A recent scientific discovery shocked me and probably will shock you as well. Women have no feet. Yes, you would be right. Women have no feet.
At least that seems to be the way big footwear companies treat women and their feet. We're going to find out more about that. On today's episode of the movement, 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 because those things are your foundation. We're going to be breaking through the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the lies that people have told you about what it takes to run, to walk, to hike, to do yoga, cross it, whatever it is that you do on your feet and do it healthily, enjoyably, efficiently.
I'm Stephen Sashan, your host and CEO of Zero Shoes at zeroshews.com. We call this the movement movement podcast because it's a movement that involves you and I'll say more about that in a second. It's about movement because bodies are made to move. Here's the part that's about you.
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The simplest thing I can say is if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. Let's talk about women who have no feet. I'm joined by someone who I've known for a number of years and really, really admired and I'm really thrilled to have them on. That's Jeffrey Gray and Jeffrey has a company called Helix.
Jeffrey, why don't you say who the hell you are, what the hell you do and then let's talk about women with no feet. Thank you so much, Stephen. It's been great to chat with you over the years, man. I don't even know how many years we've known each other now.
It's been more than either of us. I'd like to admit. Yeah, I think both of us have a pretty young company still in our eyes but we've been around for many, many years now. My name is Jeffrey Gray.
I have my doctor in physical therapy and that was really my intro into the world is I had a great physical therapy practice for over a decade, worked with everything from athletes to everyday people, focused on how to keep their feet healthy and fortunate to be trained by some great mentors, some of the people that pioneer orthotic therapy and orthoscopic surgery of the foot. I just have to learn a lot about feet and one of the things that really struck me through that whole time was that I still think to this data scientific community doesn't know everything we need to know about feet. That means that there's a lot of stuff that we can still explore. Let's pause there.
What are some of the things that you think they haven't looked into? It's an interesting phenomenon that obviously a lot of research really kicked in around the time that people were developing modern athletic shoes, padded motion control, higher heels, etc. A lot of the research has been slanted in that direction in large part because it's been sponsored by the companies promoting those products. So I think it hasn't been explored.
Again, with feet there's so much stuff but maybe if I give you guys an example of something that really changed how people understand feet. There's a really great surgeon named Alan Selner out of Los Angeles, a wonderful guy and very talented and bunions are a huge problem. We don't really need to get into the ideology of where they come from right now but he was looking at the normal bunions surgery is you have this big bony deforming on the inside part of your ball of your foot. It grows out, it's a big hard bony lump and the joints all stiff.
The way to fix it is that they would just go hack off some of that bone, take a pin and shove it straight and force it to be there. And the failure rate on these surgeries is horrible. The activity afterwards is terrible. And so I always knew that it wasn't a problem and I just used to tell my patients that's like our last course.
Like like trying to do everything else we can to get you asymptomatic or at least tolerably symptomatic for that surgery because it sucks and most people have to have that surgery to be done. Well Alan Selner took a look at it and he's like, you know the problem isn't the joint. The problem is how when the foot drops and the first race starts to rotate it changes the angle of the joint. Our body is smart and realizes that now that joint isn't aligned how it used to you.
So it's going to lay up more bony tissue to try and support that new orientation. But wow that does protect it in a short term. It creates a longer term problem of a progressively stiffening bunions. So the idea is rather than pin it straight he's like, well let's unrotate that bone.
Take away the joint capsule that's gotten like really thickened. So now the joint can flex again. Right. And so I mean the very first patient I saw with this was somebody whose foot was so deformed I couldn't get them into a shoe when I was doing a shoe fitting clinic at a store.
She was on the elliptical I think two weeks post and training for half marathon six weeks post. And I just blown away and her joint function normally. So it's a little bit more of an example story of there's people out there that are thinking about the human foot in new ways and exploring and trying to understand what happens and it creates a major impact into all of our lives. It's interesting that there's a sort of variation.
One of the things that I run into all the time is people saying hey I plan to fashias and nine times out of 10 I look at them and I say no you don't. And they say what I have you know my super expensive doctor told me that I did and I'm going to get planar fashias surgery. I said yeah so your doctor and I say this with you know how to put it with all due respect which means you have none. Your doctor's more up and I say so here's what's going on let me just show you something and I can you can sort of see these things I will stick my thumb at the spot in their calf that is clearly super tight and I'll just dig in there for a while and then I say now go walk around and see how it feels and they walk around and they go oh my god it feels like 90 percent better.
I go yeah you didn't have planar fashias you have tight calves pulling on the Achilles pulling on the planar fashias etc etc or I have people I did this with a guy he was a big deal venture capitalist and he said I love what you're doing but I can't wear your shoes because I planar fashias. Can you just stand on your toes just elevate your heels and stand on your toes he says yeah I said is that hurt? No I said okay can you just like run in place a little while staying on your toes you know just really little bit just bounce back and forth. Yeah I said is that hurt?
He goes no I said you know why? He says no I said well you're keeping your planar fashias in a strong position while you're just bouncing back and forth. Can you just keep bouncing back and forth and lean forward and see what happens and then of course he starts running and as he's running it's screaming holy crap. And so I said so clearly you know you don't have planar fashias or you wouldn't be able to do that he still wouldn't have the surgery you know.
So this is the thing that amazes me is that it's I guess it's a case of if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail that there's so much of that going on when it comes to lower extremities especially feet and angles that are blown away. Yeah I think that you know kind of circles back to everything we can talk about shoes or foot and angle injuries is that it's very easy to get really myopic and look at like one feature of a shoe or one part of the body and say that this is the problem but really everything is connected. Right. A lot more difficult to look at the body that way and but we do you get these really great outcomes you know and so it's like that cause and effect like what are the things that influence all of this and trying to break down scientifically is a challenge but.
Well there's more to it than that so your point of everything is connected. And it allows things that way is more complicated. This is I think one of the real challenges is and goes in two directions. The first is I'm going to say from the consumer and I don't mean someone buying a product like the consumer of physical therapy for example.
They expect that there's a simple easy quick answer for whatever they walk in with. And of course as a medical practitioner you want to provide some benefit you want to provide what they want you want to give them something so that frankly even if it's a long course of action you're giving them something so they get the hint that there's like the end of the tunnel so they keep coming back and they're compliant with what you're recommending. But then there's the second part which is that most practitioners and I'm going to upset a few people right now know actually I won't ask them well I'll say most practitioners don't have the eyes to see. And so seeing that complicated thing and trying to work and figure it out on the fly because you're not going to just get it immediately and have an instant prescription.
And when I said that you know there's going to piss people off I realize it well because everyone who's listening to this is going to think well I'm doing great. I'm not one of those guys. I don't think that but Irene Davis does this event with Brian Hideschite and oh gosh it's blank on a name so embarrassing anyway it's called the science of running medicine. His name will pop into my head in a second.
And the two other people Brian and the guy who's name I'm blank on right now they present a relatively simple intervention for running injuries. Irene presents this whole very linear but complex thing for how to diagnose and treat running injuries that I would argue is probably more valuable in the long run but takes good eyes to see and people who are patient and willing to put in the work. And when you go to the event most people gravitate towards the other two. Now it's because it's the simpler solution.
It's easier to implement and easier for people to understand even if it's not the ultimate solution. Yeah so anyway my point being. For one art to making the complex simple right. Yes exactly and so I love that you're doing all the research you're doing and we're about to jump into that.
But then there's that other part and before we get into the research of like getting it out into the public and by public I mean both practitioners and consumers in a way that gets adopted and gets used. So you're doing all this stuff. What talk about the phenomenon of getting people to go oh and then put it into practice. Yeah so that's I mean I ties into what I'm at now right so after my PT career I started in my PT career I started testing shoes.
Working with some new equipment that hadn't existed before but we had it at the pro athlete testing facility that we worked on and finding out how shoes influence firstly exactly both from an injury perspective and a performance perspective which I think is often ignored outside of running and just starting studying things and then footwear brands started asking me to test their products with a few goals and that was really the start of key loss was footwear brands wanted to have access to independent lab testing that was unbiased. They wanted it to have testing done on actual people doing the activity that they were doing and doing the issues. And then they wanted the reports to be something that not only made the science easy for them to understand but also gave them recommendations on how to make their shoes better. And so really if I summarize what my life is about now is how do we help footwear brands make shoes better for everyone in the world and that can obviously be better is a lot of different things we've been boiling down for the last 10 years now next next month is our 10 year anniversary.
So we had ours for five months ago. I knew it was like the same time I was on business. It's crazy. It's a huge landmark to make it this far.
Thanks and it's funny I had a previous company I was at one point I was visiting my parents they were having some sort of party on what was going on and one of their friends is a guy who had been the CEO and co-founder of some multi-billion dollar brands and he came up with me literally crying and he said how long has your business been around I said five years ago do you have any idea how rare that is and it was like the first time that I took a moment to go wow and same thing where we are now now it's 10 years. So I don't want to go too far on this tangent yet. How often did you see that companies that were coming to you for research were actually hoping for some confirmation bias. I mean that's a weird way of putting it.
No that's a great question man. I will tell you because when I started doing all this testing luckily it was almost like a side hustle at the beginning I was still treating patients full time and I was doing the testing because I believed in it but I was just doing it on the side and thinking it might have been where I could. It was just me again I didn't have support staff or anything like that I was just running like I thought it was important to do a lot of the brands that first were coming to me didn't want us to test their existing product they wanted to test product that was in development and that I was really great because that's where I thought we can make the biggest change and that's what made me feel the best. And to kind of your point about how do we get this message out into the world rather than making published research papers I don't know the other scientists were going to read.
I realized that if we made the reports really easy that it would spread like a wildfire through the brand that everybody would want to see it and then I would get asked to go to sales meetings and then there I could talk about what we did to make the sheet better and how it actually worked and then now the sales people brought it to the stores and then the stores brought it to the customers and created this loop on how to get the data out there. There was a few studies early on that people contacted us and said hey we have this product here's what we know it does we just need to prove it so that we can market it. I did not do very many of those studies before I realized that we weren't actually making those shoes better while we were trying to reinforce their bias and in doing that usually those studies actually didn't show what those brands had believed about their shoes. You know a lot of times the products did do things well or maybe if it did something well there was a huge detriment that in my opinion really was not an advantage.
So as a quick story this is a quick example because he looked started in 2010 and as you know that was a down economy but we were also in the midst of one of the fastest growing segments of the shoe industry ever which was the toning shoe market and the very first big brand who was made nameless but the very first big brand that I ever tested for came to the end that hey we have these toning shoes there's everybody. Let's have a look. Hold on just pause there so for people who don't know toning shoes. I'm sorry I'm sorry.
Toning shoes the idea was that by wearing these things it was going to increase muscle activation particularly it was going to give you a butt like Kim Kardashian that was one of the companies and so yes just by wearing them you get toning. Now my contention was any toning benefit you would get were simply because these things typically weighed a ton so it was like having ankle weights on. Yeah I got 18 ounce shoe right. So now people have a contextual what toning shoes are please give me.
And you know here's the thing some of the brands that were first out there did look like they had marketing campaigns based on science it was you know hard numbers it's at 38% more but muscle activation. So this brand came to me and said hey this is the fastest growing new segment of the shoe industry ever we want part of it here's our shoe can you test it find out calorie burn and muscle activation and all these things. It's like yeah I can do that. So we went tested there shoe tested a bunch of the other products and tested against controls.
I found nothing. To your point there was only one shoe that showed any sort of difference but it literally was a 20 ounce shoe so like in a quarter. The other ones that are like you know half of them. So anyway you know we didn't find anything and me being honest I was concerned I talked to my mentor I was like what do I do they were counting on this.
These marketing campaigns are spent on those Mondays like do your scientist you have to hold true to what you know is right with the data. So I went to them and obviously it's a big deal for me it's a big company and I remember being on phone call presenting the data to them. We didn't have zoom at that time so we can be face to face thank god. And then he told me so bad they were screaming cursing like how the F to be wasted all this money with you your lab is a piece of S we could have gone to somebody else that has a better lab and that hurts when you're a small company you know like I'm like I'm losing this as a potential client and they're saying that I suck like that doesn't feel good.
So fast forward six months later I'm still in PT clinic working part time at this point and usually what I would do is I would take like my business calls it before patience lunch time and at the end of the day. So lunch time comes and I get a call when I look at the ID and it's them and I'm like I don't want to talk to them last time I talked to them six months ago they yelled at me and they told me I stopped. So I didn't take a call but they left me a message and I didn't listen to it by call my mentor and I was like hey what do I do man like do we live in Santa Barbara it's beautiful your business is doing fine you're going you don't meet them right now. So just drive to the beach after work and if they start yelling at you just put the phone down and let them yell and get it out because they're like you don't need them to come up.
And unfortunately I didn't realize everything that happened that day but that was the day that the big lawsuits hit and you know 20 to 30 million dollar lawsuits against these companies bankrupted countless companies you know 10 of the companies that bankrupted and they called me to say thank you because of the report that we gave them they ended up chilling that product line just keep the money that they lost and they were able to say face and avoid all of these big lawsuits that had hit so they were grateful and so if anything we've been rewarded for holding true to the science and moving against bias but yeah it's kind of a funny story to look back you know it's I'm glad we did what we did at that time so it would have been really easy to tell. No that's great well look you know the other part though and to your point about making it accessible to people so they can already go viral this is a good something I said to Irene and Sarah Rogen a number of people who've done research on natural movement. So you know the problem is when you publish this stuff it's just not sexy it's just not something that makes people go uinna and more there's not billion dollar companies who are behind what you're doing who have access to the media where they can descend press release and get printed on this verbatim. I mean the one I've been talking about lately is Nike has they sponsored a study that they say is independent which is a very interesting thing.
They created the training plan again for the independent study I'm using air quotes a lot today and now what they're what they're advertising is hey this product was designed to reduce injury well that was the design and according to the study it did reduce injury except that what you don't see until you really dig in and I did and I contacted the person who did the study is that they compared the new shoe to the old shoe and the new shoe was 50% of your injuries except for the old shoe they're best selling motion to old shoe during the course of the study over 30% of the people got injured and so in the new shoe quote only 15% got injured and this is supposed to be good and so the way it's published in the media is reduced injury by 50% didn't say one out of seven people were still getting injured in a 10 to 12 week period which is my nothing. So there's a thing I wanted to say about that the independent study so look you know that my particular I'll use the word bias for the fun of it is that natural movement is the most important thing that letting you do what they can is the most important thing is I'm almost every shoe that doesn't allow that which is most footwear is getting in the way I mean I love that you what I think you described before is how you were researching how the footwear was affecting people and performance because most of the way it's typically presented first of all is that the footwear doesn't have a negative impact on performance in any way and in fact sold all sold with the idea that is going to improve performance and reduce injuries the way that like the all the new Nike stuff all the super super thick super lightweight stuff is now and this is something did you know Bill Sands? No. Bill was the head of biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee.
He had a lab at what's now Colorado Mesa University that it was like a million out of lab it's super fun and people used to call him to have him research stuff and same thing they wanted to prove the point that they were trying to sell as it how many times have you been able to demonstrate that the point they wanted to make was actually valid he was pretty much none and what he would do when he got in his lab he put you in your favorite shoe and have you run on a giant treadmill 5 feet wide 10 feet long in a mission impossible harness so if you face planted you know you're gonna just float over the ground which is super fun yeah and then he'd film you at 500 frames a second which is critical he said you know anything under 250 you don't get the data you need which seemed crazy to me until we discovered that when he analyzed me in the last frame at 500 frames a second my right foot was turning out slightly averting just before to the ground and that pointed us to hamstring issue was like oh anyway so then he'd have you run your favorite shoes then run barefoot then just try every other shoe that you ever wore like kind of doing an eye test you know better worse better worse better worse and he found almost without question 90% of the people without any intervention without any instruction were better barefoot and by better it was meaning you know just looking at how they're hip-for-moving if there was vastus valgus if they're knees were caving in how much vibration there was in their calf how they were applying force and throughout etc and every other shoe was you know he was then comparing to what was that now standard and very rarely did he ever in fact I don't think he ever found anything that ended up being better than that so it was a question of how close can we get to that so that was his thing so that's a long prelude to you know my bias so I'm curious in terms of making shoes better when I think the only way to make them better is to rip them apart and get rid of almost all the design features that makes them familiar talk to me about what that whole thing that I just said that was gonna turn into a question that I got lost in it. This is what I like to do all day to talk about what is better and to me that the one thing that is really apparent in a lot of what we quote unquote know how exactly it's too what we know about shoes is really we know about running shoes running shoes have been the most steady thing on the planet if you look at any of the footwear journals or any of the footwear research it's gonna be over 90% running shoes and there are so many other important categories of four out there so he was really fortunate to test everything from high heels to hiking boots you know we will test a you know a sandal a sneaker a lifestyle shoe a kid shoe all these things basketball soccer you name it like we're testing everything and that's really opened our minds to the two things that we need to take keep in mind we're looking at what makes us you better is who is the individual and then what is the specific of the activity that we're doing so we can say like let's go out of running for a second let's look at the work and occupational category it's one of one of the one that we based on our database has the biggest opportunity for improvement because most of shoes suck there are a few they're really good and that gap is massive that's how we know there's massive room for the average to improve so if we look at like say a restaurant worker a restaurant worker they're gonna be moving in multiple directions over multiple surfaces with multiple contaminants they're gonna be on their feet all day they're gonna need something that is gonna be dramatically different than somebody that's working in a warehouse where they're maybe working on solid concrete all day probably not being exposed to as many things that can cause slip hazards but there's gonna maybe be a lot more trip hazards and they're maybe gonna have a lot heavier things that they can drop on their feet so they're gonna need protection there so if we look at this you know traction some fatigue reducing elements is gonna be really important for the restaurant worker when you look at the occupational worker things maybe like a an impact protection from like dropping things on their toes like a to guard in a met guard those things are gonna be more important for a trip guard so they don't stumble over the electrical cable that was going across the the walkway so if we look at these things you know these are both categorized as occupational shoes totally different needs same thing if we look at outdoor footwear right now we just somehow get screwed together that could be trail running and hiking and even hiking can be like hiking where you go for a couple hours to a multi-day backpacking trip where you're gonna be eight to ten hours a day with a sixty pound pack on your back and exposed to different temperatures and snakes that invite your feet and all this stuff so we really need to look at like who is the individual and the activity that they're doing and this is why I love about all this is this gives us free rain to say there's room for a lot of different shoes to exist on the shoe wall right because not everybody's the same we need to build lots of different shoes to meet these different categorical needs that also do change over time the way people run now isn't the way people were running ten years ago like nobody was doing ultra marathon ten years ago and now it's relatively commonplace so we do need to change and constantly make things better so what are the some of the examples you just gave there's obviously youth is specific issues for something better but what are some of the things that you see in their say common factors among better versus worse yeah a lot of things that we analyze in the lab the big ones that we really boil down to is comfort function which is going to be more like the you know the flex and the torsion of the shoe and impact protection don't look at durability and traction those are the big four things that he looks focuses on and there's like little sub roots in each one of those but if you look at comfort I think comfort is the one thing that we all agree is important you know I don't talk to anybody that says I wish my shoes were less comfortable it's a thing and people ask me what I do for a living I answer my saying let me ask you a weird question do your feet feel better at the end of the day than they did at the beginning of the day and they say no and they're right from there so we make them comfortable so anyway science I think has generally done a pretty bad job at making an understanding what is comfort so we try to set out and figure out like let's try and find new measurement systems that can help analyze like when somebody says issues more comfortable what is it so the three things that we commonly test for and comfort is going to be the fit which fit is our number one requested test and use sensors to quantify shoe fit underfoot cushioning and then temperature management now here's some of the things that are exciting for you because I think if we look back to that original zero shoot right the sandal if we look at that you know it was very thin I had a pair of them you know you have traction on the bottom very thin amount of rubber just to kind of distribute some foam to distribute some pressure and then a really minimal upper not to use a cliched word right but if we think about this two of the three things that influence comfort for us are going to be fit and temperature management now fit it's mainly around the ball of the foot and if you look at the original zero shoot it wasn't anything that was going to constrict the ball of the foot or the totes particularly like the pinky and the fourth so so okay there's a good chance that that that's going to be comfortable the other one that surprises a lot of people including myself when we first started observing it is temperature so temperature the bottom of our feet are going to be pretty much the same temperature regardless because the skin's really thick there's not a lot of sweat glands and it's always in contact with something it doesn't matter if you're in a sandal or a work it's full contact and those little purples that people put in so like they're right but total waste of time but the top of the foot is really where we see temperature differences and one of the things that influence that is in a normal shoe we have a thick pad of tongue that's overlapped by two side walls of the van and then we're going to have lacy going across it too so there's no place for that heat to vent out so what we find is that in the first 90 seconds that somebody wears a shoe if their foot temperature heats up beyond a certain amount which is usually around like one and a half degrees centigrade if their foot increases by that amount they're going to say that shoe is less comfortable but they won't say that because their foot feels hot which is crazy so they're brain realizes that ooh my foot's getting hot in this thing that sucks I'm going to tell you the brain that I don't like it as much you're going to say ooh I don't like that one but you know we won't know why we'll just say it's less comfy. What if my feet are imperial we're not powerful here? Sorry I said my captain what if my feet are imperial and not metric how much are they?
I know we can struggle so often with you know I love standard but yeah changing temperatures based on who we're talking to and stuff. So that's super, super interesting I love the fact that people misrepresent what the cause of an experience is and I'll tell you a funny story this is again totally tangential about that so way back when starting when I was 12 until I was about 20 I made a living doing magic and one of the tricks was my favorite trick the way it looked is you would take a pen you'd like see somebody had a pen and take the pen from them they go oh there's one of those radio pens and you click it and suddenly music starts coming out of the pen you click it and the music stops and you know you just keep doing this people were like freaking out and then you hand them their pen back well the way the trick worked is that you had a radio shoved into your pants with a switch that you had behind your belt basically it was just like two pieces of metal that were separated by some foam and if you expand your belly then the switch would hit and then the radio that's so funny. Now here's the kick so the radio is like two feet from where the thing is but people's brain as soon as you say there's a sound coming out of this and they hear the sound their brain makes the sound come out of that so we're constantly doing these weird things where we're misrepresenting our own experience because we don't know I mean one of the craziest things about our own experience check this one out is a thing called binding. If I touch your nose at the same time I touch your toe you experience it as happening simultaneously except that it doesn't happen simultaneously because the nerves from your nose to your brain are shorter than from your toe to your brain so these things happen at a different time in your brain but your brain binds them together make it feel like they happen at the same time and we have no way of experiencing this as other than simultaneous but that's not what happens so anyway so I love the temperature thing which is really really interesting and actually makes me think about it already but I've been having about some designs lately but not lately.
Good, what are they going to do right? Well yeah actually but I want to get into the part that you mentioned the middle one which is cushioning because this is one of those things that as far as I can tell it's so massively misunderstood the way we like to say is look if you lie down on a temper petal bed it's going to feel great but that doesn't mean it's good for you or will feel good over time and especially as it slowly breaks down and that's going to change. That's going to change things over time as well and it's going to be so slow as to be imperceptible and by the time you notice it it's too late in your body's all out of whack and all the rest so talk to me about that cushioning thing from what you've seen and how that relates to comfort in more than just putting it on your foot and feeling hey it's like a great bit. Yeah you know so this is like one of the big things that we have is kind of our big missions right now is what we call the memory foam myth because like you said the temper petal thing is got everything in memory foam is great but really it does not cushion well for shoes because it cushions great for like one or two steps and then after that it just doesn't respond enough before you take your next step and right after 10 steps it's really bad you know so this is where the important thing for us is that the cushioning has to be appropriate to the individual and the activity and so like recently we've been doing a lot of studies on work this and cowboy boots big water boots meant for like you know people trucking around like you know a 40 pound tool belt plus like you know carrying heavy equipment and things like that and a lot of times if you look at that product it's a really hard polyurethane sole and maybe they have you know three or five millimeters of foam inside of the shoe and the insular they think it's gonna cushion it and that material might be great if you looked at like 150 pound person that was just in a lifestyle shoe that had a nice soft EVA sole that that might actually cushion in these people that were testing it completely bottoms out right and so it's really not doing anything and so you know we're testing maybe different foam compounds trying to find a difference and all of them suck you know fine but of course the best of nothing they just don't work for that individual activity right until we need to change the the habits of these what we're brands to say like hey let's rethink how we're getting comfort in work boots because this is your customer and this is the amount of force they're putting on it you know and so I think that's where things get really interesting and another one that I'll kind of say is just a common common issue that we face is a lot of the big app like brands want people to be able to purchase the same shoe on the shoe wall that they're pro-athlete.
Oh don't even have to say. It sounds great in theory. Oh my god. You know like let's just like I'm just gonna take a big athlete because one of the most famous athletes plus he plays for my LA Lakers when they're not on the coronavirus hold is LeBron James.
LeBron James is a massive individual right? I am a very slight individual. I love the way LeBron James used because I love LeBron I want to be like him but if he's wearing the shoe that cushions him and gives his like whatever 270 pound body that's coming down on massive jump impacts when I'm walking around that that stuff is going to be hard as a prick to me like my body's not going to deflect it. So for me as the individual and the ability level that I have playing my terrible basketball so you know I think that there's this is what things have to be really really specific and so if we put it into the context of your shoe you know one thing is that volume doesn't always indicate more cushion it's you know that nature of what type of material are using whether the specifics of the activity the individual and then you know what type of sensation do you want you know I think Steven I know you like you do a lot of like fast track work and things like that I love you know I'm not a long distance guy I like running fast miles you know a lot of this kind of mile hold on you're telling me it's possible to run an entire mile like in a row yeah right it's insane who would do that I got to do my own year because you know I do the dog mile every year and last year my dog and I ran a 4.22 so I like running fast nice but you know a lot of the normal kind of running shoes aren't good for that like especially happens have gotten a lot softer and a lot higher volume.
If you think you'll have to run a fast mile in that like if you see and if you look I'm going to go back to me as a hundred meter runner so just announced and it's not that I want to pick on them but my god it's easy to like he just announced their new sprinting spike and it has a big cushioning thing in the forefoot it's like why wait you're telling me that reducing impact forces if it does that which it already really doesn't probably just slows them down they're changing the curve but suffice it to say you're going to be putting less force in the ground or putting force in the ground slower and that's going to make you faster how when we know so can I think something that maybe somebody in your audience has added to test this I have been wanting to test this theory for a while now for the last two years for sure especially when the vapor fly came out right so if we look at the vapor fly let's assume all other features being equal right weight is equal stiffness and the rocker shape are equal right if we take a shoe that has a thicker stack height right that came to lengthen out somebody's stride length by a small mile right over the course of a marathon does that mean that they would actually be taking fewer steps over a mile in the higher stack height shoe again all of the features being equal than the lower stack height shoe and I don't know the answer to this is just not interesting pondered and it's hard because there are a lot of things like I think the vapor fly actually is a great shoe we've done independent testing on it and gotten the same exact results that they have so I know that there's some truth there for a legal marathon I'm going to pause for a second so first of all it's a really interesting question all I could think of is is I knew a guy I was at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circa sitting in like a very back row with a couple of people and as they're doing the initial paraders a guy walking by him's you know 20 foot stills and I said do you want to see the guy in the stills fall down and I went what are you gonna do I said I'm not gonna leave my seat do you want to see him fall down is it what are you gonna do is it's gonna nothing I'm literally not gonna leave my seat they went okay so as he walks by I yell hey Nick he turns around on the stumbles and he doesn't fall down but I recognize the guy through his makeup and someone I know but of course it's so interesting you know he's taking these giant long strides but it's slow because it's a lot of a lot of weight that he's trying to move so in this is kind of I may you know the biggest thing about the vapor fly is that it's lightweight that's a big deal and then yeah if it's possibly going to increase your stride length and be without increasing the amount of effort it takes to do that there may be a there there for that everything else that I've heard you know it's like nonsense someone whose name will remain name was because I don't want to get him to man at me until I get him on this podcast and then start yelling at him talks about how the carbon fiber is acting like a no a lever needs a fulcrum and there's no fulcrum they talk about the rocker bottom and then you look at the close-up video of kipchogae when he's doing the two-hour marathon and every one of the runners that him and all the people that are pacing him they're all four-foot midfoot strikers they never touch the heel they never use the rocker bottom at all so the whole idea of that is you know complete nonsense also so there's people who are making up all these stories and what you came up with is the only logical one that I've ever heard so again I don't know but maybe with their sprints bike that's gonna be doing something no it's only it's only like you know like four millimeters higher it's actually what they did is they took the cushioning that they were putting on the inside of the shoe and the other thing I will say this is something that I've been saying for a long time and I've never been proven wrong on it is little things make a huge difference in footwear so hopefully there is something that they've been able to find out with that and hopefully makes our athletes better we'll see well two things one Nick's little thing and something great he took he took a pair of paper fly and he ran I don't know if it was a 400 or a mile no sorry he'd been running in those but he said let's see how they work short distance so he did a hundred meters and those and a hundred meters in his sprinting spikes and in his spikes he was significantly faster and so and he said same thing these are cushiony the vapor flies are really cushiony so they're really kind of slowing you down on the ground and it seems likely but yeah those little things are interesting but then just there's so many ideas that someone comes up with and then someone wins a race with that product and then everyone assumes that that product must be better even though on any given Sunday someone else could have won that race and so there's so many design elements that I see especially in sprinting spikes actually where there's clearly no research proving that that thing is better but it's become the ubiquitous design element because someone won a race in it or to you know about looking at professional athletes I say this all the time it's like what do you care what kibchogi ran in you're not 105 ponkinian who runs at 13 miles an hour exactly that gets the train all day every day right he was paid to do it and I want to get into the fact that he did these you know world record setting things without any blood testing at all I'm not making any guesses I'm not saying I'm not making any assertions I'm just saying it's interesting so all right so so so I want to go back I want to talk about some more little things and this kind of goes in we're talking about with comfort is women's shoes right this is a big thing for me and I will tell you if there's one number to take away from what is important about women's shoes it he wants to test a lot of product right like we've already tested over 130 styles to date this year and we're just for the first three months our data is over 2000 shoes everything from high heels to hiking boots running though is one of our bigger database categories if you look at our running shoe database we test a women's shoe one woman's shoe for every 7.8 men's shoes first of all who's sending you point eight of a shoe that's ridiculous that's insane for the simplest reason is that women buy more shoes than men right so I know there's no logic that makes any sense with this except for a few things that we'll talk about in a second but it's not limited to running it's also in basketball we're testing about three and a half men's shoes to one women's shoe outdoors about three to one occupational is is it just under three to one so for almost every category that we have with two exceptions we are testing dramatically more men's shoes than women's shoes and if you think about it so what is the impact of this well number one we've already talked about like the shoe needs to be specific to the individual and the activity that they're doing so that we're assuming that women are equal to men and not in the women's equality way like women are the same as a man and that the activity that they're doing is the same as a man and these are terrible assumptions and then if you look at the other outcome that I think is really the most important thing if we look at one of the things that we talk about is important is comfort right comfort is huge for all categories overall comfort scores that are women give us are lower for each category than what men give us so we can fit based on these you know almost two thousand shoes that women's shoes are less comfortable than men's and we can relate this directly to the fact that we aren't testing and analyzing women's shoes enough so when they report less comfort is it for similar reasons that anybody else would report discomfort but they're having more of it or for different reasons yeah it's really interesting on that one fit is the one where most women complain and that is that is consistent across all categories except for women's sandals because usually a lot of like say thong sandals because they're so visible they actually shape them differently for women they use thinner straps and they just make them look like women and they have a different one for men so that's not a factor and then also for dress shoes again because there aren't as many men wearing high heel shoes as women so a lot of those are fit more to women and that's what our database backs up as well but if we look at it for fit in general and I hope a lot of your women viewers are are going to not have an I say this the majority of women's shoes are going to fit loose in the heel and tight around the ball to flip and that's going to be something that has to do with you see small members small is important in footwear it's small differences in the proportion of the heel shape and the forefoot shape in women versus men so I love that you have science to back that up because this is an argument that I get into not infrequently where people complain that we sell men's shoes on women's shoes and they go but I'm a woman and I go why don't I go well then buy the quote men's shoe I'm a man I'm have a narrow quote by the quote women's shoe the problem is this is how people shop and there are statistical differences and people like to pretend that either they're not or that that you could make shoes and describe them in some other way that would be more useful and I go it's possibly true but because people were so attuned to buying this way we can't be the company that creates this whole new way of thinking about how to get shoes so yeah I was at a event for footwear CEOs a while ago where there was some apparel company women's apparel company who had just gotten into footwear and it's like a big deal apparently I will tell you candidly that at these events for footwear CEOs people take this stuff too seriously you know look be better if we were all sort of malice and we all said the same uniform and we didn't have to pay so much attention to filling our closet with new clothes and trying to express our personality we can't imagine that would be nice but since that's not going to happen but the kicker on this they had all these new shoes they were all high-heeled something or other but as they were showing photos there wasn't one photo where the person who was in the shoe fit the shoe it's like these are your new shoes you picked the models and you couldn't pick people who even fit the shoe that ain't good and the number one thing that I saw people scaling out over the edges because the toe box is way too small oh yeah so so this goes to our the thing we let in with of women having no feet so I mean do you have any thoughts about why people are ignoring women in their feet when it's obviously more important because of their buying habits and the number of things they do and the number of different types of shoes they typically have and I'm not saying I'm more shoes but you know it's kind of fun because we didn't really structure a lot of this conversation but a lot of the topics that we've gotten to already are going to feed into this so number one is that running shoes are the most research footwear that we are aware of you know that you can study volume the number of shoes have been tested all that stuff and for that and most running shoes are actually pretty good now but so running is very don't be snarled on that one yeah so let me say compared to other categories that we work okay all right there's a lot of crap for web product out there so I'll give you that still very very big in front of me but if you look at the makeup of most running shoe brands and now again there are going to be some exceptions but on average there are more men that are designing and developing the shoes true and most of the time we're designing products we want to make product that works for us so when these shoes are coming in and they want to get feedback they're mainly testing it on the guys that are designing and developing it or if you know samples are expensive if they're only going to get one sample they're going to get a men's size nine so now that's trickled into this idea that like okay if we do that then we'll just scale it out to all the other sizes and for women we'll shrink it and so it's just become this idea that it started out with a lot of men that were making the product they made it for themselves and now we just kind of have this pattern that we do so we've been again like I want to try and make the entire thing about shoes better we've been trying to challenge brands to like let's do one-to-one testing men's and women's and we're trying to take off any barrier that we can for that time cost all that stuff we're trying to remove it just because we know it's important so last year we worked with over 50 different footwear brands I'm very happy to say we have five that for 2020 have already committed to doing one-to-one men's to women's but again if you look at it on a percent that's only 10 percent of the companies that we work with which is a fraction of all the companies in the world so there's still a lot of work to do with this to get to where we can test women's products better and there's certain categories that like I think also we marginalize women like work boots there's a lot of women that were work boots and very rarely are work boots being tested on women another one is basketball I will tell you the two categories of testers that come into see what's that absolutely hate their product is remember you talked about your running tests where you wear the shoe that you like and then you go to other shoes and go barefoot if you I will ask women in those two categories to tell us what product they like and I don't like any of it I hate them but these are just the best that I found so basketball and work boots are just atrocious because you know it's a high activity you have multiple directional stuff and there's a lot of demands being placed on the shoes and they just don't fit very well yeah we actually this kind of goes into another thing it's it's not just women that are being ignored generally a lot of shoes are just made for North American and European feet totally and this conversation we can also say Asian people don't have feet and South American people in Pacific Islanders they don't have feet you know it's not just women there are other groups but you know as far as a size women is the one that is the biggest group that we see being ignored it's really interesting we I'll confess we kind of ignored women for something we actually let's see can I say this legally we developed a shoe for a particular sport and we made a men's version simply because we knew more men who were in that sport we got approached by a woman who was in that sport we gave her the shoe it didn't fit perfectly she had a great response though she said I couldn't spray my ankle and he said you paid me too which was nice because it was that's the number one injury in this particular sport so and frankly you know we're really small company we didn't have the cash to make something specific for her because just making the moles for the household was going to come out to us dollars and it was going to cost us like five grand just to make one product to test and we're not quite there yet so it's that's our excuse but but everything else we do we're very attentive to these the differences in foot shape I mean when we first started the business we were doing custom made sandals for people where they would trace the foot send us a tracing we'd make a shoe and remember this yeah so we have like six thousand tracings which gave us a really interesting database once we started doing close-to-shoes that informed how we how we made those and they're never going to be perfect for everyone you know there's always a bell curve and there's going to be people at either end although the people at either end get mad at you for not accommodating them no matter I had one person get really mad you know we didn't our shoes didn't fit them and I said I got to ask you I'm not trying to be obnoxious but what shoes have you found that do fit you and they said none I mean I don't know what you're going to do then so and I mean and it's painful for me because I want to be accommodating for everyone but yeah yeah we want people to be happy right yeah but it's hard to make everybody happy it's impossible unfortunately but I want to back up to something that I'm really really curious about so we know people who work on factory floors who are on their feet all day who are in our shoes and who report that they're pain free for the first time ever and I'm not saying that you know I'm not making medical claims I'm talking anything like that I'm not saying anecdotes equal data but when you have a preponderance of anecdotal data you can't ignore it what occurs to me and I think about this with basketball too or soccer for example where there are people who are growing up in places where they don't have shoes to begin with and so this is all leading into the same idea which is when you're doing testing is there a way to account for one of two things either the person's natural gate and or anything about what's going on with their foot structurally or you know the condition of their foot because if you get someone habituated to wearing big big padded motion and roll shoes and they overstride and heel strike no matter what they do that's going to be a different experience than if they're used to getting their foot underneath their body when it lands and using their muscles like a mitt's attendance the shock absorbers instead of trying to rely on the foam or similarly anyone who has stronger feet independent of our tight is going to be different than someone who has weaker feet because they've been in shoes that don't let their feet move then I'm just really curious about how one would factor those things into research to determine what kind of information you're then getting about things like comfort fit etc etc yeah that's a great question to you so one of the things that we like to do at U of S and I think some that's made us really specialist we like testing to be done really fast as you know it's but we're in this room usually quickly so we do everything in two weeks and we have to be able to test a large enough amount of people in those two weeks to be able to be representative of the why is part of the population that issue is going to be targeted towards so right like this golden foot theory of like oh this is the one foot that we're going to put it on if it always works you know we're 300 people in our tester database that represent different activities different body weights different foot structures you know so we have wide and narrows we have flexible and inflexible we have people that are under 30 we have people that are over 60 you know we have all these different things because people are going to change one thing that's a really fun case study example of this is we've been doing like I said occupational is a big one for us right now and we were doing some boots that were meant for people that are in like high flexible positions so like gardeners or landscapers that are not or roofers that are like leaning up on these roofs or HVAC people that are on their hands and knees crawling and the idea was is a lot of these boots are really stiff so if you look at numbers right human bolliput joint if you look at the medical text as it's supposed to flex about 45 degrees the average foot when walking or running flex is about 25 degrees so we know that most shoes should have at least 20-25 degrees of flex without restriction right now there's certain people that have a lot more flex like offensive lineman and football they flex a lot more we know that so a lot of work boots they really only flex about five or ten degrees because they have to be so durable right but we wanted to see what did what did these workers who are on their knees kneeling and squatting all day what do they do so we actually did a motion capture study in our lab we found that they're feet flex when they squat or kneel 75 to 80 degrees on average which is bananas we don't think that the human body should do that remember think this is their activity this is what they do right body it's easier if they're limber into that position and they do it so much that they get strong into that position so you don't get a lot of injuries but now this isn't even bigger problem that the boot that they're putting on when it's new only flexes like 10 percent of the range that they needed to flex to so that's why it takes them so long to break it in so this is when we go into these things you really have to study the target population group of who are going to be boiled down how it's going to work in the real world you know i'm going to harp on this for a bit more and think about the study that Dan Lieberman published in camera was nature science i always forget that was comparing habitually barefoot populations to shot populations or taking very much people and putting them in shoes and watching how quickly their gate change and i also think about how you can you know you spot someone 50 yards away you see the take two steps you know who they are or and they often you know are walking away one of their parents did we the way we move is so so central to in many ways our identity that that and when people get into different forward this is the thing that balesan saw in his lab you know every different shoe in gender to different gate and to unless you're a super super elite runner where you could break either you know how to adapt to anything to be able to produce an outcome right that's mind-blowing things yes no we can literally practically put bricks on their feet and they would still you know be running running sub-formiles so yes it was fascinating to see but normal people don't have that and now the interesting thing about that is some of the footwear companies are trying to take advantage of this in ways that are insane i won't mention this one by name but for all if they could they would make a shoe that was the thing you wore when you walked into the bathroom in a different shoe when you walked out of the bathroom but you're now a little lighter so you know they're trying to find every possible permutation of here's why you need something unique for this particular particular activity but the biggest thing i think of is how the footwear affects your gate and how what we keep seeing over and over for the last ten years is when you start doing things where you're having to rely on using your body the way it's designed then it tends to have beneficial results and everything else there's a guy that i know who's at Nike for 30 years he said i worked with that one for 30 years to try to make sure he was an improved performance we couldn't do it and you know that's not that information doesn't come out no one thinks of it that way because we've been sold on this idea for so long not just in footwear in all categories that there is a simple easy solution and technology is always going to be better than what you're built with i don't know where the hell i'm going with this lot so let me let me riff on that a little bit just to be a little bit fair in here because this is something fun that my good friend uh joe ruevio who's a great runner and coach and uh run on the running warehouse uh can i just like to talk about stuff because we just think it's fun to experiment and do different things right and the other week we would have a bunch of you talking about those brush spikes members oh yeah yeah so wait for people who don't know it was a pruma spike it was a pruma sprinting spike and instead of having just like five to eight actual metal spikes it had like 500 tiny little little spike you don't think about taking a hair brush and sticking that on the bottom of your back it's kind of like everybody that was an elite run that ran in those set wheelwriters right you know and to your point like you like to think of like oh hey there's you know the person i won the race did this or whatever those shoes had some magic to them so much that they got banned before we could really test it actually hold on a job on that so i don't think they said i don't know if they said world records they definitely said personal best it was only like two guys i think but from so i i have an article sent it to you i think there was three people i mean these aren't like like put on braces these races line races yeah um leave it with three or four different runners that ran one of them said olympic one of them said world records twice and had them outlawed and the other two likes that like the world's fastest so the year numbers like that so so they were way better all of them are personal best as well so right now it's already taking on the league level guy making it better but here's the problem we never got the full e-veter now because they wanted to kill the technology for being unfair it's exactly exactly where i was going it's an interesting it's very interesting except that of course there's no controls because we don't have an identical twin we're not in the multiverse where you know we get that same sprinter and before he puts on the shoe he splits into two people and he one wears the regular shoe and the other wears the new shoe so the chemicals are iffy at best um but at the same time there are reasons that i can think of for while there's two reasons i can think of what might have happened as well one is totally psychological because we know that there's a massive brain function that has to do with how well you perform essentially your brain is always trying to limit you to a certain extent totally it'll get hurt and so if you so there's a placebo effect is what i'm saying so if you think these things are gonna be better you may your brain may not respond to the same signals that it usually uses to slow you down so there may be a placebo effect there and it's something i've argued about the vapor fly is there's definitely some placebo effects involved because not everyone runs better in the shoe certainly kichogate didn't run four percent better in the shoe or he would have run something like 156 not 159 40 again be that as a may but the second thing is um there's two parts the second thing is that the brush spike may have been interesting because the big the two biggest things that are gonna affect your speed in 100 meters is your drive phase and the traction you need for the drive phase and maybe metal spikes are not the best way to get traction on a modern track surface and then how how well you're performing in the maximum velocity phase basically how slow you slow down is the other part and there and again spikes might not be the best thing for that now but here's the here's the other part that's crazy pruma was gonna be able to patent that and so the reason they got banned was because everyone else suddenly went instead of doing the normal thing of let's copy this they knew they couldn't copy this and so suddenly it was banned because of all the other companies going who's can't be fair so now what's happening with the maximum issues is instead of trying to ban the Nike vapor fly Nike's using this as a PR play going let's see if you can ban us and that's you know instant press and everyone else is just doing their version of the same thing if there was a way of banning a shit ton of foam with carbon fiber in the middle then um or patting that then i guarantee these shoes would have been banned because everyone else would have said we have no way of doing our version of the same thing so as a master spinner i'm of course very interested in things like the brush bike i'm not suggesting we may be working on something that could up end sprinting spikes forever i would never say anything like that and advance on us releasing something that we may or may not be working on but um but there are a lot of interesting things about i guess is where i'm going with this little things make a big difference and sometimes the little things are um just basic physics yeah just look at the if you understand physics then saw a bunch of hand waving about extra padding extra control blah blah makes no sense and then you just get down to the bare essentials of what makes something fast it's the right amount of force applied to the ground in the right amount of time at the right angle that's the basics when we're talking about running everything else is you know i have to look at everything else in relation to is this improving the way we're applying for us the speed we're applying to force in the angle we're applying force if not then it's bullshit because because you're not gonna get prove it we'll prove that it's bullshit or not how about that okay well i gotta i gotta i gotta i gotta get on to the call i do too but but to that point i mean one of the things that you and i both talk about is this all idea of energy return where which is just a marketing marketing jargon for how badly does some amount of cushioning suck and but um and you know again all you through is look at it from the basic idea of physics that we know anything that slows the amount of force slows the force production down reduce the amount of force or spreads out the force is gonna make things not faster and all foam does that mm-hmm yep what more do you need to say so yep so all right we can keep doing this all day long and maybe we'll find a part two at some point i was gonna say we'll find part two when when someone comes out with something that we know is complete nonsense and that they ask you to prove that it's true um and then we'll go you know let's be positive maybe maybe we can do a part two 12 months from now i can say like hey you know what in 2020 we did one to one testing on men's and women's shoes across the board and we're seeing improvements in the product that's out there for women i'm off for it i think that's a good way to accomplish it yeah i think that would be a very big deal i'm sitting here looking at um both men's and women's versions of actually the shoes i'm wearing right now um and uh they're very different shoes so but anyway nice you've got to run i've got her on jeffrey as always total pleasure i'm really looking forward to seeing what else comes out of your lab and your head because it's always provocative sometimes more than it more than it gets credit for being and i would like that to see that change too well thank you Stephen's been a pleasure hanging out with you man and uh my best you thank you so let me first of all once again thank you secondly for everyone else who's been listening or watching thank you you know what to do go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com where you'll find all the previous episodes and all the different ways you can engage with us if you have any questions or having recommendations or suggestions anyone you think should be on the podcast is drop me an email move at join themovementmovement.com again as i like to say if you want to be part of the driving make movement it make the movement of movement happen if you want to be part of the tribe please subscribe but more importantly live life-y first and have fun take care