You want to warm up for a run or a hike or a workout. So you've got to stretch, right? What if that is the worst thing you could possibly do? Well, we're going to find out more about that on today's episode of the movement, movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, usually because those things are your foundation.
And we're going to be exploring the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the straight out lies you've been taught about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or cross fit or workout, whatever it is you do and enjoyably, efficiently. And I mention enjoyably because if you're not having fun, do something different so you are. That's one of the important messages. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
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So let us jump in and find out why stretching is a horrible thing. Kathleen, hello. Do me a favor. Tell human beings who you are and what you're doing here.
Hello, I'm Kathleen Nickdana. I'm a physical therapist and a Pilates teacher. And I've been in orthopedics and sports PT for three and a half decades more than I look. Right?
But you were even born Kathleen. Exactly, exactly. I was a child prodigy. But I've been working with athletes, with ballet dancers, with reparacial athletes, professional athletes, and just normal schmoke injured folks that want to get back to doing what they're doing for a long time.
And I just a little, if you want to hear it, my intro to minimal running. Sure. I'm back in maybe like 2008 or so. I've been a reparational runner since I was a teenager.
Not because I love it, but because I love how it makes me feel. You don't like running. You're like having run? Is that the idea?
Yeah, exactly. Although, you know, I get to run a beautiful place and you know, it's all good. But that's another podcast, right? How we get ourselves out there.
But my knees were always a little bit creaky. And I always switched my shoes at about four months or so, even without running a lot of mileage. And then a friend of mine said, we were way on a trip and she said, you know, I read this article and we should all do barefoot running. I thought that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life.
I mean, I have like, it'll be good for business. I'll have a lot of injured people. But that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And then started reading more about it.
And thought, well, you know, if there's ever a potential client, a potential person to try barefoot running successfully, I would be the poster child because I work barefoot. I'm a polite teacher. I'm a strong, flexible, feet. I'm pretty aware of how I run blah, blah, blah.
So I made the transition. I was extremely careful. I would start out in my regular old shoes. I hate to call them traditional running shoes because they're not traditional, they were not traditional, but until, you know, the late 70s or so.
But I'd wear my regular running shoes with my other shoes tied around my waist, part with your way, switch my shoes, you know, I was really careful. And even with that, I got a bit of a kill-a-side and on the other, dealt with it, no problem. Well, I want to pause there for two reasons. One, I like to say that things like Achilles, or Achilles are campaign is totally optional, depending on what you're doing.
And I always love unilateral injuries. I love when something's wrong on one side or not the other because the good side is fine. But people rarely pay attention to the good side, they pay attention to the bad side. And you said, so you got it on one side and you dealt with it.
What do you do? What do you discover in that process before you continue with the story? I did what I would do as a PT. I did some friction-asage.
I did a little bit of stretching. I felt stretching. And that was it. It pretty much took care of it.
I already had pretty strong and flexible feet, which is a big deal. And I also did a cheat running course, and I think changed my running style a bit, and that made a big difference as well. And we can talk more about those kinds of things that I recommend to people a lot. But I found that instead of switching shoes, I go, I'll do this shoe, the two runs a week, and I'll do the minimal shoe two runs a week.
It was like I didn't like going back right away. My knees felt way better in a minimal shoe. So I was hooked and did a workshop with a Chi running instructor and a running shoe store, fell out, and we had, and this is back maybe 2010, something like that. We had standing room only in the running shoe store.
And it was like, if there would have been food served, there would have been a food fight. It was like the people on the one side and the people on the other side. And you're crazy. You're going to get stress vectors and it can be done.
I was like, you're crazy. It was really eye opening since then. And I've been able to study with the most prominent researchers in running from Harvard, from university Wisconsin, from USC, from UCSF, brilliant people. There is no controversy about minimal running.
It just is. There is so much research about it. Just what I say, what I say, it's like people love to say there's a controversy, but there's a ton of research supporting the benefits of natural movement and zero good research supporting the benefits of big, big, bad, emotional issues. And the few bits that are anti-minimalist, anti-barrefoot, if you actually look at the studies, they are not what people think.
One example is a study where they were examining VO2 max, basically how well your body can handle oxygen as you're exercising. And with the idea that investigating whether running barefoot improves your VO2 max, well, no barefoot runner ever said it did. So where does it come from? And the other one was that the study included people who were quote accomplished barefoot runners, but I know all the accomplished barefoot runners around here to study University of Colorado.
I said, no one that I know nor I were involved in that study. So, but I know who was in that study. And these are runners who were not accomplished barefoot runners. They were accomplished runners who do a little bit of barefoot training on the grass.
And they're all different game. So, you know, the, the, or my favorite one that I've been talking about lately is that Nike has put out a thing saying, hey, here's a study that shows our new shoe reduced injury rates by 50% compared to another shoe. Well, first of all, the other shoe was their shoe. So their best selling motion of running shoe was the one that caused more injuries than the new shoe.
But if you, but the data, you have, it hasn't even seen, I haven't even seen it published yet. The only thing I'm seeing is people saying reduces injuries by 50%. But the data, because I got a copy to study showed that the people in their best selling motion control shoe, 30% over 30% got injured within the 12 weeks study, which really means they got injured within about the first 10, 11 weeks because of how they determined injury and in the best selling, sorry, the new shoe, only 14 and a half percent got injured, which is kind of like saying, do you want to go to a restaurant that will give you food poisoning and one of three meals or one of seven meals? Yeah, exactly.
Because it allows, you know, that so anyway, yeah, you're right. There is no real controversy. People love to act like that. I mean, you know, I come from a land of dipsy.
I don't know if you know about the dipsy race. It's one of the foot races in the country and unfortunately was canceled this year for the first time, the only reason other than World War two, right? And there are a lot of. I have to say, I've been to the dipsy diner.
There you go. So, and you didn't get food poisoning. There you go. So there are a lot of very confirmed runners.
There is a local, but I trust you is really big on orthotics and on big supportive shoes. And there are a lot of those runners that wear that. Now, I always tell my clients that we were not born to bear weight in the, so in the arch of our foot, you know, orthotics and orthotic is first aid. I wore one way back in my 20s because I had a stress reaction from doing a Rubik's on-band floor.
It's first aid, but then you need to get out of that, right? You wouldn't wear a brace or a splint forever. And there are runners that I know that I've treated who are some of the people who have the most mileage on their feet in the world, that their feet, their body is so altered that they may not, I'm not sure if they structurally can ever get out of that and they're going to keep running. Runners are going to keep running, right?
Or if they, some people don't have the commitment to it. They're very entrenched in what they do and they do it and that's what they're going to do. So, but I encourage all of my clients to think about transitioning to a more natural running style because it's better for you in so many ways. So it's funny.
I'm on the track every week and one of the things that I've noticed is a couple of a number of runners, especially the good runners that I see are forefoot or midfoot landing runners who are still in padded over controlled shoes. But what's interesting is some of these runners, their heels never come close to the ground. And so my thought is then why are you wearing that overblown over designed shoe? You were running, you're perfect for what we do.
Why aren't you doing that? And some of it is because it's what we get used to, it's what someone's told. They think that this is the intervention when this is what shoes were made like for, well, up until the early 70s. Do you know how the padded motion control shoe was developed?
You know the story? I think I've heard it, but feel free to rest. So there's two parts of the story. The first part is that when Nike was getting started, they were sharing a building with some, I think orthopedics, pediatrics, maybe sports, pediatrics, and Bill Barriman came and said, I'm getting these runners with a Kelly Stendenitis.
What do I do? And they said, Oh, well, they're a Kelly's have shortened from wearing high-go running shoes. So make a higher heel of dress shoes. So make a higher heel of running shoe to accommodate that.
Now, of course, once you make a higher heel shoe, it's almost impossible not to land on it unless you're already have great form. When you land on your heel, it's a ball. Now you're unstable. So they build in motion control.
When you land on your heel, by the time your foot comes down, you're put at your plan or fascia are fully extended in a weak position, which puts strain on the arch. So that's when they built an arch support to alleviate the strain. And so everything that we know evolved from this idea of put an elevated heel. Well, not too long ago, a friend of mine was going to trap me with one of these pediatrists and said, what do you think about the fact that your idea has become the ubiquitous design for all modern athletic footwear?
And he said, biggest mistake we ever made. But footwear, I've come to learn as a bunch of copycats where if somebody starts to sell something, everyone else freaks out that they're never going to sell whatever they do and they make their version of the same thing. And so that's the way it's evolved in the last 50 years. And there's just, again, there's just no evidence.
I mean, you mentioned some of the people that you studied with. I mean, I don't know if one of those people is Christine Pollard, who's done a lot of research showing that the more cushion you have, the more force you put into the ground, which sounds upside down to most people. But that's how bodies work is like they're trying to find them. Yeah.
And the other thing that's very interesting is if you run on a cushion surface, whether it's a shoe or the grass, your joints are going to stiffen in response to that. If you run on a firmer surface, your joints are going to soften and cushion in response to that. Now, I don't run on asphalt, I don't run on trails. That's literally pretty hard.
But it's one of those counterintuitive things that if you think you need more cushion and a lot of people think they need more cushion, it's like, well, let's look at your foot because the foot, the shoe companies have tried to out-engineer the foot, which is just hubris, right? We have this incredible structure in our foot with so many joints and bones, four layers of muscle, over 100 muscles in the arch of the foot itself. And yet we treat our feet like big dumb flippers. It's a triplane complex that can move in three different planes of movement.
And if you take some of that away or excessively load in one way or another, which that big lateral heel on a shoe, we'll do it. We'll make you pronate more, right? It will throw more load that way. Then you're going to be transferring the things that the foot is supposed to be doing, that you are taking away up the spine, up the hip, right?
So the more we try to out-engineer the foot, the worse things have gotten. Yeah. One of my friends who was at Nike for 30 years said, I worked with Barriman for that whole time trying to figure out how to improve what feet do and we couldn't do it. No, or NASA tries to make a foot for a robot that can accommodate different surfaces on a planet, right?
And they can't replicate what the natural foot does, right? It's remarkable. And I've spent a lot of time in the anatomy labs and have been lucky to volunteer at UCSF's PT department and their anatomy lab. And a lot of the cadavers are older in their 80s.
And I think about like, okay, they're in their 80s, but when did they lived their life, right? These 80-year-olds, you can see feet that still have, you can still fully dissect out all of those muscles in the arch of the foot. It's pretty remarkable. You think, oh, you know, we're 80, you might be kind of old and shriveled up and you can't really get those things because they're not nice and juicy and vibrant, but they still are.
And I think those 80-year-olds probably weren't wearing those, you know, traditional running shoes. They were probably living their life in their kids. Jack Kirk, the Dixie Demon, who won the Dixie more than anybody else, right? People would try and give him.
He would run him in, I can't remember if it was kids or just, you know, some flat. Like a Congress officer. Yeah. Like what's the Congress one that's like, it has a guy's name.
Just kidding. Yeah, it was a minute ago. Just like a, just a lace-up flat shoe. Yeah.
And people would try and give him a better shoe. And he was like, no, no, no, no. I got this, you know, and he ran it successfully. And he had to be helpful a little bit in 91 or something like that.
But, you know, the foot is an amazing thing. It's an amazing piece of architecture and engineering. And what's most amazing is that major companies have spent the last 50 years teaching people the opposite so much so that everyone now thinks that it's true, that feet are inherently problematic. And there's a great story someone told me.
And he was actually, he's actually a guy who doesn't make orthotics for a living. I put him in a pair of R-Shoes in the pre-Oh and he's walking around. And he said, what do you see? I said, well, technically, I mean, without your orthotics, your right foot is pronating a little more because you have weak ankles because you haven't been using them.
But did you notice that? He goes, no, I said, then it doesn't matter, obviously. And he was sort of dumbstruck by it. But he told me this great story that there was a podiatrist who went to Kenya, I think in the 60s, to study the Kenyan army who did a lot of their training barefoot because they couldn't have foreused.
And so his report was a podiatrist who broke in this country. And there's another thing where Americans are different than Europeans and Asians. So in Europe, there are footwear brands that have been around for 250 years that are more about natural movement than anything that was ever done in America. And they get this idea.
There is no controversy there. There's no argument there. In Asia, same thing. Sandals and flip-flops and bare feet are an integral part of the culture of many Asian countries.
And so this idea, I'm watching big shoe companies try to convince them that they're wrong and they're good at it. They're good at making that argument because it does, like the idea of cushioning makes quote unquote, in a sense, you know, you've got to mattress, you want it to feel comfortable. You step on memory foam, it feels good at first. That doesn't mean it's good for you.
And what we always say to when we're talking to Asian dealers and distributors, we say, look, you have a, you can't, you got to China, for example, or Hong Kong or Tokyo, and every 20 feet, there's a foot massage place or a reflexology place. You know, you guys know the value of the foot. Why are you letting these big Western companies credit convince you otherwise? And then they go, yeah.
So, yeah, it's a really, well back up to kind of where you got to. We'll talk about the problems of stretching in a moment. Talk about the Pilates piece of this puzzle and how that applies. Because most people think of Pilates as, you know, what Hollywood actresses do who don't know if they can't actually work out.
Yeah. So Joseph Pilates was a man, right? And he was a human being and he was born in the late 1800s. And he was, he came from a, he was born in Germany as a German and his family was sort of involved in the movement in Germany at the time of physical culture.
You know, they had a gym and it was, he and his brother were models that would pose as, you know, human Greek statues. And he was a self-taught fan of anatomy. And he was somewhat sickly as a child and made fun of for that. And so he started developing a series of exercises.
And then he was, interestingly, he was interned at a camp for enemy combatants in England because he was living in England at the time during World War I. And he had a lot of people with, not a lot to do that he got to practice on and did his, sort of a jackling of his time to do his exercises with. And then he had bed springs that he could innovate and instead of using his body for resistance, he could use the bed springs for resistance. Wow.
And so he's claimed to fame. Well, his claim was that during the pandemic of 1918, that nobody got sick in his camp and that it was because they did his series of exercises, whether or not that's true or not, but it's a good story. And a lot of what, it's because they were all in his gym and they never dealt with anybody else who actually got sick. So it was different.
Exactly. Exactly. But he developed this series of exercises that he called Contrology and said that if you had a sound mind, how's within a sound body? And you could, your body would do it, your brain told it to do that you would be at peace with yourself and you would feel good spiritually.
And if I did that, that would be good. And if you did that, that'd be good. And if the whole world did that, we would have a little peace. That was his vision.
He was a small mind thinker, right? That was a big vision of world peace through feeling good in your body, right? Which is remarkable. And you know, clearly he had studied some Eastern movement philosophies as well, but that was kind of where it came from.
And one of the things that he knew way back when, I mean, most of what he wrote his book, Return to Life in 19, I should know this. There's 541 something back in there. There are things that he purports in that. It's a little book.
It's cheap. It has all the map exercises in it without any modifications. So it's not an easy pick up and go through them and do them all. But in the introduction, one of the things he talks about is health, whole body health.
And he really believed that we were not meant to statically stretch, that we, dynamic stretching was really what it's all about. And now we know through modern science, it's caught up to what he knew intuitively watching the way the body moved. He, part of how he developed his method was studying the way animals moved in the wild. And so if you think about how a natural human animal would move, we would not wear shoes.
We might wear something to keep our feet warm if we were in the snow or something like that, but we wouldn't wear an arch supportive petitine, all that kind of stuff, right? And we would be climbing trees and we would be walking on unstable surfaces and walking over logs and doing all kinds of things that a natural human body would do. We don't do that stuff these days, right? So he developed a number of, he was a crazy inventor and a lot of people are familiar with the police reformer or some of the other pieces of apparatus, but there are many smaller pieces of apparatus that he developed like the foot corrector and the toe corrector.
And so I think that's the way that we can do the chair, the one to chair, which everybody could have at home and flip it over and it becomes a piece of exercise equipment that you can do dynamic stretching as well. It's a strengthening, it's a whole body exercise, but it is dynamic stretching built into that. So can you explain for lay humans, if you will, what the difference is between static stretching and dynamic stretching? And even more, what I often start these podcasts with, and we didn't do it, is something that people can experience as well.
So any sort of movement thing so they can get flavor. So do the kind of distinction between them and then if you can give somebody something so they can feel that distinction, that would be awesome. So static stretching, we think of it as you put your foot up on something and you hang out there and you stretch it, you feel a stretch in your hamstrings and you hang out there for a minute to two minutes and you wait for this elastic deformation of tissues to happen, that you're going to actually deform and lengthen the tissues. You're going to overcome the stretch reflex and you're going to end up with a longer piece of meat and its connection to the bones.
I think that's a good thing. I don't know if that's a better book title or band title, longer piece of meat. I don't think we should do that. That's a different podcast.
I was not thinking that when I said that but it was a kind of a marathon. This is not good but it was too late. So that's static stretching and you know, I'd like to flash back to my gymnast days when I was in high school where I would just spend the entire evening watching TV working on the splits. Yeah or I remember when I was working at Secretaries Flying Center back in the 80s and 90s and I would have, I might have, you know, 25% of my clientele might be guys in their 20, 30s, 40s that came in the back pain with very tight hamstrings and so I would show them how to stretch their hamstrings by lying on the floor and putting one leg up on the door jam with your low bone down and hanging out there.
I would do it with them. So I was stretching my hamstrings four or five times a day. Do you think my hamstrings ever got any longer? Never.
Never. I think, well yeah, I can stretch and then I go round or work out or something and they tighten back up again. So I will say that I do for my clients that come in that are kind of pathologically tight, I might include a static stretch but I always include a dynamic stretch. So the difference being that a dynamic stretch, we're not just trying to passively lay the leg up there and get it to lengthen.
We are inviting the hamstrings to lengthen by activating the antagonist. So by using the muscles on the other side, you are going to reflexively inhibit the muscles that you're trying to stretch. So, and you can think of if you're trying to lengthen your hamstrings, which are hip extensors and knee flexors, you're going to use knee extensors and hip flexors, right? So and there are lots of great ways to do that.
So for example, I will have a teach, there's a polite sexier size called side kick. So you lie on your side, you pick up the top leg and you're going to swing it to the front and then swing it to the back and you're stabilizing your trunk from your hips to your head really by co-contraction of the core transfers of dominance, multiple hip flexors. So, you can stand on a step if you've got it or on a curb and hang on to maybe the stop sign for balance, get yourself nice and tall, zip your belly muscles up a bit and swing your leg to the front and then swing your leg to the back, right? So you are actively doing a dynamic stretch for hamstrings and also for hip flexors, which by the way can be a big problem, tight hip flexors, most of us have because we sit today much.
And if you are trying to run and run with a more natural style and you have tight hip flexors, it's a big problem. So there's an example of a dynamic stretch that you can do before and a little bit after you run when you're warmed up and you want to do it. You have to think of when I was sitting on the ground or trying to stretch in the splits, the other thing I was working on a lot is an important move for gymnastics is, well, there's definitely a thing about it, but imagine you're sitting on the ground, straddled, and then you put your hands between your legs and you lift yourself up all throughout. So you need to have the flexibility for doing that, but you also have to have the strength, your quads are pulling your legs up to do that.
So I used to do that too, I'd be sitting that position and just lift up. And of course, like you said, by strengthening the quads, it allowed the hamstrings to relax and quote unquote stretch from doing that. There are a number of bodybuilders that I know of who are super, super flexible because they're super strong and they've gotten good at relaxing the other muscles. So bodybuilders do the splits to do all these things.
And so there are a couple of people, there's another zero hero friend of ours who calls him Sub-Joo-Joo, who is John Call. And John is famous for being on America's Got Talent and doing the splits between two chairs while holding Heidi over his head. And John and a couple of other people who when they try to teach you about how to do the splits, part of what they're teaching is strength for the quads and the hip flexors because so that you actually can pull your legs into that position, which is another variation of the theme. And it's interesting because I was flexible doing leg swings like that.
Never really did anything to me because I can get my leg way up and way back. But for many people, that's a big deal to learn to relax things in one direction and relax the other things in the opposite direction. Right. And for those people that are really flexible, so gymnast, figure-staters, dancers, their issue is not flexibility, their issue is often stability.
So how do you not over-compress your joints and how can you find the stability in maybe your trunk to be able to then move within your flexibility and not abuse the flexibility that you got? So when we think about stretching, we think about flexibility. It's so perfectly hamstring because that's sort of like the yardstick for flexibility according to most people. What other places or what other ways do you see that people may need to work on some kind of flexibility and have some dynamic experience of that, whether they're runners or office monkeys?
Yeah. So one big problem that I see also besides us sitting and having tight hip flexors is being limited to door selection and ankle door selection. So the ability for- Yeah, tell people what that is. So and actually hang on, I'm going to grab my bony front.
Oh, you're going to grab your bony foot. I'm going to I'll see you and grab my bony foot. Hold on. I see I'm waiting for your bony foot.
Here's for people who aren't watching. I have a skeletal model of a foot here. Oh, you got a whole skeleton model. Oh, man.
I've got a foot. I've got a foot. He got the real deal. By the way, hold on.
I've got to tell you this. My dad was a dentist and when he was in dental school back in the whenever that was in the 50s, I don't know how it was, but he had a human skull that they had made little windows. You can see the sinuses. You can see the sinuses.
You can see the sinuses. You've got this in dental school. That was my show and tell object until I was like 12. I was bringing in a human skull.
That's all. That's pretty cool. So when we run, when we walk or run, we're down, you need to be able to move the shin bones forward over the tailors. Right?
Yeah. So this has to happen. I'm kind of a joint head. You know, when it comes to like what's going on, I kind of defer to the joints first.
Then that's just me. It's not like it's better or anything. So I always look to see how much range of motion and you should be able to get with the ankle in subtailor neutral so I can feel in position that ankle neutral. You should be able to get on the other side of 90 degrees, right?
I forget. For people who aren't watching, I'm going to try and give them an image in their mind and you tell me if you want to correct it. So let's say you're sitting on the ground, for example, your feet are flat on the ground and you make sure that your shin bones are basically vertical. At the very least, you should be able to lift your foot so that you're keeping your heel on the ground, lift your toes towards your knees, sum them out.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Or that if you were in a roller chair, if you're on a stool with wheels and you start out in that position, you just described, you should be able to roll forward and your shin bones can move forward over your ankle.
Right? That's required for running. That's required for walking. If you don't have that, then you are going to do a couple of things.
You'll toe out and pronate over your arch before you'll pick up your foot too soon. Those are two typical things. So, and none of those are good for your running style, right? Or for walking, for that matter.
So, the length of the calf and the Achilles. So that whole gastroxylious plantaris Achilles into the arch of the foot, plantar fascia, all the way through great toe extension. We need all of that to be able to run with decent form, right? With good movement and good use of your foot and your leg all the way up.
So I want to address a point that you made that relates to this. You were saying, you know, your story that luckily for you, you already had strong flexible feet, there've been a couple of articles that came out lately suggesting that strong flexible feet was a prerequisite for natural movement, natural running, different running. And this is something that actually happened around 2010 as well as people were trying to, I think, establish themselves as experts in the field of natural movement. You were saying, you know, here's the things you need to be able to do in order to accomplish this thing of running barefoot.
Most of those things I couldn't do for whatever reason, some of which I've compromised fine, some of which, you know, whatever. So, I'm always, even with the new article saying, you know, people who are in this situation are better equipped to make the transition. But what they leave out is the phenomenon that just making the transition intelligently, you build, you can build that strength and that flexibility naturally. So, the idea that it's a prerequisite is one that I think, again, a lot of hand waving, a lot of people who think that, I don't want to say, there's some people who are totally against this whole idea.
People who want to find a middle ground. And they're like, it's kind of like in 2011 or so, when a number of companies came out with what they referred to as transition shoes, they were just a little lower heel rise. And it was all marketing. There was no evidence of that work.
In fact, Irene Davis at Harvard, her research shows that those transition shoes are the worst things you could possibly wear. And so, can we talk about just the phenomenon of that amount of movement, the strength of flexibility that you do need in the foot and ankle and the development of it, not necessarily as a prerequisite, but certainly, let's say as a, I'm kind of going hand in hand, you know, like a push me pull you a little. Yeah, I think that I think of it a bit more as a prerequisite, but probably because of the detail that I see. But you know, you just have to think, all right, what's going to make the safest experience for you?
What's going to be least likely to give you any trouble? And I'm sorry, I mean, I read this one, I would agree with you. I think more than I, which is that she thinks, you know, walking and strengthening is a prerequisite. And I would say, if you just start small enough, same thing, no amount of strengthening that you're going to do that's going to replicate.
I see people have plantar fasciitis that can't walk in their own house barefoot, right? So it's like, okay, that's a problem, right? Yeah. And I'm not the far end of the spectrum.
Interestingly, I love Irene Davis. I love Irene Davis. Irene, I love you. I think of conferences that she's spoken at.
And I brought a couple of Joe's inventions with me. So the foot corrector. I was going to ask you about that, but we hold that up on us. Let me see that thing.
The foot corrector. So I can show you how it works. But this is dynamic stretching and strengthening all in one package. And sometimes they look flat.
This one is elevated. I like that one better. The toe gizmo. So.
Okay, toe gizmo. Yeah. And I so during one of the breaks, I went up and I said, I mean, hey, Irene, I love the stuff and she's all about the foot. Right.
Chris Power's policy is all about the hip. Right. Brian Hidershite Wisconsin is like, it doesn't matter. Just change the cadence and everything will get better.
Brian will argue that that's not what he says. I will argue back. That's exactly what you're saying. I adore Brian.
I mean, if you do pick up, I mean, this is interesting because he's like, for Brian, if you do pick up your cadence, that's usually going to lead to a number of corrections pretty naturally, but not entirely. And then for Chris, yeah, if you lean a little more, that will make a little bit, but Irene, I mean, she just dives in deep and has. Yeah. So I went up during one of the breaks and I was like, Irene, have you ever seen Joe's, you know, so then Brian's like, I don't take off the shoes.
Come on, let's try it. And they're like, that's really cool. I've never seen that before. So some other things that can be done.
Do you want to see how they work? Yeah. Okay. I'll move these friends.
And again, we're going to describe this for people who are listening and not watching. So the toe gizmo, you got to hold that up again. So I can just try to describe that to people who aren't. Okay.
So we've got, oh man, I'm going to try this. So we have two loops that look like they're leather or something that are connected with a spring. And then there's some other kind of, I'm not going to do enough. Let's just say it's two loops that are connected with a spring.
Yeah. And I will talk about my home version of this game is this rubber band. Oh, you got to be kidding. Right.
I usually use, I don't have a broccoli band, but I usually use a broccoli band. Right. So you can fake this with a profit. All right.
So the plot is toe gizmo version is a high tech version of a rubber band. Yes. So I try and point this so that you can see my feet. I would not be doing this lying down.
Okay. So you can see me. All right. So we're going to loop the loops around your big toes.
You got a spring between your big toes. You see that? Okay. All right.
So I would be on the floor probably. Yep. And I'm going to try and contact. I think about the four points of the feet.
So people who more yoga background think about three points, but the base of the big toe, the base of the peaky toe and the inner and the outer heel. And I'm going to have equal contact reaching down into the ground with those points. And then I'm going to lift dynamically lift my arch so I'm going to dome the foot. Another one of my favorite exercises.
Okay. So I'm going to break this down. So for most people, and again, if you're doing this with a rubber band, go get a rubber band. Try this if you have one.
And so you'd be doing the standing. You want to, again, balance along your feet. So you're feeling equal weight underneath the ball of your big foot, big toe, little toe, and both sides of your heel. And then this doming thing is really like an isometric thing where you're almost like trying to squeeze and shorten the distance between the ball of your big toe and your heel.
So you're pulling up, but you're not, you know, you want to do it without squeezing your toes. So you're just trying to, you know, trying to just create more arch by squeezing. And by the way, if you're standing, I don't know if you do this, but I'm going to toss this out there. One thing that can often help for a lot of people is tighten your glutes, is engage your glutes because if you're glutes, because if you do that, that tries to make your, that tries to make your whole leg turn out a tiny bit because your glutes do that.
And if you're feet are planted, they won't turn, but that'll also kind of create a little bit of arch. Yeah. So can I add to that? Because sometimes we tell people to squeeze their glutes and PTs say this kind of thing all the time.
So we do glutes. Glutes. That does not mean squeezing your butt cheeks together and flinching your butt. Right.
It is activating your femurs to wrap into the back of the socket. Right. And that when you lift the arch of the foot and that line continues up through the legs, the femurs will externally rotate a bit and your inner thighs will turn on. Your adductor lungus is going to work a little bit to help do that, which it almost functions like a hamstring, right?
In hip extension, your pelvic floor is going to turn on, your transverse abdomus is going to lift. You're going to activate from the feet up the whole way. You get to decompress your whole body and be taller and lighter on your feet, right? Yeah.
And then sometimes this is hard for people to do standing so they can do it sitting too. Okay. That was a bit of a detour for them. You've got the rubber band around your feet.
Your feet are well planted. You're doming. You're trying to create that arch. All right.
And now I'm trying to think about doming as coming also from the pinky side. So big toe and pinky side trying to shorten towards the heel. Yeah. We have a lateral longitudinal arch as well as a medial arch.
It's lower and it's shorter, but it's there as well, right? Wanted to really split here if we could also talk about transverse arch. Yeah. So now I'm going to kick all ten toes up.
And I'm going to try and spread that spring apart. Right? And this guy does not move a whole heck of a lot. It's pretty firm.
The other ones that are a little bit more, the spring is not as tight. I know some people that don't like this device because it abducts the big toe a bit, right? So if you have a bunion, is that going to increase the bunion? And I would say, no, you're trying to activate all the muscles around there and spread all of the toes out.
So some of the intrinsic muscles in the feet spread out the menotarsals and some of them pull the menotarsals together, right? So we are trying to find all the muscles that can spread my foot instead of my foot pink squished into a narrow shoe, right? So take it and loop that rubber band around the second toe and the big toe. Spread it out, right?
And with the third toe and the big toe. So it's to play with your feet, right? It's just getting your feet connected to everything that our hand can do except opposition. So we can don't let the foot, we can do the hand, we can do those knees with our feet.
We just don't do it, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's funny.
I was talking to someone who runs USA Archery, the Olympic Archery team, and she's talking about the Paralympic team. But there's a couple of archers on the team who are actually maybe just one who has no arms. And so holds both his foot and can, and I think he actually made hold the string, might pull it a bit with his foot or might pull it in his teeth. I don't remember.
I've seen, I've seen, well, anyone who's watched America's Got Talent has seen a contortionist take a bow and arrow and shoot with their feet. So you know, there's all these things we can do. I've seen people with their feet and everyone always views that and they go, it's amazing that they do that. It's like, no, no, you could do that too.
They just have. Exactly, exactly. Okay. So you want me to show you the foot corrector?
Yeah. The foot corrector. We miss we definitely do in standing. Okay.
So I'm going to stand on a table and get a full, so I don't make a full myself and fall down. So the foot corrector for those of you who are not watching, basically a piece of, there's like a piece of wood, this kind of foot shaped ish. And then there are two, there's like, imagine, you know, near, near the outside of your, of the inside of your foot and the outside of your foot, there are two posts coming up with springs on them and then in between them is a curved piece of metal. So, all right, I'm seeing where this is going.
So you can put, and so it's like, maybe, you know, the poster maybe three just high. So if you put your heel on the piece of wood on the back, your, the ball, your foot, your toes go over that curpies of metal and you can squeeze it down with the springs. So you're pushing this at curpies down. I'm doing a horrible job.
Just go watch that video. So, you know, do you want to say more about it or what you're doing? So the, the, the thing on top actually the, the holes are elongated. They're not round.
So I can actually, I'm not just pushing on it. It's not an accelerator pedal, right? Okay. I'm pulling my toes around this saddle thing.
I'm compressing it and I'm trying to pull it towards my heel. Okay. Let it go and store that job here. That I need to stretch right?
Then I'm going to curl around and pull it. And we do this in a couple different positions now and we're on the arch of my foot and trying to do it with more of my arch. I broke up my toe about three weeks ago and I haven't been doing this and it's like, wow, I should do this. I can feel it.
You know, it's our child. And then we can put it the other way and I put the ball of my foot on the surface and my heel is up on the saddle now. And I, again, I'm not stopping down with my leg power. I'm trying to pull the heel, the ball of the foot and shorten the arch of my foot, lengthening my Achilles as I do this, right?
Not much. I'm certainly using some muscles to pull through the arch to lengthen that Achilles. Now, it doesn't stop in the foot. It goes clear up.
I'm organized in my other leg, my standing leg and zipped up and leaned into a lid a little bit so that I can feel like this is a whole body experience, right? Got it. That's it. Cool.
Do you have any idea? Do you know about the research that Sarah Ridge did about foot strengthening and walking in minimalist footwear? Not at the top of my head. So the research was taking people who had an exercise, foot exercise program, one that I redeveloped actually, and then comparing those people who just walked in minimalist shoes.
And what the study showed is that people who just walk in minimalist shoes got the same benefits, same strengthening as if they did an exercise program. I asked her, which was on the podcast and I asked her, but I can't remember what devices they use to measure foot strength and they had come up with some very clever things that you'll have to reach out to her and find out because they were super interesting, not quite like those which these are even more interesting because they're very specifically about really working that arch. And I don't remember how much overlap that would be a Sarah's, but I think I get a kid. You'll take a look at it and kick out of it.
I know Irene has talked about teaching short foot exercise for sure. Correct. But there's more to it because they had to actually measure foot strength. I mean, what they did is they did ultrasound to measure the diameter of intrinsic foot muscles, but they also actually had a foot strengthening a number of foots between devices that they had developed.
Yeah. Yeah. And I just have to put in a plug for physical therapists at Dumannual Therapy because that population that they probably studied was probably a well population, probably students that were younger and didn't have pathologies, right, or have injuries. So sometimes we need a little help.
If you have a, if you have tight door deflection and you're trying to stretch and try to stretch but really the tightness is in that joint, you need annual therapists to get in there and mobilize it. So our body has physiologic movement that can produce, but it also has accessory movement, little glides that happen at biomechanically at the joint level that we cannot do with volition. Right. So you sometimes need somebody to get in there, really ugly hands when I'm an old lady, get in there and work the joint a little bit.
And then I have people actively move after doing that. So I'm just going to help you moving the joint. I will never forget the day that I met our friend, Dr. James Stocksen, who calls South Fairfoot Dr.
Sondheims and he's working on my foot and he mobilizes this joint in that first ray, that big toe area and popped that joint like, you know, when you crack your knuckles in your hand and I thought he broke my down foot. I didn't know there was a joint there. I never seen an actual skeletal model of a foot. Scared a crap out of me.
Now it's something I do on a regular basis. But every now and then, especially as a sprinter, I can just tell something is out of whack with all of those bones and joints in my foot. And there's one person I go to and go, can you just like pop all those and get those back in place. Right.
And I go to do that. Yeah, I used to before I switched to minimal shoes. I used to feel like I wanted somebody to grab my foot and pop it that way. It's like, can you pull it like, I always felt really stiff after I ran.
And then I switched my shoes and changed my running style. I never had that. I never had that. Yeah, I get it.
I don't get it very often. But the thing with sprinting in particular, I mean, it's just a lot of force. And just every now and then, you know, you put your foot in a weird position or you do something and just things get a little out of whack. And yeah, that exact feeling of like, can you just like grab it, just give it a yank on my foot and say, oh, God, yeah, nice.
I think my wife only loves me because I can crack her back. That in the hair, she likes the hair. But I think that's it. I think those are the only two things.
Oh, and I can cook those three things. Nobody expects a Spanish Inquisition. We have this. So when people, if you were going to give people a boy, where do you even begin on this question?
I'm just trying to think of like the people who come to you, why they come to you, how they discovered that you are a person to go to. And for people who can't necessarily come to see you, you know, there's not a lot of people who have eyes to see is one way of putting it. People will go to a physical therapist who doesn't understand natural movement, who doesn't understand much of what we're talking about. So what is it that gets people to come to you?
And if they can't come to you, what would you recommend someone to do if they're trying to find someone to work with or something to do, whether it's a program you've developed or if they need to find someone locally, et cetera? That's a great question. I think that why people come to see me as my background in Pilates, a much more whole body approach. I got to say that the early part of my career when I did some Pilates that I hadn't really committed to learning the method and doing a comprehensive teacher training program from Suptonuts, which I did at age 50.
And you have to perform all of the exercises like Cirque du Soleil and stuff. So going from being stiffer to having to do all that was a very eye opening experience and body opening experience for sure. But it changed my attitude from seeing what people couldn't do as a physical therapist and thinking about, oh, that's unsafe. Oh, that's dangerous.
Oh, you shouldn't do that. We have to take that out of your routine for a while, which there's value in that. But it shifted my perspective to the potential of a human body and what it could do. And I think that putting those things together is a really good thing to look for in a physical therapist, really any movement, any sort of body practitioner.
How do you look at the body as a whole structure and how does it work together? It's not just a part here and a part there. Oh, you've got knee pain. So we're going to take your knee and we're going to treat your knee.
It's like, why do you have knee pain? You probably have something on your hip or your foot or your core strength. So I would look for somebody that has, I'm a big fan of the Pilates' method. And so I would say that or the other thing is if you are just interested and you're not having pain that would necessitate seeing a medical professional, see a movement practitioner like a Pilates teacher who is comprehensively trained in all these, not just the, I find a mat and I was, I do, but all the whole thing.
And it doesn't work on your feet. If you're curious about what that could do for your running for, how you feel at the end of the day, whatever, you know, type deep and go to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about that's been through a comprehensive teacher training program and is nationally certified. Well, you know, let's do the simplest thing. Most people who either know of Pilates or certainly do Pilates, teach Pilates.
Most people who know of it don't think of it in the same breath as physical therapy. They don't think of the, that, and most of the Pilates people that I've known, that I've known over the years and in Boulder, I think they all are. My line about Boulder is you can't throw a tantrum with that, hitting a therapist and they're both physical and otherwise. Yeah.
But I mean, most of the people I know, they kind of stop at your ankles. They don't really pay attention to the feet. And most physical therapists that I know, same thing, they won't stop at your feet, but when they get to your feet, they want to mobilize them. So, you know, these are things to ask like, like, what do you do for mobilizing and strengthening your feet?
How do you view the foot as the foundation? What do you do with that? What are the questions you think, you know, somebody might want to ask to try to suss out whether they're finding a practitioner who could be useful? Well, I don't know if I can answer that.
Well, pondering, I'm going to pop into my head. Yeah, I think if you, you know, if you, there's so much information you can get about a person and just. Here's one, here's one for the fun of it. Or I'm not sure what the question is, but I'm going to go back to the very first thing you said when you went to that, that she running thing at the Rundchessort.
I was in an event at physical therapy office in the early days, 2000, was after we started the company. So, 2009, 2010, we're same thing. I mean, there were some people who were like, you've got to wear big, big, big, big, big people who were the exact opposite. And there was one physical therapist who said, it could take you years until you develop the strength to be able to run barefoot.
And I finally hit me and I asked the panel. I was not on the panel. I said, how many of you have ever, how many of you have ever run fully barefoot for at least a mile on a road on concrete or a road? And the only person in the room who raised their hand was me.
And I was a sprinter. I mean, I don't like doing that. I mean, I did want to barefoot, but it's not my natural habitat, if you will. And I said, you know, you guys are all just talking about your butt.
You're all just making up theories based on your existing repertoire of information, but you don't have any experience to back this up. And I can tell you, those of you saying it's going to take two years, complete lie. You're completely full of it. And those of you who are saying you need to tell people that, you know, why tell people that.
I can tell you why. They were a afraid that, again, everyone was going to leave because the early days of the barefoot running movement, it was promoted as a panacea and a cure for all things. And so they were terrified that everyone was just going to leave. Like imagine if everybody is going to sound funny.
So back in the late 1800s, a co-addicted doctor in Vienna came up with the idea that you have problems because of things that happened to you as a child, a.k.a. signet Freud. There was an interesting theory. There was no evidence behind it.
There's still no evidence behind it because you can have two people who are in the exact same environment who have a completely different psychological experience. So imagine if everyone lost the ability to believe the idea that their current things they were dealing with were problems caused by something that happened to them as a child. If that happened, suddenly there would be a large number of therapists who would be out of a job. Same thing.
If we teach people how to build foot and ankle strength and learn to have a strong foundation, or as Irene Davis says, if we got kids just wearing middle-footwear in 20 years, we wouldn't have to treat them for the problems that now adults spend billions of dollars dealing with. So I saw a lot of people who were terrified they were going to lose their income and they were trying to come up with a way of transitioning so they were still useful during this process despite the fact that they weren't useful during this process. That's the way it looked. So the point being is another question may be what kind of barefoot training do you do?
What kind of shoes are you wearing? That's one. There's a physical therapy office right across the street where I work and I work from my company. When I had my shoulders surgery a couple of years ago, I went to them.
They know what I do. They were interested in what I do. They were all wearing big, big padded motion control shoes. So I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole for anything other than I got to work on my close-surgical shoulder stuff.
And it was fascinating. They agreed with me about everything. And to this day, three years later, I have not walked the 100 yards to come over and try the bare shoes. And so that's another one.
It's a barber's child thing. If you're in a town and there's two barbers and one has a crappy haircut and the other has a great haircut, you go to the crappy haircut because he did the other guy. So that might be another one. It's like, what shoes are they wearing?
What do they do? I'm not saying anyone has to be a runner. That's not an issue. There's a lot of people who know a lot about running who don't run.
But see what they're actually doing and try and maybe someone else will come up with better questions or some other questions that they found that works for them. What's the question for links on their website? Right? There are other movement practices that I will refer to.
I use Franklin, but Franklin has a method. It has these balls that I do a lot of who's a dancer and was tired of being hurt all the time and so he developed a lot of moving and it's very interesting. And I won't go into it because I'm not at all an expert or worked very much with him. But these balls that are fairly soft, I cannot tell you, we've had a nickel for every time somebody comes in and told me they rolled out their fashion with a lacrosse ball.
It's like, that's just portrait and it doesn't really do good anyway. But these things are kind of soft and they're cratered. And so you can roll a foot and do some of those kind of foot correctory things with the Franklin ball. So does somebody have that as a referral on their website or the melt method, you know, which uses a lot of different points of the foot with softer balls to try and access special lengthening.
I think that the more restricted we are in what we do, the loudier we are at it. If we can open our minds and our thoughts, I had to really turn some things off. I think that some people probably in that room when you ask them, have you ever run their foot from a, you know, they're just afraid of hurting. If they're hurting other people or, or for yourself, I remember I was at a conference years ago and the kind of the father of modern exercise physiology, who I had this textbook when I was in exercise because major at Davis in the PE department years and years ago, he said he had a hard time getting cardiologist telling people to walk and they were afraid they were going to have a heart attack.
And he said, look, if you're afraid of writing down that you need to exercise on a prescription pad, then all you need to write is three letters, do if you give them a personal card, right? Everybody knows a dog has to walk. Everybody knows a dog has to exercise. If that helps you clear your mind that you're going to hurt them because they're going to go out and start running and have a heart attack, then just tell them to get a dog.
That's hysterical. There have been a lot of dog ad options during COVID because it gives people an excuse to go outside and walk. Exactly. So I mean, all of those of us that have a little bit more open perspective about trying different things and experiencing different things in your body and seeing what it works.
And that's a good start. But we are, I mean, by the way, there are a number of people, Raymond Flanahan is one and there are a couple others, Emily Splickel is one. We're trying to put together kind of a directory of natural movement, friendly medical practitioners. Yeah.
And it's a tricky one for a list of reasons, obviously. But one is that like some national chiropractor organization is sponsored by a company that makes orthotics, the American College of Sports Medicine is sponsored by Adidas. You know, it's a long road to hoe. What I'm hoping is that given the phenomenon of social media and how quickly information is moving now that we can shortcut that process, I mean, my goal is that we change the world in the next seven years.
And if it takes us 10, so be it. But it's doable. And I mean, we've had CEOs and C level people at major footwear brands say directly to friends of ours, this whole natural movement thing is legit. We just can't do it because it would be admitting that everything else we've done is bullshit.
And we don't have to replace your shoes every four months. Right. Well, you know, actually backing up to Brian Huyerseich, Brian was one of the people who did the research on how quickly she was wear out when they have cushioning and found that they wear out way faster than what the shoe companies say. And yeah, even on the shelf that, you know, the blown EVA staff on the shelf loses, I forget what, and this is old research that I did.
But even if you don't wear them, they lose clock absorption. So, you know, it's, yeah, I agree with you. It's we have to look to what is more natural and, you know, way back when I was in PT school at Stanford, there was, which is now this little phrase is making our research at, you know, the more high tech we get, the more high touch we have to be as well. And I think that certainly true now, the more we are, I got to tell you, I am heartbroken at, I mean, COVID is just, COVID is the whole ball of badness.
But kids being at home and doing all their homework, sometimes four hours in a row with a five minute break on an iPad with crappy ergonomics makes me just want to cry, right? But the more we tie ourselves into screens and a less natural way of living our human body, human animal lives, the more we need to then get out and move our body and breathe fully and move all of our joints and all the things that those body parts can do. It's so tricky. I've had this conversation slash argument with a bunch of people.