When it comes to having comfortable footwear that can help with performance and health, I keep saying I wish more people new physics because if they knew physics, they wouldn't be susceptible to marketing. I got to say bullshit that keeps you from having the experience that you would like because of what big companies say and do. Now, people here me say that and they go, hey, who are you to say that? Well, why don't we have that conversation with someone who's an actual physicist?
That's what's going to happen on today's episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy strong healthy strong body. Feet first because those things are your foundation. And we talk about the propaganda, the mythology, in this case we're going to talk about some of the lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hide your player to your crossfitter stance revolution or whatever it is you like to do for fun starting with your feet. And we're going to, again, get rid of that mythology and propaganda all the rest.
We're going to teach you what's real starting feet first. Again, those things are your foundation. And we call this the movement movement because we're creating a movement that involves you. I'll tell you how it's really easy about natural movement letting your body do what it's made to do.
I'm Stephen Sashar from zerushus.com. I host this thing. And if you want to find out more and you do go to www.goingthemovementmovement.com. Doesn't cost anything to join.
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I couldn't be happier about this episode. And Zach, can you favorite tell people who you are and what you're doing here? Well, the high level on the human on earth is a lot of labels. I'm not really big on labels.
You need to go down a little bit from human on earth. I'm OK with human on earth. I would argue that's debatable for both of us. But regardless.
So I'm a practicing physicist actually with relevant experience starting with NASA, doing shop mechanics, trying to understand trading regimes. I had a paper called the study of a collisional fragmentation and understanding collisional phenomena and asteroid evolution. But I'm here today. Well, we pause right there.
I just need to say that you have just done something that is a first in the God does have like almost 200 of these podcasts that I've done. I think you just had more words that people would have to look up an dictionary in a short time than ever before. So a word for you. Definitely gold star in trophy.
Right. And it's my point here is to bring things down to earth. It's meaningless. You don't know anything if you can't talk to people.
And physics, it was one of my passions, optics, photography, running. I luckily was able to run high school before they had wedge shaped shoes. And I had a tiger shoe that was a little more than a wafer that I ran across country in like in 19. You know, I want to say that.
So yeah, I've got degrees. If you care about titles and stuff like that, to me knowledge is knowledge. And I think a lot of work knowledge is organically gained through experience. And to me, if it doesn't work, forget about it.
So I've got degrees in physics, graduate degrees, thought of the University of Colorado Boulder used to be a bit of white water, not a kicker than a former motorcycle riding. Got smart realized that people that I doing that side of the side, I wouldn't have fun and stay above ground. And so running's been a passion of mine for decades. And actually my history in terms of running, I reached a point where I did do all the wrong things because I didn't think about the shoes that came out.
And I went through all the orthotics, the best, everything like this pronation, all these things. And then finally, I can talk about this later, but I made the connection between biological systems and healing and proper function versus these artificial contrivances that take you astray and never, never, never help your body. So there's a lot more to my background. I've got a bunch of jobs and a long resume.
But right now I'm designing a high resolution satellite to actually help humanity anywhere from agriculture to being a space cowboy counting cows. So I'll just stop with that. I got to tell you, you reminded me of everything early on when Lane and I were running zero shoes out of the corner of the floor of the corner of the spider bedroom. And actually by that time, I think we had our customer service manager living at our dining room table.
We had a fellow guy living in our living room and the house and garage were filled with product. But we had some guys who were in town or passing through town to go to some sort of meeting at NORAD and they came to pick up our sandals. And I said to them, you know, it amazes me when military technology makes it down to civilians. And I always wondered, you know, what the military version looks like.
So like with GPS, you know, what kind of resolution you guys have. And they said, no, we're using the same satellites. You are this 13 years ago, we're using the same satellites. You are we get the same three foot resolution.
And I said, what can you take a picture from space? And they went, well, we can't tell you that. And what I know, if you get like three fuzzy pictures from different angles, you can use some pixel level, you know, mirror pixel level algorithms to clean those things up and you put that together and you get a good 3D image of pretty much anything. And they just blanched.
Yeah, that's the big long word called photogrammetry. And I'm an expert at that. And what's interesting is the satellite feeds from the orbit, they call it cis learner between the earth and the moon that are communicating the opposite direction from Earth. So it's actually very interesting.
And a lot of the technology is 60 years out. So it's actually very Star Trek and Star Wars and all this kind of stuff. So the problem for me is that bring it to the people instead of taking this game to space and polluting space. So anyway, that's a whole other conversation.
Well, let me add this because you and I've had some of these conversations. The part of me that likes to know how everything works is fascinated by many of the things that you know. And the part of me that wants to just have a simple happy life doesn't want you to tell me any of that crap. And you can be happy knowing both knowledge is power.
I sleep well at night for many, many reasons because I have a way expanded view. We're outside of Earth makes kind of a space get out. Well, let's just say when I made that same comment to my brother-in-law who's in the CIA, his responses, yeah, you don't want to know what I know. CIA is spooky.
Yeah, those guys, yeah, they're spooky. So backing up to your running history and I want to do the physics component of this in two phases. Phase one, I just want to hear like what you were experiencing more specifically and then what was that kind of, you know, wake up call where you realize I need to look at this with the actual understanding that I have about physics and reality. And then the next phase I want to talk about just what's been happening in footwear and from literally from a physics perspective, what your opinion is about some of these things.
And it's been interesting because there's been a lot of stuff in the media lately. I was just on a panel discussion with the American College of Sports Medicine and brought up physics a couple of times and I'll share that with you. But again, I'm kind of sick of coming from me and it'd be much more fun to hear from you. Let's start with your running history, the problems you were having when you had that sort of like holy crap, you know, wake up moment.
Sure. It happened by accident. So after I was competitive runner, I loved running and I ended up finding out that I was always trying to push myself too hard. But it crept up on me when I was just buying the next shoe and these wedge shapes just came out and you know, it's fine, right?
And then over time I experienced, you know, I've traced all these to pure physics. It's actually easy to understand. And then it was many, many years, but I started getting interested in longer runs and some of the overused things in repetitive motion injuries came in. And some of the supposedly small things started creeping up on me.
So I'd go to the best chiral and boulder. I got my custom orthotics and went to the running stores and ran on a treadmill and had them and I was my gate. Really bad idea. The worst shoes I ever had were from that recommendation.
So I experienced the typical problems that you would have in terms of people, you know, pronating which completely goes away with your drop and ITB knee stuff, the patellon on tracking correctly. So I mean, you know, the host of things that you all know about, which is the choir. And the aha moment happened when actually was doing vision therapy and I learned, I was corresponding with this doctor, Dr. Antonia Orfeld, Orfield, and she had a paper in the Journal of Behavioral Optometry about brainlum response in myopia.
So I read about that. We always let it down. So what got why were you doing vision therapy? Well, I'm a physicist and I think in terms of optics, I'm an optic specialist.
And what happened is I thought, you know, humans aren't just doomed to failure. Like it's just, you know, you don't get to point where, well, my knees are bad. I can't run. And then my eyesight, you know, why is that?
And I found out that no, that doesn't happen and that there's a reason why people keep getting progressively stronger glasses. And so she actually cured myopia, published the paper in the Journal of Behavioral Optometry, the referee journal publication. I corresponded with her, got in touch with a vision therapist, saw that vision therapist, actually corrected my vision to where I was riding my motorcycle with that glasses. And then having done that experiment, I realized biological systems, we have a genius design with our body.
And so the point is I took that knowledge, thought about running and said, you know, you don't just get to a point where you have to stop running. Well, I can't run any more my knees or something like that. And so I applied that same theory, realizing that if you support a system of the body, you tend to weaken it. So what happens, and all you people wearing glasses keep this in mind, when you go to doctor's office, they want to look at the back of your retina, they dial out your pupils.
What happens optically there is your focus gets worse. If they measure your prescription, when your people's dialysis, they over-prescribe it. At your glasses, you tell your friends, oh, I'm getting used to my new glasses. They're actually too strong.
Your brain is adopting to that and your vision gets worse. So I actually caught my brother before this happened to him and he didn't have to wear glasses. So I reversed the procedure. And the point is, is that when you do that, then the lens gets confused.
And this is a direct correlation between running and this because your onion skin lens needs to be able to accommodate and focus. So it needs to kind of shift back and forth and find that perspective center. Same thing with your feet. If you have anything on your foot between your foot and the ground, it's equivalent to walking around in a dark room, looking for the light switch.
You just don't have that instant feedback. And I want to do a plug though for people seeing their ophthalmologist and having their people's dilated and having someone look at your retina because yesterday I had the pleasure of having an appointment with my ophthalmologist and giving her a bottle of wine and thanking her for saving my life. Because during a routine I examined, she found what was called a freckle on my retina. And she said, I think we should monitor this, which I didn't know until recently, let's just monitor this as doctor's speak for oh shit, this can be cancer.
In fact, a year and a half later it turned out there was. And she was the one who kind of had a hunch, but she wasn't allowed to diagnose that. So she sent me to the guy who diagnosed it. And happily I went from diagnosis to being fine in eight weeks.
And I second that plug. So by no means does this mean that I doctors bad, they're just as many vision therapists who will take you the other way. And they will put your accommodation just on the right side so you can actually improve your vision. So absolutely necessary.
I have 100% of course. Okay. So you had this aha moment of going, huh, there's a similar thing going on with my feet, those with my eyes where supporting them was and getting something in the way between you and the ground was basically making you foot blind, if you will. And then what happened?
What do you do once you had that realization? I went through a sequence of experiments. So there's nothing like being a spokesperson for something, even though I'm not evangelical about this, you know, if someone asks, I'll help them, but I'm not out to change the world. But what happens is I'm the guinea pig, right?
So Dr. Orfield was the guinea pig and she proved by using her brain learning response to cure her myopia. So I started with the running shoe that tries to give you a midfoot strike and a marathon with those. And of course, keep in mind, the whole point was that I left to run and I was not going to be able to run because I'd run a half marathon and beat the heck out of my body and wonder why is this and fast forward by the way today, running a marathon and other distances.
I just go about the rest of my day. It's all gone. I haven't had so much as a tweak and I'm not kidding in decades. 100%.
And the big takeaway here is it's not Zach. Zach's not lucky. This is the nice thing about physics is we're trying to approach truth and I can obliterate all these companies that, you know, they're brilliant at marketing because they have the big shoe and the little shoe and the regular shoe and convince people that this year's model is going to help them. So what happens, I transitioned and I'm stubborn and it wasn't quite enough for me.
And I actually ran into some of the became friends with Micah True. You know, I guess they called it a movement. I don't care about that. People who love to run.
It's not about being barefoot. You know, if you are barefoot, you should be to get your stride 100% about stride. It's not to go into store barefoot and be radical about that stuff. It's 100% about your stride.
So let me pause right there. First of all, for people who don't know, Micah True was featured in the book, Born to Run and really introduced people to the Todd Amara on the cover Canyon. Secondly, what you just said, I want to highlight it because it's something I say all the time, which is this conversation is not really about, I mean, any conversation that we have is not really about footwear. It is about form.
It's about using your body naturally. It's about natural function. I was just at the American College of Sports Medicine. It was a panel discussion about how to select the proper footwear.
And my opening slide was you've been misled. This panel is not about footwear. It's about optimal human function. And that can create comfort performance and improves health.
And then, you know, by the way, there's some shoes involved, but that's only about whether they get in the way or not. So yeah, I'm with Maria Walton, who is Micah True's partner. And because of her death and she was just right, I wrote her a song honoring Micah True called the Bio-Blanco. And that ended up being in the movie, I think it's called Born to Run.
I forget what the movie's called. It was at the premiere at the Dairy Center in Boulder. And we had a bunch of like, and Tom Kupikun, Scott Jurik, and all the Ultra Runners there. So that was kind of a big night of just coming together of kind of what I would call a pure thread of what it really means to run and move across the earth and enjoy yourself and not get too worried and hung up about statistics, which was what Micah True was about.
So I mentioned that because I ran to this crowd and synergistically, of course, you attract like to like and people were running minimally. And it's really hard for people because there's a metaphor here for fear. So if you think about anything in life, as you know, if you tense up when you're getting a shot, it hurts more. If you relax, it doesn't.
Same thing with walking the earth. You can, if you even just change your mind and think of your feet as just blending into the earth, which is inclusion and love, then the pain goes away. But if you're like chicken hopping and thinking of the earth as a separate entity and that excluding versus inclusion, you will have with nothing else different except your mind, you'll have a different experience of that walk. So I put two and two together.
I went cold turkey in terms of realizing that you want to remove anything but feedback from the foot. So you want an exluth hard surface. And you just run and let your brain engage your muscles the way they were meant to. And after three months, I felt like a kid again and I had my sprint and I think you were there.
There was a filming with a major network and a major anchor that was there. And we were right. I was actually, we were filming doing a spot on barefoot running and there was a sprinter from CU and I actually edged her out as the old guy because I had regained my sprint. And it's just a joy that continues to this day.
I said the producer of a picture of Natalie and I, my partner, were doing our track work at 8,000 feet in Estes Park this morning in zero shoes, which I have some things to say about that. It's not a promotion for zero, but I'm very experienced because I was a science advisor on a barefoot running book. I think it was number one, a seller on fitness and Kindle. And I got to try a bunch of different shoes.
And so, you know, I have experience, personal experience with this and then a physics background and mechanical engineering background to back it up. So, okay. So I'm going to do a little paraphrasing. So when you went cold turkey, so I'm guessing what that meant is you went barefoot barefoot.
Yes. Got it. And I love that you mentioned a smooth hard surface, which I hope is a joke that you want to make a barefoot runner just misty. I just mentioned a freshly painted white line on the side of a road.
It's like, it's nice and smooth and I started, but it has just a little bit of something. It's like, just totally delicious. And when did you do that? Oh, good grief.
I'm supposed to remember dates at least 20 years ago. And it's because, and you know, what's interesting that is that as a physicist, they have these things called rank, rank of tensors, you know, and it's like, okay, whatever, bring it down to earth. How many dimensions are there? Okay.
So we got, you know, three dimensions and then time, you add a very real dimension when you've touched the earth in so many ways because you feel it, the temperature and the texture. And if you don't, if you have a shoe on, you're insulating yourself, you're actually insulating yourself electronically. And so forget new age voodoo. You are electrical body.
You can carry a charge. You literally ground your body. That's very real. And you can build up charge.
So people feel good when they walk barefoot because they're bleeding off electrons, which, you know, of course, are damaged to carry around. And if you've walked across the carpet with shoes on and shock someone, that's literally proof that you build up charge. So that's what fits. I got a different take on that one just for the fun of doing it with you.
I don't know if you had this conversation. I don't think we have the thing I say is, yeah, you can build a charge. This is really quite impervious to having electricity pass it, which is a good thing. I like to say 99.5% of people who are struck by lightning survive without a problem.
100% of trees that get struck by lightning explode because the currents passing over you, on your skin to the ground in a tree is going through the tree, superheating the water, turning the steam, things blow up. And I would argue, and I'm happy to be proven wrong on this one, that the thing that feels really good about having your feet on the ground is I like to give the analogy this way. I say sugar doesn't taste good. We evolve to like the taste of sugar and then manipulate sugar because it gives us something we need, which is calories.
And I suspect that that good feeling that we get is a similar thing where we learn that certain things tell us that what's nearby is something beneficial, food, water, whatever it is. And of course, feel and it also just can feel good. And feeling good is not just a thought. It's a neurological phenomenon that and we also know that just being in nature has stress reducing benefits, which is also a neurochemical process, which is arguably physics as well.
And so I go for this sort of simple biological evolutionary version of that story rather than electromagnetic version of that story. Yeah. And I'm not, I don't look at everything from a physics standpoint. You know, I have my big organics to be aware.
It's like what we call things organic because it's the way things used to be. So it's like the way things used to be. Let's mess it up. So you have food is just food.
Let's mess it up and then call what it used to be organic. It's like that's, that's odd. So I agree. There's no need to mention to it.
Look, we say the same thing. I say we're not the, you know, people ask me to prove that what we're doing is valuable. I got to know we're not the intervention. If you look at human footwear, for as long as we know that human footwear looked a lot like what we're doing.
In fact, even the first Nike shoe, the first waffle trainer was flat, no heel lift, toe spring, the toe box, a little narrow, but it was only about 10 millimeters of shitty foam. So it was close to what we do. And anything that happens once they added the wedge heel, which happened because a, some podiatrist who were in the same building as Bill Barriman suggested that putting in a wedge heel would help people who were getting into at least an night and 30 years later, that those same doctors said to a friend of mine, yeah, that was recommending that wedge heel was the biggest mistake we ever made. Yeah, that's like when Doc Holiday went to Glenwood Springs, you know, to help yourself problems.
It's like exactly opposite. Yeah. You know, it's funny, total tangent for the fun of it. We were just, my wife and I were just in the Czech Republic since we have our European office in Prague and we went to a town that is famous for his healing waters.
And this town is like over a thousand years old. And so I went, I was sneaking submission about what's healing about these waters. Back then food was not great and digestion and therefore was not great and people would die from dysentery and other intestinal problems. And there's a lot of magnesium in this water.
I think it just made them poop. That's really helpful. It's funny a thousand years. My brother got his PhD in Airlong in Germany.
He gave me a thousandth year anniversary. Stein, you know, it's funny in the US. It's like, Oh, this is historic building. It's 40 years old.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when it was made and there was a whole bunch of them that started with a one and a zero and it's like holy moly, still in these buildings, they still work.
So move on to footwear. I want to do one last little thing on the barefoot side and because we've mentioned this is really about stride. Is there anything that you can think of? And this is, this could be a gacha question because I don't have any answer in my head.
Anything you can think of from a business perspective about the phenomenon of changing, of how your gate change and what's happening when you are running barefoot by mechanically. The problem with that transition speaking to a general audience is that depending on what you've done to your foot, if you've worn high heels and you have got awful bunions, you've scrunched your toes up, you know, you've, whatever you've done to your shoe, you have to undo it to get your foot back to where you can function. And so for me, luckily, you know, I was walking around barefoot as a kid quite a bit and usually tried to wear as little shoes as I could and I hadn't messed my feet up that much and I would at least take care of my feet and massage them and have foot rollers and do things all the time. So I was trying to get ahead of the problem of running the wrong way.
And from a physics standpoint, it's, it's so obvious that I try to explain physics to people in ways you understand because it's meaningless. Like, you know, if I said the Coriolis forces minus two omega cross V where omega is the rotation of lossing vis-a-lossive vector, it's meaningless. Well, except hold on, if when you're running, you're paying attention to Coriolis forces, you're running really fast. Right.
That's impressive. Right. So people was like, if you've ever been on America around and you walked out to the edge of the center, that's the Coriolis force. Yeah.
You open a door, you open it to hands or the handle. That's torque. Okay. Yeah.
But people know this stuff. You can run an equation for it, but it doesn't matter. It's the physics that matters. And I always say math is the language of physics.
Physics is not the symbology. The symbology is just represents its language and people get caught up in that when they see that, because if you see an oil spot after it ranged in the grocery store parking lot, you're looking at quantum interference. You know, the oil actually has different thicknesses as it's dissipating and light literally comes down and literally annihilates itself, depending on the thickness of the oil. And you see a rainbow.
So there's so many physics things that you see that no one thinks about. And they think, well, quantum physics, that's some kind of lab, you know, for me, it's celebrating something, smashing atoms together. No, it's every day. And if you have a glass of tea or your favorite sports beverage and you grab that glass and you see your fingerprints on the inside, that is an evanescent wave that you have literally brought into existence.
So this stuff is all around. And when you tell people that and common experience, so the problem with biomechanics, because you ask is that the difference is that instead of everything happening with the stackite of a shoe and then shockwave translating up through my leg to my knee to my hip and beyond, I engaged the entire leg. And it's so simple because, well, it's the way we were meant to move and it's a brilliant design. And it's sad to see people try to correct something that's not wrong with a shoe, you know, with support or an orthotic or, you know, the finding the light switch in the dark, but you have more of a stackite.
It's the way the quick answer is the way the leg and the body was meant to move out of a brilliant design. And in physics, we designed like springs and piston mechanisms, damp oscillators. And so the calf is the shock absorber. And imagine if you had a, I don't know, if you took the shock absorber off of a car and drove it around, that's what you can heal straight quite literally.
And people would say, that's crazy. I would never do that what you're doing all the time. And so there's so many problems with that because we get into the physics of it, shock mechanics, there's all kinds of stuff that would make people not want to run that way. So when you heal strike, you have a towards and on stability, towards and just means rotation, you know, and so you have this.
Your heels are ball and it will be stable. And you'll have a shockwave go up and when it hits a refractive interface, believe it or not, there's a lot of stuff that can happen. You can actually have any change interface, you can have cavitation, which is rare, rare faction. So I'm also a geophysical expert.
I know about seismic waves, DNS waves, compressional waves and shear waves, physics, this happens in your body. And so the more the transient shock is a local shockwave, you can have shear stress. Believe it or not, you can have cavitation, which can result in ultraviolet light, microplasma, free radicals. So there's a lot of time like X-rays, they're somatic.
So if you have one big X-ray or 100 small ones, it's the same thing. So you're running all the time and the more the shockwave, these microscopable levels, these things are happening. And then all of a sudden, you know, you've oxidized and you've compromised your tissues and created all kinds of problems. They just go on, you know, knees and ITB and this pronation thing, which vanishes when you don't heal strikes.
So it's so obvious because if you hit your heel, you have a double impact. So I've done this CU on pressure plates. I've run with the traditional shoe, run their foot. As you know, you have a shockwave that's two peaks if you heal strike, but the problem there is that you have an unstable landing, you overload the arch and you stop for an instant and then you push off again.
So you just like, stop, start, stop, stop, stop, like a jalopy. And my analogy is if you look at legs across the spectrum in terms of, you know, dogs and rabbits, deer and humans, where's the heel on a dog? Where's the heel on a deer? What if they ran around hitting their heel?
It's not any different, you know, it's the same. And the reason gazelles can run so fast and so gracefully is the same reason we can. They would never heal strike. It'd be laughable to see that.
And so we have a little bit different ratios, you know, the bienaccia and golden knee and all that kind of thing, the brilliant design of the body. But that's the basic idea is if you make the analogy between these animals that run, they would never land on what is the equivalent analogy of the heel in terms of the skeletal structure. And it's just obvious to me. So it's hard to even describe because your leg was designed for your heel to be kind of like a cantilever thing and the brains of your forefoot is that it can splay and absorb shock and then also return that.
So it's a little bit lost. It's an inelastic collision, but you're actually dissipating and morphing to the varied terrain and loading up the calf and the thighs and using from at least the hip down. And so you have that distance involved versus this really teensy distance that you're trying to accomplish with the shoe. And it's crazy, it's crazy.
It's not, it's truth. It's not as an ex opinion. I'm not trying to, we've done shock tests. I've literally done shock tests loading like rods at NASA and seeing what happens with the shockwave.
So I know my shock mechanics and I've tested materials to failure. And I know that, you know, especially like with repeated injections of frequencies into systems, you can actually have a catastrophic resonance and catastrophic decline and failure, which is famous in certain bridge things. So here you are heel striking causing these like shockwaves to go up your leg, hit a refractive interface at the hip or the knee or something like that. And you know, you have these cavitations and you have these little free radicals and all of a sudden your tissue decomposes and you go to the doctor and it's like, well, we're going to have to replace your knees because and you can't run anymore.
So this is a really interesting thing. People think that if they end up with, let's say, patellar tendonitis, tendonitis and run your knee, the way it's talked about now is that this is a quote overuse injury. You've just been using those muscle ligaments and tend to run your knee too much and that's why they've degraded. What you're suggesting is something much more interesting, which is that it's not an overuse injury.
It's in this case, you know, a shock based injury that's just affecting the tissues. So you can use them all day long if you weren't creating those shocks and cavitation, the easiest way for people to think of cavitation, in my mind, if you have a better one, is something like a carbonated beverage where you can basically create these bubbles out of water by changing the pressure or just getting something. The bubbles coming out of suspension, it's like the bands for nitrogen. The bands came from people building the Brooklyn Bridge and those caseons and they had to press it to keep the water out and that's, workers would come up into the nitrogen would come out of there.
When they came up top side out of the pressurized air, the nitrogen would come out of solution in their blood, you know, fall over and die or have some malleas, exactly the same thing. There's a really good analogy. So I use physics terms and I try to translate things because when I use things like shock waves, people know that when you hit something, it goes through a material, but you don't know that the amplitude can double and do weird things at the interface. So it really matters.
And the other really, really big takeaway is that your body, the bones weren't meant to be loaded like that. Your fascia and your muscles and your ligaments and tendons are really supposed to do most of the work and you need some kind of like structure, I guess to have form. And my job, self appointed job is when people ask is to try to bring this down to earth and it's so simple that you can take your shoes off and go for a run. Tell me if you're going to heel strike.
Right. And then people have that thing though, it's like, well the earth is scary and I can't touch it because what if I step on something and I said, well, then don't step on something. Oh my God, the number of times where someone says, and look, we're not recommending going barefoot per se, but then what people do when you do suggest that idea is exactly that. Not only do they say, what if I step on something, they imagine stepping on things that don't exist in their world.
My favorite is actually what if I step and dog shit, I go into the last step and dog shit. I don't know 20 years ago. I said, well, why are you going to start now then? And right.
That's a good answer. But you know the thing is about the shoe is I agree, it's that in fact going way back to when I said stride, it's not barefoot cold, turkey, organic, you know, I got to be barefoot test the earth. It's stride. Yeah.
So when you have your stride back, then if you do this mental gymnastics, this mental mouth, it's like, okay, well, then I don't need the padding anymore. Right. You're right. You don't.
And then what happens though, if you run a trail or you run to these artificial surfaces, so like even these open space trails, they grind these rocks up in their pit middle shape and they will like just bug the crap out of your running. So what happens then? If stride rules and you start doing that, you start chicken hopping, you change your stride. Right.
So absolutely appropriate to have the most minimal shoe you need. And you know me, I've been running, well, I met you and I took a blank of Vibram and you know, some shoelaces and built a sandal when you were just starting a small thing and went over your house and looking for the most minimal thing, I've run everything you can imagine in the, I guess, zero sandals, different incarnations over the years. And I don't know, I've never actually worn any of mine out, which is odd. I see people wear them out, but I think it's because I had a stride.
It is. It's just the thing that I say, I mean, you know, we build these things to be durable. And I say, but the difference is this, if you're just standing up and just lifting your foot off the ground and putting it down, lifting up, putting it down, just all vertical force, no horizontal impact at all, then it'll never wear out. And so if you're starting to see wear patterns, it's because, you know, you're creating cars on force for transcription.
And that doesn't mean you never create a horizontal force. I mean, as a sprinter, my first 20 steps are as horizontal as you can get away with. That's how you're building up speed and slowing down does the same thing in reverse. So, and even, you know, if you've got a really good stride, there's a little bit in there, but, but that's whole other sort of, let me jump into this a little bit from what you said.
So considering that, the entirety of footwear evolution in the last 40 years in particular has been adding various forms of cushioning. Can you say, again, from a physicist perspective, what cushioning does and or doesn't do? It removes your foot's ability to do what it was intended to do, first of all, no matter what, no matter what. In fact, the way I think of the perfect shoe is that it's like just a magic carpet that follows your foot around.
It removes the whole idea of having a last that you have to cinch down. And people are so used to cinching down the last because they're trying to spring off of their foot and have this thing really tight on their foot. So the cushioning thing insulates your proprioception. So from a physics standpoint, it confuses your brain.
So there's called a brainlum response and, you know, proprioception. And what it does is it confuses the triggering of the muscles. So the short answer is it confuses the triggering of the muscles. It's always, always suboptimal, no matter what.
And a lot of people get away with it and say, I run just fine. I run just fine. You might not have major injuries, but you absolutely could always run better. No question.
Always get better. So when you put a, even if it's a zero drop, a bunch of padding on your shoe, it takes the stress has to go somewhere. And so anything that's happening between your foot and the ground isn't happening with your, your natural accommodation with your muscles and the hinge motion and the pistons in your, your calf and the way they were then it to work. And so it's less efficient and it confuses your brain.
Like I said, it's, it's like walking around the dark. Your foot needs to be able to display. And then also if it's not perfectly planar, which trails and roads aren't, it needs to be able to accommodate that. And what you're doing is you're moving a complete dimension when you do that.
So now you're saying everywhere you step a flat and not only that, if you have a slight rocker in the road, now you've introduced an unnatural, let's say torque or torsion, which is a twisting to your ankle. And why? Because all that goes away. Like, well, no, the why is really simple because shoe companies have been misusing physics to convince you that you need this stuff.
And every few years they come up with some new version of cushioning and they never say, here's our new stuff. Sorry about the crap we've been selling for the last five years. Well, I don't think they're even using physics. I think that they're brilliant marketer.
Some people can sell you water that has caramel color brilliantly. And it's, it's a travesty, but no, it's marketing because well, this, this, you're not, I said, I said misuse physics. Oh, misuse. Well, yeah, I mean, that would have seen they're even using physics because you can.
No, no, no, no. Give me my favorite example. So I'd ask, and I say that to be pretentious. Cause that's how you say it in Europe.
Cause that's what it is. All right. Uh, they had, they invented their boost foam. And the way they showed how great it was, was they took like a two pound steel ball and they bounced it off a cement and a barely bounced and they bounced it off, quote, the other company's foam and it bounced a few times, then they bounced off the boost foam and the first bounce came up about 30% of the height that they dropped it from.
And then it bounced like 10 more times. Right. And so the misuse of physics, of course, is I immediately knew that if you want to get the steel ball to bounce really high, you have a bounce off a steel plate with a bunch of concrete underneath it. And the first bounce will be 99.5% of where you dropped it from.
And I've bounced about 200 more times. So that's a nice. You're losing energy. It's like, why would you want to do that?
That's the funniest thing I see some of these stores have this. They sell people this shoe because it's got memory foam in it. It's like, look how comfortable that is. You know, it's, oh, boy, instant gratification society.
But you know, it's really worth it because bar none and I succeeded in getting my partner to run minimally and we went sprinting today and she was sitting like four thirties, you know, short distances when it wasn't doing that before. And I said, well, because if you're trying and, you know, I'm sitting here, what 62 going on something, I go out and I run pain free and I can sprint like mad and I do it because it's fun. You know, it's not like, well, I got to hit a PR hit some master's record, which is nothing wrong with that. But I've always loved that.
And to have that, you know, you lose that if you take someone who is got, quote, the wrong shoe, this gigantic stack, I, you know, heel protector thing, have them go to the track and watch them sprint and they're not going to heel strike. Right. And well, I see people who do because. Oh my gosh, I hope not.
No, absolutely because for them, they just think sprinting is just moving their legs faster in the same pattern. So that's, that's what I've seen more times than I would care to. To admit or more time to admit. My dilemma is that I understand this solidly.
There's, there's no doubt about it. Like the stride rules and these running shoe companies are brilliant marketers and they've come up with, you know, capturing three markets now instead of the one. And it's, you know, I don't understand people. It's a whole lot of psychological phenomenon is that sociologist friend of mine wrote a book.
He did some research found that on average, people make decisions based upon what they think other people think. So that's twice removed from reality. So if I fantasize what I thought you believed, which is not true. And then I adopted that.
That is why drug commercials work because you have a cartoon of these red dots that turn green while it worked and then you go take your problem. You don't have and you create more problems. So it's, it's, it's an interesting philosophical question because if you love people and you love humanity and you want them to have a better experience, you know, they could be moving better and pain free, but there's so many competing things out there. They'll say, Oh my God, no, you'll find something wrong with, you know, a micro statement you said and try to prove you wrong and discredit you.
But that robs everybody the experience and I'm living proof and I'm not special. I'm not an actual born runner. I'm a natural born loving to run person, but my biomechanics and my body isn't, you know, ideal for any particular type of running. So for me, it's even more important.
You know, they call them the middle packers of people who just want to get out and run. They could always have a better experience. And it's very hard even to take a highly intelligent person and help them make the switch, even if they want to. So I had a friend who was sold and I was running in the Northeast when I worked up there, I'm running barefoot everywhere on trails, roads, everything.
And he said, I want to try it. So he shows up with a pair of this wrong brand of barefoot shoe and I just hard sank because he was convinced he tried it and he said, it didn't work for me. So he just completely lost it. He lost the opportunity and he was an intelligent person that was signed up to try.
And so given that these other people, you know, look at the latest shoe and it's the next shiny thing, which is rampant in our culture in many ways. Yeah. Well, you know, there's another piece to this. I'll throw in actually I can tell you, at the ACSM event last week, I was one of the people on my panel was from Brooks.
And at one point he said, you know, we're trying to put more spring in your step and propel you forward. And I grabbed the mic and I said, I asked him, I said, would it be okay if I'm a little obnoxious for the next 30 seconds? He said, yeah, sure go for it. I said, there's nothing that could put spring in your step or propel you forward.
That's called physics. All foam sucks energy out of your system. Nothing moves you forward. If anything did, we'd be able to see it in force plate data, which we really compelling.
And none of you have shown force plate data because it doesn't work. And he conceded the point. He said, yeah, we're not trying to violate the philosophy of physics. We're trying to give you something that works for you.
Yeah. If you want to convince someone with the big stack heights, you not to wear that shoe is like, realize that every time you land all that energy is getting dissipated. It's not storing kinetic potential energy, right? You know, Sisyphia, Sisy rolled a boulder up a hill, creating a huge amount of potential energy and then you let it roll back down.
That's kinetic energy. So give all your energy away and then have to start all over again. And it's really appropriate what you said about accelerating, maybe not having too much friction during a stride, but when you're accelerating decirally, of course, you know, you have a large torque to get to maintaining speed. And then if you got your really nice turnover, which I work on in my track work out, then it's just a joy and it gets down to though, why, why are people doing things too?
And I was a fitness captain at a company, a major aerospace company, physicists by day doing exotic stuff. And it's really, it's exotic, really cool stuff that blow your mind. You can see underwater and space. But let's see fitness captain.
And I really want to help people. And I said, pick a realistic goal, like a life goal, or at least a 10 year goal. And don't impose some type of idea of what you should be able to do. And, you know, I was trying to help find ways to help people make that leap.
And there's, there's so many body identification problems in this world and idea of what you should be like, you're a natural sprinter. And I found that I'm not really necessarily great at long distance. And I actually feel, I feel better when I sprint. Like if I got, I'll do a warm up, hit the track.
And I love running as fast as I can. Today it was like four thirties of then three twenties. And, you know, for short, distance is not, not, not Steven Sashin level stuff, but you know, older guy and I'm hitting it, man. I'm burning it.
First of all, I got this older guy. I got the older guy crap. I'm a year younger than you. I'm trying to, I'm trying to do one in a couple of days.
But it's cool because who wouldn't want that? I agree. I don't take ibuprofen. I don't have all these little secret things I do.
No. And it's 100% because I changed my stride though. 100% because I was everybody else. And you don't use your body correctly.
You're something that you'll find entertaining when we were in Czech Republic. There's a half marathon in the town we were in. And I watched everyone run by me as I was enjoying a pleasant dark beer locally made. And the first 70% of the runners, every one of them, midfoot strike, four foot strike.
And you would think that that would make me happy, except that they were still wearing shoes with a whole bunch of cushioning. So they're losing all that energy. Now granted, they're running, many of them were running at a speed and they had a body weight, a mass that was appropriate for that cushioning. In other words, it was sucking the least amount of energy out of impossible because foam is basically tuned to a weight and speed.
But you would think that I'd be happy they were midfoot strike landers, except that their heels never touched the ground because of the thickness of the sole and the heel. And so they were losing all that last bit of their their kiddies stretching, right, right, and then coming back. So they were less energy efficient than they could have been. But there, but because the higher heel has trained them to not let their not let them use their kiddies, their brain basically goes, Oh, my kiddies can only stretch this far instead of a few inches that they were losing.
And as you know, a formula for disaster and spreading is if you don't use the full range of motion, if you think you just like you said before, if you just think do what you're doing, but do it faster, you know, you'll pull a muscle, you'll rip into a kiddies apart. That's a really good point because you they're loading and unloading. What I found is the body is such a brilliant design. And it seems so weird.
If you look at an x-ray of a foot, I wouldn't have come up with that. But it's just brilliant. Because, you know, people like when you doing yoga or something, you know, unless you're a martial artist and you're doing local pushups, you understand about using your hands to distribute stress. And people can do that, but your foot does the same thing.
And you just throw all that away. And it's arrogant actually to think that a shoe company can better the foot and it's arrogant to think that a scientist can do nanotechnology to better the hummingbird that I was standing there that was going to refill my feeder and I'm holding it. And it's right here, looking at that design right in front of my face and the sheer arrogance of thinking that we're in advanced society and we have chat GPT and, you know, we can offload any accountability or creativity to AI. Not going to happen.
Yeah, that's a whole other threat. Well, we have to wrap this up. But secondly, I want to appreciate that you have been willing to jump into the world of Newtonian physics rather than the more esoteric version of physical you spend your days in. So I appreciate that.
I appreciate that. And it is it does amaze me watching what footwear has turned into and what people believe, of course, as a result. And I mean, again, when I say people should not understand more physics, it's because if you do, you want susceptible to these things that people say that are so clearly not true when you understand things, you know, about force production, for example, and what you brought up about about stress and about wave activity, I've lost the ability to think in English is so so interesting for people to think about just, you know, if you if you're landing on your heel, if you're if you're just sending a shockwave up your calf, basically, into the into your bones, you know, that energy's got to go somewhere and do something. And what we're wired for is to have our muscles like a mittendents get in the way of that to get there first and accommodate that.
And if you bypass them, that's gonna be problem. Look, when when the first big big issue came out, I won't mention it by name, let's call it Smoka. They what that is, I'm just saying, I mean, I just made that up, I don't know where it came from. You know, there were some professional runners that were on the track of me.
And I said to them, they love these shoes, they're getting more miles, I said, it's gonna mess up your knees in a couple years, you want to be able to run. And they want your your mind and partly they didn't believe me because you know, look at me, but two years later, none of them could run because all that shock was going into their knees, they weren't feeling it and it was causing the response. But I'm still loving this idea that the idea the cavitation of the fluids with around those joints, causing problems with the tissues instead of being over using that is blowing my mind. That is something that happens like X-rays.
So it's called somatic and X-rays, if you get like a bunch of small ones, it's the same as getting one big. And so when you do this to your body, you can break it down. And these microscopic level, you know, like I said, you've got free radicals and UV light, we all know about UV light. We buy plastics that are, you know, not as susceptible to UV light, we all know about that and microplasmas, you know, and it just seems like, no, that can't happen.
It's like, no, it's physics. It's a shock, it's a refractive interface. And there's a PNS way that gets, you know, transmitted and reflected and then to get really technical, standing wave ratio is how efficient that energy is to have. So if you have a rope and you shake it, you send away through it.
If you tie a piece of dental floss to the end of it, the dental floss is going to go crazy. If you take the dental floss and shake it and tie shake the dental floss, the big rope's not going to budge. Right. So that's really the physics and it's so easy.
But my dilemma is, I have to, like I said, with opening doors and the merry-go-round and all spots and glasses of tea with your fingerprints, I have to bring it home. And I can't say towards real instability, you know, have to show people well, just try run around your heels and tell me how that works for you. And then, you know, then stop thinking and just take this smooth hard surface and go from here to there at a jogging pace. And now watch them and it's like, yeah, they're trying to immediately improve their head and not bobbing up and down over the place.
And I'll tell you one thing, those shoes that I can't remember the name of it, you can't eat it, those big clown shoes, try it. It's like running in a jumping castle. No, no, I mean, someone gave me one of the Nike vapor flies and I put it on and I tried to, I took two steps trying to sprint and I felt like I was in quicksand. Because again, I was moving at a speed much faster than that material could handle.
Right, great. So yeah, so it's about, there's more and more and more and more and more technical stuff. And I guess the take away is my role in life is, you know, theories are great, but it has to work. It has to work.
And I was literally looking at not running. And I changed my stride and, you know, people would have to run with me and see, I sleep pain free, I run like a demon pain free, because it was using my body where I was meant to be used. And I did that hopefully to save other people of time, because I did do the work. And I discovered it for myself.
So I grew it organically. I didn't find a book. I can't recommend a book. It's coming from me.
So I'm so sourcing this information. And I was able to take my hard grounding in mechanical engineering and shock mechanics and doubly and fiber technology and physics and optics, take all of that and some correspondence with some real doctors who are published that do real research. And today benefit myself. And then want other people to be able to experience that because their experience can always be better.
And I guess it's kind of tough because this year industry would radically change. Yeah, we didn't have to go to that road. In fact, we got to get out of here. Zach, it has been an absolute pleasure.
By the way, if people do want to just ping you and say, you know, thanks for asking a question or whatever, how can they do that? I guess I don't brand myself. Like I said, I'm a full-time physicist and I actually have a physics job. I'm a practicing physicist, but I have email just for initial ask name at Gmail.
I don't do anything fancy. I have a website that my website only allows for virtual reality and it's still wacky. So ZBERGN. Like if I get put my hand right ahead and it's Zulu, Robbo, Echo, Romeo, golf, Echo, November, at gmail.com.
So Zach Ferguson, ZBERGN. And I don't have a book and I don't have a video. No, I think it's because a lot of times people do. It's like, well, if you really want to know the answer, go buy my book.
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