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. You've got questions?
I've got answers on today's episode of the Movement Movement Podcast. The podcast for people who want to know the truth about how to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting from the feet versus that's your foundation, where we break through the mythology of the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies about what it takes to walk, to run, to move, to do yoga, to crossfit, to dance, enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. And that's why we are here. I am Stephen Sashin, your host for the Movement Movement Podcast.
And today we are doing Q&A. So by the way, if you have questions that you want me to A, then you can drop them to be via an email. Just send an email to moveat, jointhemovement.com. And when I do the next Q&A, maybe I'll have your Q for my answer.
So before we jump into them, don't forget, if you want to be part of our tribe, please subscribe. Come to jointhemovementmovement.com and you'll find all the places where we are sharing this content on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, on etc., etc. So you can subscribe and share and review and like and all those things that you know how to do. I don't need to tell you like everybody else always does.
Shall we jump right in? Oh, you know, we always like to start with a movement. And I thought of one that you may be able to do right now or maybe not. And if you're in a car, you probably can't, but I would love it if you do and if you do what I want to hear about it.
Because what I want you to do to start this movement, if you are wearing pants, take them off. And if you're not wearing pants, get a pair of pants, get a pair of pants. Or you're going to take a photo and do it that way. The point is this, I want you to put your pants on, you do this with your shirt too, but frankly it's more fun with your pants.
I want you to put your pants on, then I want you to take them off, and then I want you to put them back on with the other leg first. So the movement that I want you to try is doing, it's not counterintuitive movements, it's something basically a way to do the opposite of what you normally do. If you normally put your pants on right leg first, try left leg first. If you normally put your socks and shoes on by going sock, sock, shoe, shoe, try sock, shoe, sock, shoe.
If you normally put your shirt on by putting your head all the way through and then your arms through, try arms through, head second or vice versa. Whichever way you do it, try the other way around. And I want to hear what you experience as you use this. Oh, crush your arms.
You could have done this one possibly if you were in a Tesla with this self-driving mode, cross your arms and then try to cross your arms the other way and see how that goes. Now if you're watching me on video, you will see that I can do this really, really easily. I've actually gotten to the point where I can't remember which way is my normal way to do it. But try and see if you can break out of some of these familiar movement patterns and see what that does.
All right, so welcome back to the movement podcast. I don't know why I said welcome back. You haven't gone anywhere. This is going to be a short one.
Got a couple of questions. Here they are. Actually, that was just a piece of paper. The questions are really right there.
But these are my notes about what I want to answer. And let's jump in, shall we? One of the biggest ones I get because we talk about things like plantar fasciitis and patellar tendinitis and various other things that may happen to people, I get a lot of emails and I've gotten quite a few that say, how do I fix my fill in the blank? Say something to me like, hey, I've got fill in the blank injury or illness or condition.
What do I do? Even if I did play a doctor on the event or TV or on whatever you have on iTunes or anywhere, I would not try and give you that answer with that little bit of information. I'd mostly want to see you. And this is something that I want to talk about.
It's really common that when you'll go and see a practitioner of any sort of any sort of whatever problem you have, they'll often start treating you before they see exactly what you do and all the different activities you do, whether it's walking, running, hiking, dancing, etc. And you want to make sure if someone's going to give you an eval and give you some recommendation about what to do that A, they watch you doing it. And B, they actually know how to see what they're looking for. I honestly don't even know how you're going to determine that.
But I can tell you that if someone says, let's put you on a treadmill and watch you run and they look at you from the knees down, that's not going to be useful in any way because you really need to see kind of nipples down, frankly, to see what your body's actually doing or even better if they would watch you running in the real world and even better, better if they videotape you in super slow-mo so they can watch with you and show you what you've been doing. And even better, better, is if they have a force plate on the ground because the way it looks is not necessarily the way it is. If you see someone who's a really fast runner, it may look like their quote, heel striking, their heel is hitting the ground before the rest of their foot does. And maybe they are, but maybe they're running so quickly and they're stride, their gate moves so smoothly that really their heel is barely touching but they don't actually load their foot until it's fully on the ground.
So sometimes video is a little deceptive but also very, very helpful. And even more, we really want more fun is if you have someone who can not only show, watch you, show, videotape you, have the force plate, but if they can demo it themselves, I'm not saying that everyone who has anything to offer has to be able to demo. Some people are great teachers but they're not initially great doers. But also can be really helpful and of course what's really best is if they can give you some cues, some things to do before any sort of treatment just so they can see how well you can move differently, how well you can take instructions or take cues.
Because a lot of what you're doing if you're trying to address something like Planet Fazbear Patellar Tenderitis et cetera is develop a new movement pattern. So it's really helpful to see if you're someone who needs a lot of video feedback because you're not really sure where your body is in space or someone that just needs a couple of cues or someone who's frankly a natural but was just over training and doing too much too soon and getting tired and reverting to a place where you know you can't remember what to do or you're not feeling anything, et cetera. So the short form is, you know, find somebody who knows how to look and I hope those tips were helpful. But the other thing is just consider this idea.
Natural movement is what we're always talking about here. And what you might want to pay attention to is are you moving naturally or not? Are you putting your body in a situation where it can do what is natural? When it comes to your feet that means bend and flex and move and feel the world.
Give your brain the feedback, the sensations, the information it needs to know how to work with control the rest of your body effectively and efficiently. And if you have something that's going on on one side and not the other, it's my favorite thing, a unilateral condition, pay attention to the good side as you're doing whatever it is you do. And see if by paying attention to the good side you can just get a sense of what's happening and then the bad side will kind of eventually come along for the ride. I've mentioned Feldencrist training before.
This is one of the principles in Feldencrist training. It comes in saying, hey, my left arm is all out of whack. They do all these things with your right arm and get your right arm nice and smooth and getting the groove. And then you start to check your left arm again.
And by the way, I was doing the wrong arm as I said that. I'm seeing myself in my video monitor, so I'm moving my right arm and saying left and vice versa. But you get the hint. So anyway, you know, you move one arm, the one that's the good one for a while and you actually get it moving even better.
And then you check out the quote bad one. And without you having done anything, it often has gotten a little better. And then you just try and do the same movement pattern. So anyway, I don't have any answer for how do I fix fill in the blank other than go for natural movement, pay attention to the good side.
If it's a unilateral thing, find someone who knows how to really look and really evaluate before they just get their hands on their and try and fix something right away. All right. Next was what do I do about blisters or this comes in a couple of different ways. It's like, what do I do if I'm getting blisters or how long to take to develop calluses on my feet if I'm trying to be a barefoot runner?
Oh, boy, boy. That's a non question because if you meet barefoot runners who are really accomplished barefoot runners, we neither have blisters nor do we have callous feet. What we have is slightly thicker skin, maybe got a little more leathery than it used to be, but that's not really important. That's a long time to develop and isn't necessary, frankly.
That's just happens over time. Don't worry about it. Not required. The most important thing to think about is this.
Blisters and calluses are the result of excessive friction. That friction is coming from excessive horizontal force. That excessive horizontal force is only going to come from one of two places. Either you're reaching your foot out in front of you too far.
So as your foot lands, you're essentially putting on the brakes. So you're stopping yourself from moving forward. And those typically, those blisters start to usually show up on the balls of your foot or you're pushing off the back. You're scraping your foot off the back to get your foot off.
Or maybe you think there's this idea called toe off where you're literally supposed to flex your toes to push off the ground by flexing your toes. And then often you'll see blisters on the balls of people's toes. Is that right? And then on your balls somewhere.
That's the most important part. If you have blisters on your balls, then you're doing something completely different. And I don't even want to know about it. But if you're getting blisters on the pads of your toes, that's what I wanted to say.
Then you're probably doing that push off thing. You're scraping your foot across the ground. Remember, if you're walking or running, you want to be more placing your foot vertically underneath your body, lifting your foot off by flexing your hip. And what that means, imagine that you step on a B.
If you step on a B, you're not going to push further down on the B to get your foot off the ground. You're going to lift your foot off the ground by flexing your hip first. It's not that you don't use your calves or your ankles, but you want to think that the movement initiates from the hip and the calf and ankle are part of that. So blisters calluses not required.
It's a sign that you're actually got a little form issue that you want to address. And if you go to zeroshoes.com, that's xeroshoes.com slash blister, you will hear about my blister story because there was a blister that I got that was the beginning of everything that I've been doing for the last 10, 11, 12 years in natural movement and with zero shoes. And hopefully you'll learn something from that story. There's also in the learn more section of our website, there's some videos.
There's a whole video series that I've done. I think video number one is all about blisters and friction and how to prevent that. So take a look at that. My next question that I get often is how long does it take for me to transition to barefoot or minimalist?
And I like to answer that by asking what is the square root of purple? In other words, it's another question for which there is no good answer. And the reason is everybody is a little different. So I may have talked about this before.
I can't remember. I defined what I referred as the four neurological types for making a transition to anything, for learning a new movement. If I tell you how to run barefoot, I'm going to give you this instruction. Find a nice smooth hard surface.
The smoother the better the harder the better you don't want to do this on grass because a smooth hard surface gives you the most feedback and feedback is how you learn things. Then you want to go for a really short run, like 20 seconds or 30 seconds, and then you want to see how you feel the next day. And if it hurts, do something different until you're having fun. First you want to recover.
Then you want to try something a little different. And typically the things that most people do, they're overstride. They're reaching out too far in front of their body with their foot. Sometimes they're pointing their toes when they reach out in front of their body because they've heard that you're supposed to land on your forefoot or your toes.
Just get your foot underneath your body. And you probably want to pick up your cadence a little bit. You want to have your legs moving a little faster without you running faster. Think Fred Flintstone starting his car, kind of.
Or another image. Just imagine that your feet are on a wheel. And the wheel, when your feet hit the ground, it's barely touching the ground because the wheel just keeps going around and around. And you want to almost think about lifting your feet off the ground before they even touch the ground.
So that kind of caves, that kind of speed. That's another thing to be helpful. And again, don't push off the ground, lift off the ground. So that's the instructions.
Now here's the thing that's problematic. Some people, they literally can't tell if it hurts. So you people, you need to wake up those nerves in your soul's your feet and tell your brain that you're paying attention to those things now by just spending some more time barefoot. Walk, hike.
Just like get outside, go to the mailbox or go to the end of the driveway or walk around your block. Just you know, it might be a little uncomfortable at first. I tell you that things that were difficult and painful for me when I first started spending time barefoot within some number of months or I don't know how long, really, they became no big deal. I mean, even like significant rocks and things that are in our yard used to be impossible for me to walk on and now I'm not a problem.
Not because I've gotten developed calluses or blisters, not because I've become desensitized. Quite the opposite is because my feet are more flexible. I'm more aware of where I'm putting them. And I think my reflex arc may have gotten a little faster where I snap off of things more quickly if they're going to be unpleasant.
So it's going to take as long as it takes, oh, next neurological type, people who can tell it hurts, but they don't have great proprioceptive skills, which means they don't know where their body is in space. You can put your arm parallel to the ground and it can look like you're in an all right situation or you're trying to point to someone else's shoes. You're going to need some video feedback of you walking or running or doing whatever you're doing so you can get used to the difference between what you think your body is doing and what your body is actually doing. And as you develop that, proprioceptive skill, that'll be helpful.
The third group of people, they can tell it hurts or not. They've got good proprioceptive skills. They just need some cues like the one that I gave about cadence or about not getting your foot underneath your body or imagine the Fred Flint something again, like his feet are always a little behind him. So I think it's Ken Bob Sachton who says you want your body to be moving forward and your legs trying to catch up and they can't quite make it.
That's another way of making sure you're not over striding or not reaching out with your foot. The fourth neurological type, these are people who are natural. I mentioned these before. They just go out and they just, they can run barefoot even if they've been in shoes for 20 years.
They take off their shoes, they're doing fine. But the problem with them is they have so much fun, they get tired and revert back to one of those previous conditions and don't even know it. So you guys have to just chill out a little bit. So it'll take what it takes.
If you have a race coming up, don't try to make sure you've switched to minimalist or barefoot before the race. Let the switch happen on its own and then deal with whatever races happen in the future. Don't try to push the envelope. Don't try to make the waves do what waves do.
Don't try to whatever metaphors you can think of for trying to make things happen before their time. I know there's some old commercial that says something about that and if you remember what it is, email me because I can't remember it. Okay. Let's see.
Oh, there's a question that I get about going barefoot in public. FYI, I do it all the time. The actual question is, is it legal? And the answer is, most of the time, absolutely.
If you go, there is a Facebook group. I think it's called Barefoot is Legal and there is the, oh my gosh, I forgot the name of the Barefoot Society's. The Barefoot Living Society don't hold me to it. I feel horrible that I can't remember the moment.
But you can look these things up and they will tell you that A, if you walk into a restaurant and barefoot and they say that it's a health code violation and I'm allowed to do that. As far as I know, there's not one state in the country of the United States of America in which there is an actual statute saying that you can't be a patron, not true for employees, a patron who's barefoot in that restaurant. They will oftentimes change the story and go, you have an insurance issue. It's like, no, no different.
In fact, it's not an insurance issue. In some states, in Colorado, this is the case where if you're knowingly taking a dangerous act, the place involved in the dangerous act is not responsible because basically you're being a moron. So I was in Costco recently and someone stopped me and employee and said, everything, okay, I said, yeah, why? They said, you're wearing shoes.
I said, yeah, they're my shoes. They're my shoes. My shoes are about being as close to barefoot as you can but having some protection if you need it in some style when you want it. So that made them very happy.
You know what I've never gotten bothered? I've never gotten bothered at our big supermarket which is called King Supers which I remember when I first moved here, that name sounded really stupid and now it just seems normal. That's not okay. So I was in King Supers.
My favorite thing to do is A in the frozen food aisles on a hot summer day because those floors are cold and if I don't want that kind of cold just the produce section, that feels nice and cool and what I really like is being there when the mister goes off. That's the adult version of running through a sprinkler and I highly recommend it. You know the only place I've actually been bothered going barefoot, whole foods. You would think.
I mean whole foods where they're not okay if you're going barefoot but they're totally fine if you're breastfeeding your dog. That is totally insane. But whole foods gives me a hassle. Now it's legal for someone to have a policy that you have to have shoes but it's not illegal to not be wearing shoes.
There are some people who would argue that if someone says you need to wear shoes it is discriminating on various, what's the word I'm looking for? Stepping on the toes of various anti-discrimination policies. Religious and otherwise you can find more info about that. Take a look.
I actually used to have a little card that said you're not allowed to discriminate me because barefoot might be part of my religion and if they say what's your religion they're not allowed to ask that. So yes it's almost always legal. People may be a little uncomfortable. I usually keep the zero shoes, the genesis are super super flexible sandal.
I keep preparing my pocket. I'm not trying to make waves. I don't want to get kicked out of a restaurant that I want to eat in because they've got their panties all in a while. Okay.
Last question that I have for now is one of my favorite are minimal shoes the same as barefoot shoes. There's a variation of this question which is not even a question. Sometimes people get all in a snip and they go barefoot shoes. That's an oxymoron.
You can't be barefoot in shoes. So let me just address that part first. First of all you are correct. You cannot be barefoot in shoes.
The term barefoot shoes evolved as sort of shorthand for the idea of shoes that let you have the closest thing to the experience you would have if you're barefoot but still be shoes. That's a shortcut. The reason people like me started using that phrase nine, ten years ago is that people were searching for that phrase. I was trying to have people find me when they were searching for barefoot shoes because we were offering barefoot friendly shoes or barefoot inspired shoes.
That's what people were using. That's the phrase I have to use too. I didn't make it. I get that it's an oxymoron.
I get that it's contradictory. That's just the way it is. Let's just move on from that one and answer the question about minimal shoes. Look here's actually the funnier.
Even minimal shoes are always minimal shoes. So Dr. Arby Davis from Harvard refers to what she calls as minimalist shoes and partial minimalist shoes. I call them true minimal shoes and fake minimalist shoes.
The partial or fake minimalist shoes are sold with minimalist names. All their branding, all their marketing says they are a minimalist shoe. They sometimes say they are a barefoot shoe but according to Irene, they are neither of those because they have enough padding so you're not getting the feedback that you actually need to let your body make the adjustments to a natural gait, a natural scribe. So a minimalist shoe, if you want to put them in categories, will often just be lighter than a regular shoe, won't have any or as much heel lift.
That means it's a zero drop shoe that heels at the same level as the ball at the foot. It shouldn't have any, frankly, if it's going to be a quote truly minimalist shoe. Just because it's zero drop doesn't mean it's minimalist. It could be zero drop and sell a bunch of padding.
So minimalist shoes should have, close to no padding as possible. It should be really flexible and it should be really lightweight. Now what many minimalist shoes are not is barefoot inspired or barefoot friendly and that will include a couple of other things. One, wide enough toe boxes, so your toes can spread and relax and move naturally and I will confess no one is making something wide enough for everybody.
It's a tricky thing. It's a footwear manufacturer. There's kind of a bell curve. You want to be able to handle as many people as you can whether they're feet or narrow or wide and unfortunately it's never possible to be able to accommodate everybody which pains me but suffice it to say a more barefoot shoe is going to be even thinner, even more flexible, probably even lighter and really let your toes spread and relax as well.
So be careful for people who use the word minimal or barefoot when they're talking about shoes that still have a heel lift, still have a bunch of padding, still you can't roll into a ball or twist in any shape or squeeze your toes together and don't let you get feedback from the ground. This is the other issue again. Your brain is wired to feel things from your soles, you have more nerve endings in your soles than anywhere at your fingertips and your lips. You want to be able to feel as much as you're ready to feel while still getting the protection that you might need for something that you may be doing.
So I hope that helps with the barefoot slash minimal thing and that's the last question that I got right now. So let's wrap it up by saying first of all thank you very much. Don't forget like, subscribe, share, etc, etc. Third if you have any questions again that you want to submit send them to move at jointhemovement.com and I leave anything out I think that's pretty much all I got so as always live life feet first.
You've been listening to the Movement Movement podcast with host Stephen Sashan. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com