Episode 175: Building a Foundation for Natural Movement

We think natural movement is an important thing. We think it's a natural thing. We think everyone should be doing it, but maybe not. Maybe you're not ready to do what's natural.

Let's find out on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to well have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with the feet first, because those things are your foundation, where we look at the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies about what it takes to run to walk the dance, the hike to do CrossFit or yoga, or lift, or whatever it is you'd like to do, enjoy a really healthily, efficiently. I'm Stephen Sanchen from zero shoes.com. I'm your host, and you know, the drill. We're all about trying to make natural movement the obvious better healthy choice, the way natural food currently is, and it is a movement, movement.

And because it's a movement, that means you're involved. So if you want to be involved and shred the word, shred the word, shred the word. You can put on a bagel. Some shreds.

That's right. That's right. Thread the word. Thread the thing on the bagel and then some shreds.

You know, to do come to www.join the movement movement.com, where you'll find previous episodes and how and all the ways that you can share and like and review and thumbs up on YouTube and all the things you know how to do. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. And what else do I want to say about that? Normally you see me wearing zero shoes t-shirt today, because it's freezing cold.

I'm wearing my frozen dead guys day t-shirt. We've got the Boulder, Colorado, the area around here, and a Norwegian immigrant who started his own do-it-yourself cryogenic business. That was in the tough shed. Anyway, we're here with Skyler Tanner and Skyler.

Welcome. How are you, man? I'm doing great, man. Just a little bit.

Well, you know, people hooked us up and said, if we're talking about natural movement, you or someone I need to talk to, we've had no conversation, basically, prior to this, which is my favorite way to do it. Let's like jump in. So, and I don't ask people for intros, so I can do their intros, because that's always boring as crap. So who the hell are you and what are you doing here?

So I think the reason I'm here is because in 2011, we were both at the first Taylor effects conference, and you told a great story about the only time you were in a fistfight, and how it was the most ape-like thing possible, how this guy came out. You're like, like, hands up. No, no, no, it was hands up. That was better.

He was lifting his shirt up. I was like, oh, sorry. I was like, it was something out of a David Attenborough flick. And the moment he, like, hit you, it was like, all right, let's go drink a beer.

It was like, that was it. And we had it. That was crazy. No, as he's running towards me, this Atlantic City, I was doing a stand-up comedy at the time on my way home from a gig, and it was just like, it just seemed like this weird, free, destined thing, where all I had to do is let him punch me once, and get it over with, and we'd be done.

And that's exactly what happened. It was the strangest thing I've ever experienced. So I don't know if it was called, I don't know if I would call that being in a fight, because I didn't do anything. Right.

But part of a fight, I was like, it was a fight adjacent. I was a fight adjacent. So, and then you had the time you had just the sandals, and they were like at home sandals, and you had the beads. You were running all the beads up and down.

And so it was just a great kind of, almost open conversation we were talking about. We were thrown together on a panel and worked really well. But yeah, but we didn't have this conversation. And the panel discussion about natural movement was really entertaining, because at one point, I remember saying, everyone's talking about all the different things about natural movement.

And I said, oh, and I remember actually we kind of bonded over this. I said, look, let's not miss words, or let's call us bait, a spade. We can't do what human beings are all doing. We're not walking down to the river and calling rocks to build a house.

We're not walking for 25 miles to get our meal once every other day. Maybe we're not doing those activities. And you can't really fake it. It's sort of like as a sprinter, I get out on the track.

I run as hard as I can. And maybe I'm a little sore the next day. But if I'm in a race, I run for 10 to 12 seconds, and I am toast for a week. So there's a whole different sort of biological thing going on when you've got different biology going on the way people did, when they were either running to catch food or running away from being food.

So you can do all the functional movement you want. It's not the same as doing any of those things. And that kind of put a crimp in the conversation for a little while. But I'm going, yeah, yeah.

Hey, I was, and it's true. I mean, all this is what we were talking about with fun. Because I mean, I orient my life around these. I mean, these are clues at the end of the day.

And we're trying to do a clue-based proxy of what we are forced to do in the past just to survive. On the idea that the things that are killing us now were not prevalent, or at least not based on what we've tried to do next in hunter-gatherer groups are not prevalent in what we do. So how do they move, how do they behave, what do they eat? And that clue is, it's almost like quoting chapter and verse for a lot of people.

It's like, well, they did this thing. They climbed the tree. They did this. And that's what we must do.

And they only use their left arm. That's right. We, what was the, what's the, the spear like lever increasing? Yeah.

The collateral. And so I, well, and that's the case, then we should all ride bulls. Because if you look at the chromagon and the break marks in these skeletons resembles that of rodeo riders. Like if you're trying as a group to bring down a large herd animal, somebody's getting thrown off, somebody's getting thrown off, and somebody's getting real bad.

So you're also then suggesting that some of our Neanderthal ancestors were dressed as clowns running around and jumping into barrels. Right after the carbon wheel, they carved the barrel. I'm just going to be in the house. You're right there.

There's your punch line after the carbon wheel. So, so my background, clinical exercise is all just by training. I mean, I'm a general owner by trade. I've been in this business for 21 years.

And I certainly, if you want, Street cred, except first failure effects, first ancestral health symposium, which, you know, I don't know how much that that treats the tool by makeup coffee. So, so, but you're optimistic. I'm optimistic. I think it would get you the ability to walk into a coffee shop and smell the coffee.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm in Boulder. They have the boiler maker because of the altitude. It's going to drive me crazy.

You're boiling coffee at like 200 degrees there. Right? It's not right. It's all right because it's great.

It's all these collagen bulbs with the full flask and they drop into ice cubes at the end of your cup. It's driving me crazy. I'm going to coffee drinker so I don't know it except that I know of it. Yeah, right.

It's a great visual. Is there a conversation without the use of the word chakra? Yes, I am actually. There's a right.

Well, so my other cousin who used to live in Boulder and could not have the chakra conversation without chakra. And actually somewhere off the grid in the front range, as you do, as you do. As one does. Yes.

One does. It's just inevitable. I mean, when you move to Boulder, you're required by law within 60 days to either get a Subaru or a Golden Retriever. Labrador will get you a warning.

Any sort of doodle now, actually, you get a bonus. You get a bonus. You can't have the pure bread. You can't have the mix.

So anyway, the point is that so coming from this, you know, kind of from the rehab side, but also working with real people side, people in the Pacific Northwest and the wilderness running around and having just having a great time climbing trees, diving in the water, pushing. It gives me a good feeling to see that. It's like when I'm trail running in the green belt, you know, it's somebody got a high-def 4K camera. I mean, I could sell the same thing.

But I think what ends up happening is that the populace at large is pretty sick, even though it's interested in natural movement, and kind of curious about asking these next questions. Where can we go? Can we? I see I'm movement deficient in my life and what's the next step.

And I think about this from a foundational perspective of do these people even have enough body awareness, which don't get the natural movement. Just like zero, she's all point. Your feet are incredibly sensitive, but they shouldn't be painfully sensitive. They're just that desensitized.

Initially, it's like, how many people have held your trachos? Like, I like what you're doing, but my feet can't walk in. My feet hurt when I'm walking their foot. Not a whole lot, but when people say to me, I can't walk barefoot, they usually say something like, oh, I have plantar fasciitis.

And I say, so first let me stick my thumb on your calf and see if I can find a spot. But if I dig on that, your plantar fasciitis goes away, which happens 90% of the time. And for the other 10%, they say they've been wearing orthotics or insoles and supporting their feet for some extended period of time. And so the normal sensation level was painful from us.

It's called a structural level. And I say, well, that's because it's sort of like if you've had your arm in a calf for a year, and then you take it out of the calf, it's what throws away at you. Let your feet move and then start building up some strength again. But to your point, though, I vividly remember when I first started going barefoot primarily, which was now about 12 years ago, it did feel like I was just overstimulating my brain.

It didn't feel like my feet were doing too much. It literally felt like my brain was getting overloaded. And since your brain's primary function is to actually weed out information, because there's way more coming in than we have any ability to process. It just felt like that was about in London.

I see that with people, where at first it's just too much. And then it's not like you're then people have the mistaken idea that what happens over time is their feet get less sensitive. It's just what happens to see, I think, and you can tell me what your take is. It seems that your brain just gets better at weeding out the information you don't need and just paying attention to sensational information that you do need.

It's useful. Yeah, I think that it's actually funny, because I was the first time I ever ran like a barefoot, like five-miler, it was because it was raining. I was wearing the non-padded version of your sandal that has the straps. Were watching a sandal.

Not the rocche, the one that's more like the Z-Trek. It was wearing a Z-Trek. It was starting to rain. It was starting to rain, so my foot was starting to slip around on the top of the side.

I was like, I'm going to hurt myself. So I took him off and ran the side of my miler. It was like a turkey chop. And my feet were fine, right?

Because I've been barefoot for all of my life. He said, I thought we were used to go to college even if he had a phoenix barefoot with the moccasins. So then we got too hot, I put him on. So I have a long history of training barefoot.

So I have a foundation of loading my feet in an unshot or unsupported way. And what do we do anyway to tell people moving into a barefoot of this is either we're telling them to do it walking or just standing, often recommending things like, you know, your feet might have tight spots that you didn't realize using a little bit across the whole tennis ball work. That like rocky pebble platform that y'all sold for a while and that compression kind of balancing that deeper muscles of the foot. So there's often this idea of needing a little bit of prehab just to get us back up to baseline.

So yeah, let's pause there. Because I want to do two things. First, we're already kind of jumping into what I was teasing at the beginning, which is, you know, are people ready for natural? Which seems like a crazy thing, but it's an interesting thing to investigate.

And we can talk about that from, I'll mention what Irene, not argument, but an ongoing conversation I have with Irene Davis about this or, well, anyway, but before we jump there, I'm going to put you on the spot a bit, since this is the movement pod. We like to share a movement thing for people to do, whether they're, if they're in their car, maybe they can do it, maybe not, maybe they can go home. If they're out in public, you know, hopefully they can do it and be embarrassed and we get video of that. Whatever you can think of, can you think of some movement or something thing to share with human beings?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I talk about when, what we do here at Smart Trank is, I talk about evidence-based resistance training and we talk about joint-friendly fitness. What we even mean by that is that, what the hell do I mean by that? Well, 95% of surgeries or therapeutic surgeries are routine because we don't have to find, because we operate the same way.

My biceps tendon is basically in the same place. It's your biceps tendon and I'm the same way. I'm not yours. It's moved.

I'm sorry, I believe it. But the point being is that your arm is inventing backwards with different anatomy. As a human being, things are generally the same. And so if you know that, the reason why surgery is gonna be about 95% routine is because we know where the poor positions are, we know where the ligaments bind, we know where the tendons rub, we know where the tissues compress or impinge.

So one of the things I tell everybody is, a great example of visual dis-active insufficiency, kind of thing going on. This is a classic martial arts joint lock, which is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu takes a full advantage of biomechanical positions. What you often see in a jim though is that people because you feel something in these poor biomechanical positions, they do these exercises because feel is a compelling argument. Even if that feeling is just because it's a poor position, not because you're working more.

So a classic joint lock is the wrist joint lock, right? So the flexor muscles, or the grippy muscles right here, they also move your wrist in the flexion. But as long as you're holding a fist, the muscles on the backside, which come around over the top, they are stretched out over the wrist. It's like a giant crane.

So the only way you're getting the full anatomical flexion is to open your hand, to let it drop all the way down. Oh interesting. And you can't hold a fully closed fist, it's a classic joint lock. You're able to try to do this to break, or it's oftentimes in crop maga or self-defense, somebody comes up to it and says, they're always trying to do this to open the hand because you can't hold it shut because of the biomechanics of the wrist.

And so the second order question you ask then is, knowing these poor joint positions, can we avoid them if we're trying to load muscle tissue, or even second of that, if we are training to make ourselves robust, knowing that we're gonna get hurt in real life, we can give ourselves injury resistance, can we avoid those positions in our training, accepting the risk of the real world? Well, I wanna back up to this wrist thing, because this is a really interesting thing, is to pull your arm. Make a fist. Make your arms perpendicular.

Your arms are perpendicular. Right, right, right, right, right, right, just make a fist. And as much as you flex, right, right, now open your hands and watch how you can bend your hand more and try to make a fist there, and you can't. You can't close the fist.

You know, a whole bunch of tension in the front part of my forearm, but it's actually more in the front, which is kind of funny because the back is getting more stretch. That's like a really weird thing. Now, how do I keep it up for your same thing? It's like, you know, what you wanna do is put joints in positions where they don't wanna move, and then other positions they don't wanna move.

So you're mobilizing someone in two dimensions. And actually I have a funny story being in New York City at a concert in Central Park, and things are kind of muddy when you're blanking down, and people are like walking all over our stuff. Like, look, if you're gonna walk over a blanket, take off your shoes, and some big guy just starts walking over our blanket and his muddy shoes. And I just reach up, I'm sitting on the ground, and I'm not a very big guy.

I just reach up and I grab his wrist in one of these ways that you do this. And I start turning his hand in his wrist and bringing him slowly down to the ground with one thumb. And I was looking at me with this look at those two things like, hey, I would kill you if I were you were standing up, and how are you doing that? Yeah, yeah.

And I felt kind of bad about it, just like, I was trying to make a point, like, just take every damn shoes, no big deal. Yeah. But yeah, it's amazing. And especially those extreme positions, like in the hand of the wrist, how quickly we respond to being in a band position by going, whoa, whoa, stop that.

Or how wrong it feels when one of those positions, I had a quick, pardon me again, a quick aside. I was, we were taking some photos to promote the speed force and the catalog. And I found this cool bush to jump in front of, you get this really cool look, but in the bush was right in front of a sewer drain. And I had to run up to jump on the sewer drain, or off the sewer drain in front of the bush, but I couldn't run in this, like, parallel, or in a straight line, because there was all this mud in the bush side of the street, like, over the curb.

So I had to run on the street, jump onto the sewer drain, then do this leapy thing. And then for 10 times, I'm doing it right. The last time I caught my foot in some weird ass way, and when I kind of rolled onto the ground, my foot felt really peculiar. It's like, is it wet?

I mean, am I bleeding or something? I look down, I didn't see any blood on my shoe. And it's like, how's it going on? And I take off my shoe and my fourth toe, doesn't have the pad of the toe on the ground.

It's pointing up in the air. It had dislocated and spun around 180 degrees. And yes, that look on your face was on my face. Like, it just was so wrong.

And it didn't hurt. Like, oh, that is just not supposed to be that way. And I was surprised at how intense that, oh my god, reaction was considering there was no pain. Then I just touched it and snapped back in place.

Like, oh, yeah, that's probably not good. And the pain probably came later. Your brain's almost going, like, I don't know what the hell up in there, pain, don't touch it. It actually never really hurt out of the doctor.

And he said, well, I'm not going to bother taking an x-ray. Because if you broke it, we do the same thing. If you just dislocate it, which is just tape it up to the toe next to you. So just tape it up, leave it around for a couple weeks.

It'll be fine. And it's exactly what happened. But again, just like the effect of something that the extreme ends of our body just gives us so much information. But anyway, so there's one movement thing.

So keep going about this whole phenomenon of joint and wrong position. So when I talk to clients about it, and we'll bring this back to natural movement. And because of the point I make here is somebody who likes to die, I love this stuff. But the idea that, well, cyanide is natural.

Poisonide is natural. Lots of things are natural. The question is whether or not they are helpful to us. And the opposite question or the backwards question is, can something that is semi-constructed help us to live more naturally?

I mean, yeah, obviously. I mean, that or at least what we want from the natural living. I don't want to necessarily to sleep outside all the time. I don't necessarily want to crush things with rocks.

I want the things that came as a secondary consequence of that. Natural food. Let's face back. Let's run around at a one cloth.

Only because we're an Austin man. It's cool. It's fine. I love lots of things about their today.

So we want the consequence that the natural movement gives us. And so my whole thing when I'm working with people, I'm like, I want you to get hurt doing things you value. Things you'd rather be doing. But you shouldn't be getting hurt in here.

And so I want to support people who are taking initiative to get themselves healthier, whether it's material on putting out or something like this and that idea that sometimes something a little constructed to help build up your foundation can help more quickly get you to the thing you'd rather be doing, which is spending more time on your feet without pain and living in the world. So two things. Thing number one. Well, I'll preface thing number two, which is let's talk about things they could do.

But first, I want to give an example of something where people are putting a joint in a wrong position or doing something out of whack that they think is good because they're getting the unpleasant sensations that are giving information to them. So every human being on planet Earth is a function of kind of actually the way I wish I could give you this for showing us. I could probably find it the way in which we became throwing creatures is this winding up of our pack over our shoulder, winding up to snap as a giant rubber band across our body. That over time comes as a function of changing the orientation of our shoulder.

Our shoulder joints face much more forward. While we still maintain the ability to hang, obviously, and to breaky eight, our shoulder joints compared to our eight cousins are not their shoulder joints. The actual the actual surface is the glenophossa. I'm sorry, that's not the right joint.

But the shoulder joint itself is pointing up. It's more vertically oriented. So they have this large gap of non-impinged tissue going overhead. And so what happens is, yes, we can breaky it, yes, we can hang.

But one of the interesting consequences of every human being on planet Earth, once their shoulder gets to 90 degrees of flexion going overhead, like reaching up, is impinged. That is to say we are crushing the supersonatus tendon and some other smaller tissues underneath your AC joint. Everyone is. And that is actually like a crowbar now because once you go above that, you can feel your collarbone tilting up in some of the muscles of your ribs, pulling your shoulder blade forward to go overhead.

OK, so what ends up happening is when people are doing kind of overhead press movements or they're hoisting things overhead, it's a little bit like negative compounding because you're just scrubbing these tendons underneath your AC joints. And it becomes a little bit like negative compounding. Like I suffered it a thousand times and nothing happened. And then snap, all of a sudden my mildly frayed tendon that was not really in plain gives away.

Right. That doesn't mean never go overhead. And in fact, it's kind of a reverse when you're doing a pulling type motion. When you pull your lat, which is like because it attaches to the front of your shoulder, like giant slings around your back, pulls your sternum up, which opens some space at the shoulder.

It decompresses that imping a little bit. But what happens when people are reaching overhead with high effort they're often doing this, which is like a clamp. So basically kind of like caving in your chest a little as you're trying to push. But so what's the signal that people are getting that's making them think this is a good thing?

It's not that they're getting it. Well, they feel their shoulder. They're deliberately like my shoulders are weak or I suffered this. So I'm going to go overhead or they're or they'll really is a classic kind of overhead press that a lot of nobody.

They're told not to do anymore. Be pressing behind the neck, right? Most externally rotated and that peck is compressed on the shoulder. And then you're going up overhead and you're like, man, I really feel my shoulder.

And the reason you really feel your shoulders is the same reason you really felt the forearm in this joint lock that we were talking about because it's a poor mechanical position. Got it. The muscles are as contracted as they can be. They cannot contract any further.

So we feel that is work, even though it's just bad mechanics. So this is an interesting thing. This is just making me think of what people refer to with a phrase that I hate is the mind muscle connection because your mind is connected. Well, that's all I'm sorry.

But anyway, the point being is if it seems to me, from what you're saying is if you're having the joints in the right position, the only place you're going to be feeling the effort from doing some sort of exercise is in the, I mean, assuming you're not putting so much tension in the leaguance and tendons. Right. Fundamentally is in the muscles themselves, not in the joints, but in the actual muscle. It doesn't feel smooth.

Right. You're not basically feeling like, well, my muscles aren't working, not like I'm being compromised. Right. And something is awry.

Right. And the mind muscle connection, the way people talk about that from my experience is when you're really paying attention to the muscles, then you're getting that kind of smooth effort, that smooth contraction. If you're not paying attention, then you're more likely to be doing one of these things that is impinging on a joint or putting your joint in a bad position where you're feeling something that's effortful, but not the thing that you really want to be feeling. And think about when you, if you've ever taken, I, first of all, yes.

And then think about whenever you've taken somebody who has been like a shot runner and tried to get them down to more minimalist, initially it feels awkward to them. And there's an also education process of saying, hey, this thing that you got away with previously and felt good to you and natural to you, we need to create new awareness. And there's a lot of very explicit coaching that you have to like feel this, feel this, pay attention to how this is moving. Well, the simplest one is not even that.

The simplest one is just about cadence. Yeah. So you're probably used to running at a certain cadence, you know, they're feeding you to certain numbers of steps per minute. Right.

That just starts to feel normal. Even if it's not good, it just feels normal and to get people to start running at a slightly faster cadence, which actually solves many problems right off the bat. Right. You can't do what you do when you're running at a slower cadence.

It just feels wrong for a while. And if, quote, feeling wrong, it's just a neurological phenomenon. It's like, it's just breaking out of a neural habit and laying down new neural pathways feels, quote, wrong or awkward until we lay down the new neural pathways and leave the old ones away and then it's the other way around. Right.

That's the place. It's very, very interesting to watch people who, yeah, when you're trying to just do a new thing, your brain doesn't want you to, because it's not energy efficient to learn to do anything. I spent, this is another weird tangent. So I was an owner of our consumers way back when.

I stopped doing gymnastics actively when I was 32. I've spent the last, how many, how many, 57 last 25 years, I spent 25 years doing what I referred to as getting the gymnast out of my body. Yeah. I've pretty much done it now.

Maybe it took me 20 years to do it, but it was unbelievably difficult to just get out of having my shoulders around it and turn the road to my pecs over developed and it was totally stunning. That's amazing. I've got a four year old who were, but he jumps off at everything. So I'm going, we need to put you in gymnastics.

It's going to be great, but I can tell you, you know, did you say it was a girl? No, no, no, he's a, you know, I've got three sons. I don't know. I know.

So I was, I was, as you started saying that I was remembering when I first moved to Boulder, I met a woman who had a daughter who was 10 at the time who was getting into gymnastics, and I said, just so you know, she gets good at this and I can tell she will. In eight years, she, her posture's going to look like mine. Yeah. You know, we looked like we were cut out of the same bowl.

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. It's a great book called, I think it's called Bodies.

It was like 1999, 2000, and it's a, it's a photo pictorial of all these really high and athletes from, you know, probably 25, 30 disciplines. And the amazing thing is we talk about athletics is accelerated evolution in the sense that, you know, even though you saying bolt was taller than all the other sprinters, you just long gated body type of a sprinter, which makes sense that's why it's faster than everybody else because if you're a strike, you can maintain that. But it's amazing because you look across all these people and you put your thumb on their heads and their body types are so similar. And so it's amazing how coaches are going to go with the classic trinter line.

I can make you faster by can't make you faster. I can make you faster by can't make you faster in a sense that you come pretty quick with a certain amount of talent. Of course, work beats talent when talent doesn't work. When I was at the World Masters Track in Field Championships in Finland, I asked all the people who were over 85, I said, so why are you here?

How are you here? I said, so cool watching you do this because when you first started doing it, you just look like an 800 guy who was trying to move his legs faster. Watching him learn to become a sprinter has been really entertaining. I said him, I want to raise him at some point.

He often raises people for 100 bucks. Yeah. That's a shout out to you Nick. Let's do it.

No, I know that those are great videos. But it is funny because I'm going across and I put my thumb over Johnny Gray's. Do you know what Johnny Gray was? He was like, give me some of a bitch.

You know, like 175 pounds, six foot, six foot three, you know, and you're just like, well, this is also my argument. When people say things like, you know, they look at a little marathoners and they look at the shoes they're wearing and then they go buy those shoes. I go, hey, look, I don't know why you think anything that guy or that woman is doing is relevant for you. You're not 105 pound Kenyan running at 13 miles an hour for two hours.

Right. Right. And even more than that, what was that 105 pound Kenyan doing when they were first getting started regardless of their body type? That's a classic isn't his book range recently where the author was talking about how people want to know what the coach is doing now, but that's very different than what the coach would have done with someone at the beginning.

Right. Yeah. So that's my actual point about this. We'll see there around the cores of the world.

I mean, here's the most prominent. I haven't, you know, when you're going to business, you keep the blinders on trying to make sure the lights out. But the people who were sort of like most prominent and that's, you're seeing the result of a long period of time working on things. I mean, and he was a triathlete before that.

Like he had a long athletic history that slayed a certain amount of foundation. And so it's my job or arch, I'm like, how can we shorten that so people can get the fun? Okay, we're going to get to that in one second, but I just want to tell this story because you reminded me of it. When I started gymnastics on day one, this is in seventh grade in junior high school, the coach hands, each of us, there's, I don't know, maybe eight or nine of us, each of us a sheet of graph paper, ten to the inch graph paper.

He's at each one of those squares is ten push ups. Whoever fills in the entire page front and back first wins a coke. And we were just competitive as crap and, you know, within a very short period of time, we were doing 1,000, 1,500 push ups a day in spurts of like, you know, 100, 150. And this is because the most important movement you can do in gymnastics, pushing and then just like lifting around straight in front of you.

So, you know, he knew and it's like, here you go. And there's a couple of ab things that he did the same thing. First one to do is wins a coke. And it was insane, but I mean, it really laid down his, he knew that as whatever we were 13 year old kids, something like that, we needed to get strong.

That was going to be the most important thing for the rest of our career. And that's what we did. You know, that's not the way. So somebody comes in, so the foundation for natural movement, this is where we all started where we jumped around to.

So talk to me about what you do with human beings and what human beings listen to this can do to build that. And let me actually, before we jump into that, I said, I was going to talk about Irene Davis. The conversation Irene and I have, she says, you know, people really need to walk before they run, like literally like spend a bunch of time walking barefoot walking in a truly minimal shoe, like hours, then you know, build up for running. I say, that's cool.

That's one way. So I think that's one way to do that is run for a super short distance, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. See how you feel. It hurts.

It's something different to having fun. If it feels like just muscular pain, just rest, you know, using it. You need to do less, not necessarily get stronger. It's usually because you're trying to do too much with certain muscles.

It feels like you really hurt something. Then you need to pay attention to your form and most likely you need to stop overstrawding. Stop pulling your foot across the ground, stop pushing your foot off the ground, pick up your cadence a little bit, et cetera. And so, you know, I ultimately think that we're getting similar results because we're not hearing a people having all bunch of injuries, you know, having a bunch of problems.

We all want to make sure that people who are getting the natural running are as free from things like stress fractures as humanly possible because the moment one person out of a million gets one, everyone goes, I see that's bullshit, which is of course nonsense because the thing that the point I always make is you have to look at the cohort of normal runners in regular shoes and see what the injury rate is there and then compare it to people who have acclimated to natural movement. And what we don't have that data, but I know you would agree anecdotally, we're pretty confident that the people who have acclimated are not getting the same kind of injuries or severity of injuries. Well, and those 10 or 5-pound canons you're talking about, I mean Lieberman, Daniel Lieberman, pointed this out that, and actually in the book, running with the Kenyans, the author was talking about how all the young Kenyans get in these early track needs, they're all running barefoot. And then eventually, because the cadence is the good cadence, the barefoot strike in, is so ingrained, then you can go to a normal shoe and they're still landing with their foot underneath their center.

Normally, if you've got enough padding to the heel, the normal foot barefoot, the heel just literally gets in the way, it just bump into it and then you're going to spruce a guy that I met this past weekend, he's a double amputee from the time he was four, he had to just add to remove both his legs from the knees down. He's got a, I think he's down, can't remember if he's gotten, he's got a son who's four years old and ran a one mile trail race recently and came in third as 10 year olds and he's never worn shoes or not normal shoes. He showed me a picture of this kid at the end of a race and first of all, his form is gorgeous. He is just beaming, he's so happy.

And this is my joke about barefoot runners, you can spot them from a mile away because they're looking like they're having a good time. Oh yeah, even, it's amazing because you're right, I mean, even in the most minimal shoe, it's still different than barefoot running and still returning that barefoot running, even when you've gotten good at it, I played a game with my kids, it's like just running high fives in front of our house so we'd like a long run up, but they have to do it barefoot. We have to run and do it barefoot. So it's amazing, they're running everywhere barefoot, but I think you both, both you and Irene are triangulating on, I'm going to use this running, I'm running a couple of 20, I'm running a 25 day trail race, but I don't fancy myself a distance runner.

If you think about 8% of your time running, which is what she's walking, excuse me, barefoot, to build up small percentage of time, maybe 15ish percent of your time with those spurty kind of stuff, maybe on an infield of a track, something like that, those are softer natural surfaces. And then my point that I'd say is, it doesn't even need to be softer, I'm saying softer relative, you know, because depending on the track, because I've got a track of something you know, you don't have to run barefoot on a track because those modest surfaces are like glass. Right, right, right. Some of them are better, like a broken glass.

I do it, but I don't recommend it. Right. And then I'm suggesting that when coming full circle, the biomechanics of this whole thing, at the ankle and the calf, there's only so many articulations that are like the big foundational articulations, plantar flexion, dorsiflexion, right, lifting your fingers up and you have inversion and eversion, right, which is the wiggle. And so actually when people are coming into this, it's plantar flexion is not just the calf, the gastroc, it is the planter.

It is the muscles of the arch of the foot also contributing and building up and getting strengthened. And when we think about, I have a machine to do shin raises in here, but I have found that if you could take somebody else, I'll find a video for you. So to help demonstrate this to people, you put people's heels on a block and you put them kind of leaning against the wall with their toe as if they were really high heels. So wait, oh, so wait, are they facing the wall?

They're back to the wall. Back to the wall. So their body's kind of like this and their foot is down like this. I'm going to paint this for you.

Who aren't we going to watch? So you're back to the wall. You're half way from the wall. I mean, maybe I'm walking away here.

If you put your whole foot to the wall and then step forward, maybe half of the length of your foot and put a whole under your heels. Okay. And then you lean back on the wall. So now you've got a little bit of a moment on there.

And then when you're going to use your heel as the fulcrum and if you lift your foot to use the shin musculature and the anterior musculature of your ankle, you slide up the wall slightly. You have a little bit of resistance here. You're just going to slide up the wall your way and do this. You have to find something, you do it, but you do it barefoot.

But if you have something on under your heel, you get a bunch of motion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, hold on. I literally do it with a two by four. I take a shoe and step on the shoe.

So you've got to have about a half of your foot length, a half of one foot length and then lift hard and hold it at the top. You feel your shin going. Yeah. Yeah.

It's subtle. It's subtle. But if we talk about stress fractures and plantar fasciitis or even if we're, you know, some people during that transition period, if maybe they've been pro-inscience lins, the strengthening of the shin muscle is, it would be helpful to just, how can we speed up this whole process? How can we make those articulations stronger because those are the foundational articulations that support the dynamic movements that you're going to be encountering the real world.

Got it. So that's a really good one. What do you recommend for people doing that? I mean, people don't want to know what he said.

How many reps? I would actually try to disen-now this is challenging because what I want to try to say is I'm going to give people time and say like, you know, start by doing this for controlled repetitions for a minute and then adding time rather than saying get eight sloppy repetitions. So let's make up to our whole thing about my muscle connection and doing these naturally. So if you want people to be paying attention to the good feeling, the right feeling, if you will, what would you be queuing them to pay attention to so that over time they know when things are broken down and some stuff?

Okay. So the muscle, the actual in that dorsiflexion kind of sliding of the wall, the muscle belly becomes basically connected to your tendon up near the tibial plateau, which if you just run, if you touch your kneecap and then slide down maybe an inch and a half, it dips a little bit and then it comes that bone, you feel it pop up. That's the tibial plateau that you just run your fingers across. You shouldn't feel the effort there.

In the middle of your calf off the outside of the leg, you'll feel the flesh, the muscle belly of the shin. That's where you should be feeling it. That is where the work is being done. You'll feel a little tension on the front side and as you get more aware of what's going on, you'll actually feel the muscles on the top of the foot that are lifting the toes and there's some, because I have a large cohort of older population, there's some evidence to demonstrate that people's gait improves when you strengthen their shin muscle.

This will trigger the egg. Why would they improve? Why would they, their stride increase? Because the reflex of lifting their foot through the gait cycle, it gets out of the way.

So do they start dragging their feet because they're weak or do they start shortening their stride because their foot starts to drag? I love that you pointed this out. It's something that I've noticed is every now and then, especially with their sandals, some people say, hey, do I have one handy, it's too far. They'll say, hey, the sandal is floppy.

And I hold it up, I go, no, it doesn't flop on its own. It doesn't flex in the wrong way on its own. What's happening is you're dragging your toes because you're not, you're not getting, and it's not that you're not lifting your toes. I don't say that way, but you're not positioning yourself where you get the reflex that your toes naturally lift as they come underneath your body.

So your, your, your, one way of describing your toes, but what you described, why that's happening with it, I hadn't thought of before. It's brilliant. And it was totally accidental. It was one of these things where I had an older woman who was, she was going to go on a pretty aggressive hike in either Peru or somewhere in South America.

So I was going to bolster her. I was just like, okay, well, what can I do to make sure that you've got some, some armor? And she came back to me after a little watch. She's like, I'm walking better all of the time.

You know, interesting. I started digging in the literature and I kind of put this together. I don't have an answer, but that seems to be, there's a lot of literature on kind of asking. Okay.

Is it the, the, the typical dorsiflexors that are weakening that result in this shorting of the stride, um, or, or as a shorting of the pportal shinner, as a shorting of the stride due to this drag as a result of this reflex, not being a strong and get the foot out of the way during the middle of the swing phase. It was funny because you would think, and I played with this as I've been walking, and you would think that as your foot's about to come off the ground where your toes are pushing into the ground, that the reflex would be, or the natural thing would be that as your foot comes off the ground, your foot points more, your plan reflects more because it's already heading in that direction or putting force in that direction. The reality is that the exact opposite of when your foot comes off the ground, it pulls back, it door full, it's back towards your knee in a way that, that obviously makes sense. It's why we can walk, but it's one of those things that's seemingly counterintuitive when you're doing it.

It's like, you watch it happen. You can't, you should. Um, but it's like, how that seems odd because anywhere else if I was pushing and then got rid of the force, I'd keep going in that same direction, but in this case, it's, you know, doing the exact opposite. Right.

Well, we're full of recoil tendons. So there's a lot of, you know, the wind up and pitch, wind up and that's the, that's the key component. So I think that this is just a tiny, tiny addition with a, you know, and the fact that you're deliberately doing this means you're bringing a certain amount of deliberate intensity to it, which as we know pays it done with the right dosing pays much more per unit of time. So in the grand scheme of things, I'm asking that people go, okay, what are the big articulations to build a foundation so that I can do more of the natural movement that I'd rather be doing?

And it's a few minutes and actually this is the problem is that most people look at studies of like active 80 year olds who garden and otherwise active and then like 80 year old resistance trainers. And what happens is the resistance trainers can actually volitionally recruit all the available strength in their muscle tissue versus the merely active people. Like, well, does that mean we don't need to become weight lifted? Well, they do it in an isometric test that nobody's practiced.

So, so from a, there's not nobody's training to the test, which is nice. But as a result of that, they, my client is walking, but she'll appreciate the end of this discussion. But as a result of this is that the being active is the whole point that we want that. But if we could add a little bit of resistance to trying to get those fast switch fibers in the ankle, which are your immediate stabilizer, your subconscious, single goes to the spine, goes right back to the foot, stronger, it's just a little dose.

You're going to have a lot more fun. No, it's true. And we should open with that against the wall exercise. It's interesting because this is something that Sarah Ridge at BYU, who I talked to her research was that just walking in a minimal shoe gives you the same strengthening benefits as just doing a dedicated foot strengthening program.

They didn't think to have a cohort doing strengthening plus just walking. But so we don't have a whole lot of time left, but I just want to check. So anything else that you want to share with people about something about building a foundation, whether it has to do with walking running, I like it, of course, is that's a foot thing. But anything else that would be something that people do that you see on a regular basis where if they would make this little tweak would be way, way, way helpful.

Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, often planking or plank plank, like motions, crawling type motions get thrown around in the natural movement world. If I can encourage anybody to do anything in a plank type motion, plank should not be a passive exercise. What people should be doing when they're down in that position is attempting to pull their shoulders down towards their hips as far as possible and simultaneously tilt their pubic going up towards their sternum.

Imagine if you imagine that kind of crunch on the ground shake and flip it around, gravity is trying to pull your belly button to the floor. So what often happens is people are hyper-extending their spine and complaining about how much they feel they're back. And then this translates to crawling, right? Because what doesn't happen is if nobody's been on the ground in a really long time and they've got their back sagged and they've totally spilled their pelvis in the interior tilt and they're complaining about their back.

Well, the fix of that is actually not to just try to suck in your belly button, but actually mildly flex your spine against gravity by creating tension in your stomach. It's something that the number of people have talked about this, and it's really true how most people think of a plank. I don't know how to describe it, but the real value of doing it is basically creating tension across through your entire body. And I mean, elbows down to your toes and squeeze your glutes, which like people, but that's on the other side.

It's like, I know that's what you need to do to engage the abs as well. It's something I've talked about before. Glenn Mills, who's the same bolts coach, said that what got him to be a successful hunter-meter runner was they spent a year just getting his core working because he was just super loose acoustic and they had and of course that works to your glutes, that works to your abs and he's not, he hates the weight room. Just hey, you saying or Glenn?

You saying? I love the weight room. You saying? Because I'm at CC videos of you saying in the weight room.

Probably because of my equipment there. Oh, no, he's crushing it. He's just definitely doing it. He's talking about that, which is very entertaining.

And there's a whole argument about whether you know whether it's going to be the weight room and that's all I think. Anyway, anything else you want to leave people with on the move inside? No, I think I think we've covered it all. Exactly.

I least probably can't do it. Let's talk about it again. That's perfect. So dude, Scott, thank you so much.

What would you recommend? How would you? Sure. I'm not really on social.

So it's a hard time finding me there or at least it's going to take a while for me to come back around to it. Skyler, that's S-K-Y-L-E-R at SmartStrengthAustin.com. Feel free to shoot me an email. SmartStrengthAustin.com.

One giant word, no hyphen. Yes, of course. It's amazing to me that people still say things like all one word or all lowercase or something. We know this right now.

So I think it's my mom who still says that. It's all one word. I know. All right.

Well, dude, again, once again, total treat. I will see you with the next paleo effects. I'll be out there. I might be walking by.

I might be walking by. I've got shoes for you. Well, I'll definitely find there. I'm of course I'm going to see you.

Hey. Okay. You know what I'm talking about. So for everybody else, where you can find me is at www.jointhemovementmovement.com.

That's all one word. We are creating a movement movement, getting people to share the fun and benefits of natural movement so we can make this the obvious better, healthy choice the way natural food currently is. You are the movement of this movement. So share and like and review and give a thumbs up and ring the bell so you hear about these if you're watching this on YouTube.

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