthetic is something that's always a challenge.
But the other thing is you have so much rotational motion in figure skating that you don't have in the same way in speed skating with the rotations and the landings that I think people are a little more leery probably. Let's just do that without. If they would strengthen. Well, that's it.
Yeah. That's where I was going because I mean, speaking as a former gymnast, you know, there's a lot of times where you're landing and rotating with some serious torque and you know, gymnasts who have any real ankle support. Yeah, no, we definitely, I mean, we definitely thought that you've got to start this with a little kids. Yeah.
Like, and then because as a little kids get, you know, as they train and they get stronger, whatever, they won't even know the difference and the people will be fine and they will have, you know, foot muscles and lower leg muscles that can handle it. But the problem is again, in the skating community getting by in because, you know, the parents of some competitive, first of all, you have to have somebody who's competitive and gets their results to be the example. Right. And the parents of all the little kids might, you know, whatever the champions ask, you know, it's a really hard, you really need to like really have influential coach to buy in and get all their kids going.
Well, this is, I think you just nailed like when people, when I love when people say things like, well, how come filling the blank professional athlete is not wearing some in, well, she was like, we're not paying him a shit ton of money to do that. Yeah. But I think to your point though, the, at a certain point, there's going to be an opportunity for some serious athlete in any sport we can think of, golf, tennis, basketball, baseball, football, soccer, if I didn't already say that one, I don't think that's what I'm saying. But miniature golf, probably not so much.
I don't know. What was that thing that's in miniature golf? What? Do you see miniature golf show on ABC?
Oh my God. No, I would love that. It's on Hulu or something. It's like extreme in golf.
It's crazy anyway. I'm totally looking at it. Wait, hold on. I have a professional putters association ball that I won when I was 14 from winning a miniature golf championship and I still have that ball, you know.
You could have been on this show. It was awesome. If it was for miniature golf, I don't think I'd be with my wife. I mean, a lot of our courting was happened over miniature golf.
It was rough and hot tubs. It was a lot of art. So, if some of you know, major sports personality has some, and they all have a reason, frankly, to make a change. But I say to professional athletes, like, don't go switching right away because, you know, you've got to go.
Sorry, my son is here. Come on in. We're doing a video podcast. You're on kind of television right now.
Hey, I got your shoes. Oh, yeah, let's see what you're wearing. Take your shoe off. Let's see.
Yeah, let's see. I'm going to show them what you're wearing. Oh, there's going to. Hey, check it out.
I'm not there to talk to Paul with my socks. He is not big enough for your shoes yet. Oh, okay. What size did I start at?
11. Oh, 11. Yeah. Yeah.
Where's the one? Did you know? Did you know we had a kid shoe? No.
Oh, that's why. Yeah, we got it. It came out. Came out of the fall.
So, I know a guy who knows a guy. We'll see if we can hook you up. Oh, good. Sorry.
I'm just wondering because of the dangers we did because I'd be the kind of person saying things like, Hey, stop jumping on that couch. The springs are better on this couch. Yes. But anyway, point being at some point we'll have some real athlete who obviously has a reason to make the change and once they do, you know, it's going to be all over.
We have a bunch of professional golfers who've been contacting us saying that they train in our shoes, but they're not playing in them because they're getting so much money from their shoe sponsors right now. So someday we hope that changes. We have, let's see if I can be if I'm allowed to say this. We have a professional athlete in a sport that is well known for ankle injuries who emailed us with a shoe about a shoe that we were testing with them.
And the word was, I couldn't spray my ankle and use if you paid me to. Oh, nice. The issue is that people in this sport, if we're going to try and break in, we need to custom make shoes for everybody who's wearing them and again, we've got a kind of cash yet. But at a certain point, we can change the world that way.
Cool. So what did you discover in dealing with your history? Sorry. What are you doing?
What are you doing? Okay. Are you going to go now? For people who are just listening, there's a child who has taken over the entire podcast.
I'm sorry. I'm randomly walking around in front of the camera playing with some sort of toy that I wish I had. Hey, you want to find out? No, he's now we're trying to coax him away from the camera.
I'm not that happening really slim. I feel like I'm David. Sorry. Okay.
Okay. Bye. See ya. We don't know what you're going to find around here.
Do you any dogs that can? Yeah. We have three office dogs. We're here today.
I'll see if I can get one of them. Nice. They're pretty low key. One of them, I don't think knows that I live here at all.
They've been here for a year and still doesn't know who I am. It's just really chill. So in dealing with skaters, talk about what you've researched, what you discovered and how that's relevant for people in the whole natural movement world. Well, so some of the stuff that we've done with skaters, I guess, well, there's not a whole lot of money in skating research.
Talk about another area that is, you know, hard to hike into, right? Like, so the skating world- Oh, wait, I want to pause for a second. You would think that you could, well, again, hard to break in for the same reason professional sports, but you would think that hockey players would have some motivation to really look into, you know, how to stay alive and stay in the ring. Yeah.
So concussion research is relatively popular. I mean, there's a lot of people in concussion research. And there are some people doing hockey biomechanics research in Canada, though, you know, and it's like, I want to say there's two universities that have set ups that really do the hockey stuff with figure skating. There's very, very little that's been done.
And so, you know, for a while, you know, there's tons of money for a pair's dance skate, whatever the hell that's called. I'm totally making that up. It's like, you know, all that money for synchronized swimming research. Oh, right.
Exactly. I mean, yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, it's kind of like that.
That's the phrase I couldn't think of. Yes, there you go. Yeah. So for a while, there was a look.
They were trying to figure out how to change the boots because that really, you know, I think everybody involved with skating and the care of the skaters as athletes pretty much agrees that the boots are a problem. But there's, you know, four or five companies in the world. They have a pretty small market. You know, it is so they're not rushing to try to change things and then you have that one company that did change things with your ticket, but ran into problems.
And you know, it's some way they just, we got to cut our losses and like, go back to the standard. I think the boots is really challenging. That is not something that we, you know, that anybody has really figured out an answer to yet. Other things that in conversation with some of the medical personnel that deal with, like the US figure skating team athletes, they had they do talk about weakness of foot muscles weakness of hit muscles.
Interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting. So like when they'll often do single leg landing tests, like in the office or something, and you can just see the knee like collapsing in it's ridiculous. Like, this is what you do.
Like, this is, this is the move. I think that's how you land everything, you know, and they can't control it. And so, so that's definitely something like, and even I would say, you know, 30 years ago or so, there was a cross training in figure skating. I mean, it was, you just go skate and you just do your things over and over again.
And now at least there's office training, you know, and dance and stuff like that. So I think well runners, of course, are very much the same way, you know, this is run in particular. They want to run and don't even anything else. Despite the fact that doing that causes the problems, they're doing something else.
I'm curious. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't even get started on sports specialization, right? Like, anyway, so, yeah. So what we've been doing recently with skating, we have been, well, we've been, there's two projects that we're working on now. One is instrumenting a figure skating bleed so that we can actually get measurements of their landing forces on the ice because we actually don't even have that.
Oh, interesting. Actually knows any studies that have that have measured landing forces and figure shooters have done it. In a lab, having a skater jump like backwards from a box onto a horse plate on artificial ice or something like that, which is going to be very different. So we've been working on instrumenting a blade so that we can get on ice landing forces.
It's a long, it has been a long project and it's been really challenging. But that's one thing because that's really a starting point, right? Like we don't really know what the impact forces and then and what influences them specifically with skating. And then the other thing we've been working on is an activity monitor, like a sort of like a fit fit for skating, but something that will count the number of jumps the skaters do.
They will give them their rotation speed and chime in the air or jump height or something along those lines. So we've been working on developing that too, which does maybe doesn't have too much to do. I just like the idea. If anyone thinks that academia is somehow not connected to the real world, boy, you just proved it.
I know that it's so fun. I know it's a project. I think that's awesome. And it is fascinating.
I think the application to hotdog vendors might be really high in some way that we haven't identified. Right. So given the skaters are for all practical purposes, putting their feet and casts for hours a day, what are you seeing or anything about that or what do you see with that? I mean, so I think that I mean, I would love to test skaters foot strength, you know, as we have now, we just like want to throw everybody into the foot strength device and see what happens.
Yeah. I mean, I think it would be interesting to get skaters given how much time they spent doing activity in basically a cast. And then really, I mean, I think it is, it is a piece that could do strengthening, obviously, but also changing the boots. I mean, they probably do quite a bit of dance.
So you think that should be straight. But I don't know, we just don't have, we just don't have the data. Like, you know, it's hard to say. No, no, I'm just going back to the whole speed, segating, clapskate thing where I'm just thinking if there's any, you know, if there were any opportunity to articulate the angle or the foot in some way.
I mean, I can't imagine that wouldn't be beneficial if there was a way of figuring out the, the engineering of it. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, definitely, it makes sense. Yeah, it's logical.
It just, again, you know, breaking into these, this market and having somebody who has enough money to do something about it and, you know, do it well. Yeah. Well, it also occurs to me that if someone actually did make that, the odds are pretty high that it would be banned immediately because they'd have, they'd have a patent on it. They'd have, you know, the rights and everybody else would forget.
So like, there was, I don't know if you know, there was a thing on Puma Made a spreading spike. It was called a brush spike. So instead of big metal things, it had like a bunch of little things like literally imagine a whisk brush, just, you know, glue to your shoe. And there were some runners who did really well wearing it.
And so of course, probably inaccurately, people concluded that they did well because of the shoe, but then the shoe was suddenly magically banned. And the argument was, well, it's bad for the track. It's like really interesting. Yeah.
Yeah. Go take a look at a Mondo track after one year of people running on it. There's nothing that's good for that track. So the idea that, you know, these little things are somehow worse for it is ridiculous.
But it's funny, it really is interesting to me, how in the running world, if someone does well, the first thing people assume is well, it's got to be the shoes. I did a podcast or more accurately a rant a week or two ago about the Subtuber marathon. My basic position was, look, keep chugging running sub two hours. It's amazing.
But this guy was already the most amazing athlete that you could find from marathon. He ran a two, one, 38. That was his world record. And then he runs two minutes faster under ideal circumstances.
That's less than five seconds per mile different. And you think it's because of the shoes? Yeah. Okay.
Fine. Yeah. Yeah. So what I haven't asked you this and it occurred to me.
You know, I'm really, how do I work with this? I don't like using the word passionate, but I know people will. And I think that's a very, very attached to the whole phenomenon of promoting natural movement. I mean, it made a big difference for me.
It made a big difference for my wife and now for hundreds of thousands of people that have gotten into zero shoes and other most truly minimalist footwear. And it also really motivates me because there are big companies making a lot of money doing things that are demonstrably not good for people. And that just infuriates me. So, and something Irene Davis said to me early on, which is if we get kids wearing shoes like yours in 20 years, we won't be treating adults for the problems that they currently have.