There are a lot of YouTube videos saying that the barefoot industry is lying to you and there are a lot of people who've been saying that if you go barefoot you're going to get injured. We're going to chat about the reality of that and what you can do about it if you're interested in being a happier, healthier runner 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, healthy, strong body starting feet first because you know those things are your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or do yoga or cross or whatever it is you like to do and do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. Did I say enjoy it?
Trick question I know I did because look if you're not having fun you're not going to keep it up so make sure you're having fun doing what you're doing. I am Stephen Sashan, CEO co-founder of Zero Shoes and the host of the movement movement podcast and we call it that because we including you are creating a movement about natural movement letting your body do what it's made to do and the part where you can help is really really easy. There's no cost involved. There's no time involved really.
It's simple. If you want to find out more go to our website www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can interact with us on social media and just leave a review and a thumbs up and give us a five-star rating all those things you know how to do to help people find out about what we're up to. In short if you want to be part of the tribe just subscribe. So before I introduce our guest you may notice I'm a not at the Zero Shoes headquarters with a bunch of shoes behind me.
I'm not wearing a Zero Shoes t-shirt and see I have a bunch of hardware all over me because I have some shoulder surgery on Tuesday. This tube is going to the thing that's running cold water to this and then I got a brace on it. Blah blah blah blah blah. That's all very entertaining.
So just wanted to let you know why that's going on and what's up but more importantly let us chat. Hey Rafi do me a favor tell people who you aren't what you're doing here. Sure so my name is Rafi Salazar. I'm an occupational therapist by trade.
I own a physical therapy clinic in Augusta, Georgia home of the Masters if you're into golf and we're here to talk about what the research and the evidence shows about transitioning from conventional running to minimalist running and just a natural gate pattern. Before we do that I didn't know you were in Augusta when I was doing stand-up comedy for a living. One of my first gigs was in Augusta, Georgia where on the opening night they surprised us by saying hey Suvi Sales wants to come and do 10 minutes. It's like what I don't know that anyone even knew who Suvi Sales was then and I know a lot of people don't now but that was FYI really nice guy.
The largest head I've ever seen on a human being utterly utterly fascinating just ginormous noggin. So now before we jump into this and first of all thanks one of the things that I've noticed in the people who are complaining about the whole barefoot world and by the way we're not even necessarily going to suggest that you run in barefoot. That's a whole other story but one thing that I hear people saying all the time is one of two things. One is hey the barefoot industry is lying to you which I find very interesting because the things that these people then say are things that I have never said in fact I say the opposite of many of those things they say or and the guys at Pivo Barefoot same thing have never said those things and the two of us are the two largest companies in the world promoting minimalist footwear and natural movement.
So that part's really interesting to me but there's one other part that I want to see if we can start with and that is when people talk about switching to either running barefoot or in minimalist footwear they talk about injuries and the possibility of getting injured and they never compare the potential injuries or the actual injury risk in running barefoot or minimalist to the actual injury risk that has been measured for 45 years of people running in regular shoes. I can say more about that but do you want to jump in on that one? Yeah I mean I think the reality is running as a sport in the amateur world anyways probably in the pro world too has one of the highest injury rates in some cases some studies put it as high as like 85% of amateur runners experience some kind of injury over the course of their running career so basically like eight or nine out of ten runners experience some kind of running related injury it's usually lower extremity foot later fasciitis, hip knee, back issue something like that. The number that comes against Bambi around quite a bit also is like 50% of runners 80% of marathoners get injured every year but my favorite thing about this and I'm going to see if I can get in the show notes Nike did a study about four years ago they published it right before Covid partly they actually just they sent it a press release they never actually published the study but the press release said that they had a new shoe that reduced injury rates by 52% and on their website now they actually have the abstract but they still haven't published the study for a couple reasons that I just realized where it says they have they're compared their best selling running shoe to a new running shoe and the new running shoe reduced injuries by 52% over 12 week half marathon training program and in fact it did but then you have to look at the numbers in their best selling shoe in 12 weeks over 30% of the people got injured and they knew you only 14 and a half percent did and now this is an amazing thing this is like me saying to you all right I'm going to buy you dinner every night this week you can pick one or two restaurants one where you'll get food poisoning roughly you know we answer about one and seven the other way the odds are like three and seven which one you want to go to and of course the answer would be what are you crazy so but I think they haven't published the results because they defined an injury is anything that kept people from running for at least three training sessions now I was the size of spec that if they actually showed how long people got injured for those numbers were much much higher and so you know if after 45 years this is the best that they can do is injuring 15 to 40 foot to 30 percent of people in just 12 weeks injury rates go up then that's a problem and you know that's what we need to compare ourselves to if anything we might God look if at zero shoes if we were injuring 30 percent of the people wearing our shoes in 12 weeks probably got a business I'd probably be in jail so you know it's an amazing standard that we're not being held to and or even more initially that they're not being held to so anyway that's I just want to kind of frame that in this conversation about what it takes from your perspective and the research for people to and again this is I think this transcends running but anyway to have a transition from whatever they're doing in whatever shoes they're currently wearing to something more natural and arguably better for you yeah well I think it's a from a standpoint of just like on the on the logic of it if you get injured you know you get playing our best ideas or whatever you have weak arches like the idea of okay we just need to put more support or more cushion or whatever makes a lot of sense on the surface like oh that's common sense I get injured because the way my foot is striking the ground so I just put more cushion and I'll be fine because it won't be striking it's hard but what we fail to really understand in that in that logic is what it does one to the entire kinetic chain but then the neuro like the whole neuroscience of it and motor control and what it does to have like impaired or inappropriate motor patterns when you're doing something over the long term and what that does for repetitive strain injuries and all that so on the surface you know cushion supportive shoes sounds like a great idea because of course we're going to be decreasing the impact force but the research suggests yes I was going to say accept and I'll let you continue I'll just here I'll give you a little one liners just to keep rolling on this yeah I mean it does quote make sense if you don't think about too hard if you don't know anything about physics in particular and this is the part that well and you know when the big max on the cushion shoes started coming out I'm a former all-American gymnast and the first thing I thought literally immediately was foam is like a trampoline it's not it doesn't get you anything back it's what you put into it and like a trampoline it's tuned to a particular weight in a particular speed if you're not that weight and that running at that speed it's just going to get in the way there's no such thing as energy return there's just energy loss and it's a question of how you mitigate that but but then the I mean this is a bit of a tangent but something I've been thinking about a lot lately in 1971 a guy named Alano Maryweather do you know him?
I heard his name yeah then you're a rare one because most people don't he has a world record to this day in the hundred yard dash because they switched the meters after he set that world record and he was running in shoes that are much more like ours thin flexible lightweight on a crappy track service frankly and he ran in nine flat hundred yards which equates without a 9.800 meters which would make him like the fourth fastest guy in the world today and he wasn't even taking any drugs so it's you know people have no sense of history as well when we have this conversation so in addition to the misunderstanding physics and and kinetics they don't have a sense of history yeah yeah for most people history starts today you're born right so there's there's not about that yeah that's one of the one of the things you hear like on the politics side of things oh you know history starts from many people today they're born so they haven't before that they're not even listening the same is true for anything seems well this is where americans in Europe they have a whole different sense of that yeah and age as well so before we jump into like the specifics of this I'm curious what got you here because now first of all you know 13 14 years ago when the barefoot boom started booming there was there was very little research and there was very little incentive to do any research because it was going to pay for it and so but now that's a different story both research about what we're doing in research about what quote normalsters are doing but where did you start and how did you end up here sure yeah so I was uh 29 years old and I wanted to run after having been relatively sedentary um I wanted to run a half marathon before my 30th birthday I had a kid a couple years before that this was 20 so 2015 I had my first son and I was like I want to be one of those active dads they don't want to be like oh go play on the backyard I can't move my back or whatever so I started running back in 2015 had been doing that on and off for a few years and 2019 rolled around I was like you know I'm gonna run a half marathon and in that half marathon which I ran at a time of 158 22 so I'm proud of that under two hours um I ended up having a stress for action in my foot and it was one of those you know you cross train for a while make up a stationary bike until the foot heels and then for the next couple years I was really just plagued with all kinds of running injuries it was right right knee pain and left knee pain and back pain I had an MRI on one of my knees and was told that I had a condom elasia patella and we needed to take it easy and buy some support issues um and shortly kind of after getting over the knee pain it was my mom actually was like oh I just got these shoes these zero shoes you should really look into them and at the time I was a professor at the university teaching in the OT department teaching evidence based practice and I was like everything she was saying was one of those you know like the the spider sense in back my mind was like no there's no way this is true like there's no way this is curing plantar fasciitis there's no way it's doing all that um so I dug into the research a lot and what I came to find was that and I've heard you say this I think a few a few times I had different podcasts like when you dig into the research it's not so much that the shoes themselves are fixing the problems it's the benefits that you receive by having more proprioceptive input in bottom of your feet right because the proprioceptive input or really just the sensory input of walking um and having flexible footwear uh informs your movement patterns and over time you know doing one movement pattern one way for five miles either leads to some injuries or you can build real strength and that's kind of what got me started on so I was like you know what I'm gonna try some some of these natural or bare foot running shoes and I started doing that I know 20 20ish um 2021ish and just had a look back I don't think I've run in a pair of push and shoes in a long time and what I tell people to come into the clinic but I tell folks on the podcast and stuff like that is again it's like the shoes themselves are not a cure all it's the benefits that you get from wearing those shoes um so my mom was right the shoes were helping her but not in the way that she thought well so that's true I mean treated by this you know it's a rare human being who when presented with information that conflicts with what they believe goes huh instead of immediately thinks of a million ways to argue against that point confirmation bias right yeah exactly and and I mean it makes sense you know it's an evolutionary thing we're wired to stick to what we believe because it would take if we had to rethink something every time we encountered it we'd be dead something would have eaten us by now yeah so so do you remember I want to kind of pick this apart for the fun of it what you know what was the like thing about slowing the film down frame by frame so your mom says hey you got to try these out she's talking about all these things where she was you know in the right direction but not necessarily for the right reason um what happened like when you said your spotty sense was tingling can you a sing what about that and be tell me what you started researching what you found when you actually dove in where'd you where'd you look and what you discover sure yeah so um I think that the thing that she said that I was like oh no she said oh I've had planar fasciitis for years and now where these shoes I don't want to planar fasciitis and I was like okay um so what you're doing anything and she's like well I'm exercising stuff but the shoes took away my planar fasciitis and I was like we're gonna we're gonna dig into this and being the the research nerd that I am and having access to a you know PubMed and some of those peer-reviewed research journals through the university I just kind of did a search and the research that was being published back then and probably so being published right now is like compares like quote-unquote shot runners to barefoot or minimalist runners and I didn't know anything about any of these terms when I was digging into it and what I was looking at was I was trying to look at injury rates but I was really looking at like the impact forces of running efficiency and things of that nature so it's funny because even on the surface there's one study I came everywhere was published probably the journal worth be to consport medicine or something like that and they compared they compared shot runners to barefoot runners and over I think it was a six-week program or something six weeks running on the treadmill and they were testing stability of the ankle and at the end of that research study um the conclusion was well the people that were started they started running conventional shoes they put them in a barefoot shoes and then they tested for six weeks they had more instability in their ankles than before and so you know we should be whatever cautious about encouraging people to do minimal minimal shoes or something like that and being at the time doing research or teaching m as practice I was like okay like if I was to appraise this article like what the conclusion that you're coming to like obviously is a no-brainer if you take somebody from like stabilizing like anti-pronation shoes and you put them in basically no shoes or very flexible shoes like well no duh they're gonna end up pronating more probably they're gonna have some more instability but they never made the connection for me of because they have instability they will have more injuries they could make that connection um so I began digging a little bit more and a little bit more and ended up coming up with uh it was a study published I think it was in 2018 and it was in foot in ankle orthopedics and it basically discussed foot exercises to transition people into barefoot to improve function muscle size foot pressure distribution all kinds of stuff like that with the ultimate goal of like reducing injuries and what they showed was like these it was four we call them the core four exercises in the book but the core four foot exercises which are basically like seated doming, standing, doming you're trying to just work the intrinsic muscles of the foot um and toe spreading they equated that to increased uh increase endurance and ability like heel raises and heel lifts decreased uh instances of plantar fasciitis actually increasing the natural arch of the foot and that kind of got me down that round of hold okay so obviously there's there's a connection here between the footwear that you that you choose and what that means for the function of your feet you know very similarly I'm my background as a as a clinician is like upper-storming hands and we talk about all the time splinting people like in the wrist or the hand and one of the big things we're worried about is intrinsic muscle wasting you know losing the ability to grasp or to do fine motor things because you're splinting or mobilizing the muscles over long periods of time and it's the same base of principle the feet right so that got me down the rabbit hole and then I was like okay so now there's there's obviously some some merit here to the idea of allowing the feet to move more and then doing it in a targeted way to build like intentionally build strength um to decrease the risk of injury in the long term is really it's the strength and the the foundation like you said of your body's movement um that kind of dictates whether or not you're gonna get injured in the long run or not. Well I want to highlight something else that you said you did that most people don't do and can't do and that is you you look at the research and then took a bit of a deeper dive into it and what I mean what I'm saying that is I think about research like almost any of the research that's comparing shot runners to barefoot runners where they say hey we took some runners and we had them run barefoot yeah um it's like well two things one if you just put them in a brand new shoe their running gate would change in fact I was in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands and he this I think he would do is you'd come into his lab with every shoe you owned and he would show that each shoe you wore changed your gate so you know that's one thing and and for the things about quote running efficiency which is not about how well you run it's measuring via two max or something how much energy you're expanding when you're running there's two things that are interesting about that one again if you're just switching to something radically new it's a new movement pattern it's unfamiliar that's going to be a make a change and it's going to be more difficult and then the other thing basically what I'm saying is that very rarely can you actually find out more about the cohorts about the people that they're using in the studies that's the one thing yeah and the other is whether they paid any attention to form because even if you switch someone barefoot especially on a treadmill they can have shitty running form they can still be overstrawing heels striking do all these things and no one ever seems to look at that or measure that this is like in the early days when doctors would say I love this barefoot running thing is I'm getting more patients than ever it's like well first of all you said that in the early shows came out and secondly you know when someone came in and said they got into running barefoot did you ask them if they were actually running in bare feet or not well no and did you look at any video of them running and you know how to analyze their running form well no it's not about the foot where it's about the form and if you don't know what you're looking at then you're just making up a whole story but there's a guy here in town I'm usually reluctant to mention his name but I will I think he might have retired Roger Crom and Roger he would say that he was using accomplished barefoot runners to compare in his studies and I called him on it I said I know all the barefoot runners in this town you didn't have any of them in your study you had people who do some barefoot training as part of their long distance training but they're not barefoot runners they never run like a mile on pavement for example so but you know not knowing who is actually being studied and not looking at the critical thing like you both mentioned form not footwear you know these things are massively misunderstood and most human beings don't have the resources or the will to really dive in and see you know is the study done well or not yeah well I think it's one of those things like I had an edge right because I was teaching this university I went to grad school for this like part evidence based practices what clinicians at least should be on the surface doing so being able to look at a study and kind of pick it apart more critically like to your point most of the the studies out there comparing barefoot runners to non-barefoot runners they basically take a cohort of conventional runners and then randomly assign them to like you know one way or the other so if you take somebody who's run to the last 20 years and regular cushion pronating you know limiting shoes and then you put them in barefoot shoes like of course there's like they haven't learned how to run in those shoes yet so it just leaves a little bit to be desired so so I want to slow the film down one more time so you got a pair of shoes and what was your experience when you put them on and I mean what do you do like them when you got them and what was your experience of them? Sure so what I did the first time I put some shoes on and I won't mention them because they're competitive years and I know okay speak to your girlfriend.
Yeah so I ran I put them on and I actually ran backwards for like 20 paces so that I could kind of feel someone I think it was a marathon training academy podcast I'd listened to before then was talking about form they said the best way to get good running form is to run backwards because you're gonna naturally land on your midfoot foot your forefoot you're gonna be upright your elbows are gonna be behind your body you're just gonna get in good running form doing that and then you see you run backwards you know 15 20 pace and then you run forward a little bit trying to maintain that form and what I noticed very quickly was that I went backwards it felt good and then it went forward and started heel striking a lot and it kind of hurt my feet because I was on pavement and after probably about a block my first run in minimal shoes really lasted maybe a quarter of a mile and that is because I had read some of these researchers like listen they're people getting injured I don't want to run like four miles and injure myself so I ran about a quarter of a mile or so and what I noticed was initially I was striking very like most people very I was overstriting I was striking on my heel it was hurting me and probably in the first I know hundred hundred fifty yards or so I noticed that I began altering my my gate pattern I was changing I was landing more on that midfoot forefoot and reducing some of those impacts on my heel and that was kind of my first go at this and so what I tried to do was then build up so I was doing cross training so I wouldn't lose this functional capacity in the off days and then I was just trying to extend longer and longer and what I was trying to do was make sure that my form was good while I did the transition and as soon as my form started breaking down it was a sign of to me of weakness so I would just stop running then I would go back I'd do whatever kind of exercise I was doing at the time because I kind of looked at it as a long-term transition it took me ultimately you know about eight weeks or so before I was like back up to running a 5k or something like that and feeling good about it but I was a spaz about about the form so I was not gonna let myself run in poor form especially after feeling it on my heel that first time I was like okay there's there's a way to do this and obviously it's a repetitive movement I don't want to injure myself over a long period of time doing you know heel striking for two miles and bare feet so that's that's kind of what I did I've seen a number of people when they hear about this whole idea and they hear you're supposed to land it for four foot they'll continue to overstride and then point their toes planar flex yeah when you were making that transition that first 150 meters were you noticing any other changes in your gate and others when were you still overstrying and planar flexing or could you tell that you were getting your feet underneath you? Initially I was overstrying and kind of just planar flexing after a while and part of this was kind of reading and listening and kind of really listening to my body too like I was leaning more under me and then what also happened was cadence it kind of it picked up as well so the faster your cadence is at least the research kind of sports as well the faster cadence is the harder it is overstride. There's a chart that I didn't say and even if I did say I am organization is not my skill set where it was showing the relationship between cadence and force and basically most people as your cadence was picking up the amount of force is reduced until you started picking up significantly and then basically when she starts sprinting you're putting a lot of force in the ground but it was a nice u-shaped curve between cadence and force and I wish I could find that piece of research again. Yeah so I mean it's about kind of finding that balance so that's what I did I just tried to build up you know going from having run half of my earth on just having the capacity to like run 10 miles like it was maybe humbling a little bit like I was trying to fight the urge to run more because I knew I could run more but I went into it with the like with the vision that it was going to be a long game and it was you know it was going to take some time to build up to that in the new I was looking at I was changing my running technique I was changing my running form and that takes on.
Well here's a sort of personal question not like you know deeply probing or anything but what you're describing is my favorite thing which is you basically became your own coach you were using the feedback you were getting to make these adjustments in real time did you have any sense that's what was actually happening for you was that just the way you're built anyway and you didn't notice? No I mean I kind of realized it what I was again because of my background in the clinic like I kind of realized like what I was going to be doing involved learning new motor patterns so I was I kind of nerded out a little bit was like okay these are the movements that we want to do if I'm going to be landing on my forefoot on my midfoot yeah I need to get my feet up under my body I need to get my back up I need to worry about the posture I can't be over reaching with my arms and it was a matter of like I was having to be very cognizant of it while I was running for those first you know several weeks or months like making sure that okay my form is good I'm feeling it this is what it feels like when I get out of sync whether it be over striding or reaching too far with my body or hunching over whatever it happened to be and it just took learning you know learning what right feels like well you know I love that you pointed out that you paid attention to what wrong feels like because that's something that if we're not really aware of that it's harder to learn what the right is sometimes when I'm teaching people I'll say exaggerate this thing you're doing badly because it's just so ingrained you don't know what you're doing right or wrong so you need to do something on either end of that spectrum to kind of wake up your brain enough to go oh okay now I'm now I know where I'm starting at least so that that's a good one I want to lead to a couple things but we mentioned something else that I really like actually you know there's two things one is think about the counterfactuals thinking about when people are presented with this idea of running barefoot or minimalist footwear no one ever seems to talk about the various places in the world where this is what they do without a problem for years and years and years they never use that as an example of hey this is possible the excuse is always yeah but they grew up doing that so you know as if it's impossible to learn some new movement pattern at any point in your life like you can't learn to play the guitar once you're past the age of seven it's sort of the analogy for that one that makes no sense and the other one that I love and I'm dying to hear what your thoughts on this one is I hear this one a lot from people like oh yeah but we didn't evolve to run let's say barefoot or whatever on hard surfaces like this what's your response that and is I don't even know if there's actually good research but I have thoughts about this one I'm curious if you do yeah I mean I think you know I kind of I'm not one of those where or go barefoot or wear minimalist shoes all the time no matter why because there are times like shoot when I'm standing up on a concrete surface or a very long time so I have a question I think the reality is like our if you look at the way our feet our body really is designed to move and all that like it was we evolved to run on uneven surfaces yeah that that makes sense on principle but the reality is like once you learn the appropriate motor patterns whether you're doing it on uneven surfaces or flat surfaces the impact force is still being reduced if you're running appropriately so I don't know I feel like yeah I'm not too convinced you know my version is you got to go to these places that we evolved on and in because there's a lot of hard-packed mud which may as well be concrete exactly sticking out of it you don't want to step on or in rocks around I also love to say look as a former gymnast we did not evolve to double twisting double backflips but we can do them we didn't evolve to you know fly fighter jets but we can do it so this the I don't even know what this fallacy is called sort of like the reverse naturalistic fallacy which is natural it's good this one is I don't know what it is but it's a misunderstanding of history and what we can do there's got to be a name for that one somewhere yeah and I mean the reality is like neuroplasticity like we're yeah our brains and our as such because our brains control our body and our motor patterns like our brains change from the day we're born to the day we die so there's no reason to think that you can't learn a new motor pattern you can't generalize a skill from say on even surfaces to flat hard surfaces if down the right you know time and training great feedback I mean I will I will add to that since you brought up neuroplasticity and your experience took you about eight weeks for me it was much faster and for some people is longer because people do have different propensities for neuroplastic change for learning a new but pattern for adopting that for feeling it and of course you know there people will be better or worse at different things so you might find that you're if you're running you're not going to be as elegant as some guy who's a two-hour five-minute marathoner who's just wired for that but that doesn't mean that you can't find a way to do this enjoyable and works for you I also like reminding people that there's lots of different ways you can run there's different distances so I'm a sprinter I run a really I run as fast as I can and in a straight line for a really short distance I don't take turns around the track because I don't have a GPS watch and I don't like to get lost so but there are other people who you know the idea of what I'm doing just is completely absurd and they'll run a hundred mile races and everything between so not only is there that thing of finding that that taking your time to become your own coach to listen and find this new optimal form but then figure out what you want to do with it was all other piece of the puzzle yeah absolutely yeah and I think part of it too with the taking the eight weeks was more strength based than anything like the reality was I've been running in shoes that had limited the intrinsic muscle strength of my feet so taking the time to really strengthen the right muscles in the kinetic chain and it's been one of those things that you know even now like I'm still working I had an injury maybe three four months ago six months ago in my glute need and it was probably because of the way I was running so now it's you know one of the PT's in the clinic here's been working with me and I've been strengthening that right muscle that that left side of that left glute and working on it to address it's really in the context of running you know so I think it's one of those things too like it's not only it's not only the neuroplasticity piece but it's really the strength of the underlying muscles too and you're gonna find stuff like okay now that my feet are strong the problem just moves up the kinetic chain and now that you know my knee is strong I was my hip and now that my hip is strong you'll play whack them all probably your whole life I think that the reality is just approaching it from this motor control strength based approach as opposed to stabilize yeah yeah well and I think other way around too and what you just pointed out to glute medius which most people don't even know they have is when I was with Bill Sands he was saying this is the number one thing that we do with runners is they just don't have any strength in their glute medius and for anyone listening just look that up and look up and we can talk about strengthening exercise for that as well I saw something on the trail the other day that blew my mind this woman ran behind me and her left leg looked totally fine everything you know was in alignment looked great her right leg her knee was pointed inward vastus valgus and her right foot was still pointed outward it was evert in a way that I've never seen it was like corkscrewed and then she was a little overweight and I noticed something that blew but like I said blew my mind she had no right glute I mean I don't know if she had it removed but I mean literally yeah like her left glute was a full looking thing in a slightly overweight woman and her right glute was like flat as a pancake yeah yeah and of course that's the thing if you are not using your glutes at all all all of those things that happen downstream and your your femur being internally rotated rotated your knee all that like it made total sense and I was inches away from literally stopping her and saying here's an exercise that if you do this I guarantee that's gonna constrain out your leg and you're not gonna be running like a dork and but I was not that rude but if I see her as a problem the way the message is delivered has something to yeah I don't know what the right way to deliver that message is because it's certainly not hey when you ran by I was staring your ass and that's definitely not the way to start that conversation I don't know what the right way is so this is this is this took us a while just to get to leading to where you started by saying you almost at the beginning said in the clinic so talk about what you're doing now and with whom you're doing these things and what you're doing with these people sure yeah so we at the clinic have physical therapy obviously we get people that are come for all sorts of some ailments the on the running side of things a lot of what we're doing is we don't push this whole idea of minimalist footwear or anything like that we talk about just natural running patterns really so we wrote a book called the natural runner it's an eight-week plan to transition from conventional heel striking overstriting to a more natural running gate so a lot of that involves exercises both corrective and then endurance building and then obviously running within the context of this program to try to get you to the point where you know you could do this in thick cushion shoes if you want to I would argue that you probably need a little bit more appropriate stuff at feedback but if that's what you want to do you want to keep your hocus or whatever with their you know 50 millimeter cushions go for it or if you want to go all the way and go you know barefoot this program works with that too really the idea was just to reduce people's injury by addressing the underlying strength component the motor pattern and the form and that's kind of what we do with with the natural running programs do you know about Isabelle Sacco's research on foot strengthening and people running in regular shoes no I have not oh so Isabelle Sacco SACO she had people doing eight-week foot strengthening exercise program and or split to people in quote normal shoes slimming the two groups one did this exercise program the other didn't and over the course of the year-long study the ones who did just the initial eight-week exercise program had a two hundred fifty percent lower incidence of injury than those who didn't in regular shoes now I added that Sarah Ridge's study which showed that if you just walk in minimalist footwear like ours you can build foot strength as much as doing an exercise program now no one's done the study yet showing you just walk in middle shoes run in regular shoes and have a reduced injury rate but kind of do the math if you're walking in middle shoes that builds foot strength as much as the same exercise program that Isabelle used to show reduction injury rate if that makes sense to you with the transitive property of injury then go for it but so yeah you'll get a kick out of that study so I know people are going to want to hear a bit more about what's in your book without giving away the entire do you have a book so say more about what you're actually doing or give people some examples of things they can do and then before I forget because if I don't ask this now forget have you thought about doing a study demonstrating the value of this program maybe we had thought about it's just you know it's one of those being probably on the former academic institution side of things like I get you know like a randomized control trial and all that just cost a lot of money to do it's true so you know we you can do and I've been saying this for years in health care like the the value in health care tangent here the value in health care is the data the outcomes data and what you what you can do with that what you demonstrate from that so we're definitely all about tracking data and outcomes and trying to to equate that we're also dealing though with you know probably a biased sample size of people that are that are coming in because they know that they have a problem here and injury and they're trying to fix it they stay right they stay in the program as opposed to people who might come once or twice in the leaves so you don't get those outcomes so yeah down the line research would be cool if we could get funding or something we'd be there's I have a friend who's a I guess how old is he now he's got to be geez almost 80 he's a doctor who does prolotherapy he's actually the guy who taught prolotherapy on the start of one country knows it and for people who don't know prolotherapy you basically take a needle and you jab it into the tendon or ligament that's having some laxity problems or some some tendinosis or tendinitis and it basically selectively injures your body so that your body recruits things to heal your throat traumas yeah exactly and I said it to Tom once I said you know we're talking about the research on prolotherapy here's the research I don't take insurance I charge a lot of money and people come back yeah wait sorry I don't take insurance I charge a lot of money it's really painful and people come back and refer their friends so you know there's a certain time where anecdotal information is actually valuable but yeah but backing up to what's in the program let's walk through that or run through that yeah run through that yeah I like it so it basically it's a seven day workout plan or seven day workout week and we adapted it from a great book by oh man it was published by Runners World it was called Train Smart Run Forever and the idea we basically took the idea of the seven seven day workout week and adapted it for this specific thing but his idea was the author's idea was basically to be a lifelong runner you obviously need to not just run you need to work on all those things that break down over time right the right muscles the maybe it's endurance and capacitive functional capacity so we kind of took that and adapted it for okay what does it mean for somebody transitioning from conventional running to natural running what does that mean for their their foot strength their posture all of that so it starts with basically understanding those four foot exercises and then what they called weightless or barefoot weight bearing and this is based off of a study that was published in the foot and ankle orthopedics in 2018 but they basically outlined four exercises to them are similar so they're seated foot doming which is you know trying to draw your feet up like that like you're arching your feet you're just standing for people who are just listening can you describe that again yeah you're basically putting your your heel and your toes flat on the ground and then you're keeping them on the ground you're trying to pull them together almost like you're crunching your foot up trying to arch your foot it's an isometric contraction you're trying to hold it three to five seconds and you do that while you're standing so you're weight bearing and then you're doing it and then you're doing it while you're seated and those are the first two exercises the next one is plantar flexion and inversion so plantar flexion is just pointing your toes and then inversion is bringing your the sole of your foot towards the midline of your body so you're pointing your toes and bringing them in and then the last one is just spreading your toes spreading apart and closing them and doing this in conjunction with what they call barefoot weight bearing which is just walking around a bare feet for at least two hours a day five days a week increases the strength in your calves your feet obviously your foot muscles and can decrease injuries going forward so the title of that study is can foot exercises and going barefoot improve functional muscle size foot pressure during walking and qualitative reports of function and people with flat feet so what they actually did in the study was they measured the arch of people's feet over time during this program and there was an eight-week program and the majority of people who came in with like flat foot deformity did these exercises they didn't do any other you know they didn't run they didn't do any other kind of exercise programs they didn't wear orthotics they just did these exercises and then they walked around in bare feet and the majority of them I think two-thirds or so ended up with actually defining or a defined arch at the end of eight weeks so it builds the intrinsic foot muscles of your feet the muscles of your feet which is kind of the platform for all of the running going forward if you think about what what a foot does biomechanically like you've got this arch in that arch in spring and kind of absorb some of the cushion and then it's also stabilizing you as well so that's kind of the first the first level is every single day you're going to do these these foot exercises and you're going to walk around with bare feet regardless of whether or not you're going to wear normal shoes when you're running or whatever you're going to work on the intrinsic muscles of your feet and improving you know the balance and then the strength obviously going forward that's it no that's just the first part so yeah that's the beginning and then each other day so you've got three days where you're running and then the other days you're doing some kind of cross training and then one day a week is just like a recovery stretch day and basically what you're doing is some kind of cross training now we give you some examples in the book like jump rope cycling rowing and all those are really focused on kind of the endurance functional capacity side of things we always recommend jump rope for the first eight weeks when you're transitioning because that's really where you're going to build some of that intrinsic foot strength while you're actually jumping but then you're also getting eccentric contraction of the of the calf which running and transitioning into a four foot motion means you're landing on the the front or the middle of your foot and then your heel is lowering down and if you have not strengthened your calf or your gastroc you're going to end up with tightness with soreness possibly some injuries if you do it you know too long too quickly so the jump rope doing doing that is a cross training gives you the added benefit of that you're not losing any endurance you're building some of that functional capacity but then you're also training those foot muscles in the gastroc for what will eventually be a long run landing on your midfoot so those are the cross training days and then there's just various strength exercises and you're focused really on the posterior kinetic chain which is we mentioned your glutes your hands your calf muscles a little bit of core work and basically the idea there is that you're building the strength foundation for all of your running so most people most runners and really people in the u.s in general because we sit at a desk all day and because of the way we overstride a lot of times you get strong into your kinetic chains your cat your quads are very strong your hip flexors are tight most people can't extend their hip or like kick their leg back very very far because it gets tight up in the in the kind of the elia upsoas area of the quad area so we work on stretching those as well and then strengthening your butt your glute your hamstrings because those are going to end up pushing you or driving you forward in a forefoot pattern instead of kind of like pulling forward with your quad right i heard something the other day um uh it was a an interview with um the author davis sedera who moved to france and um some people mentioned to him that he walked like an american and he said what does that mean he says you throw your legs in front of you yeah and that's what we do we don't use our glutes and our hamstrings to extend to push ourselves forward we kind of throw our leg forward and kind of hop over it so we're using the exact opposite muscles for what's optimal yeah and from like just a standard impact force of what that's doing like when you overstride like that and you hit with your heel not only are you know you're working those quads a little bit more but the energy transfer is basically like you've taken a straight rod and you've just jammed it into the ground so the force is going right up the kinetic chain up your ankles knees into your hips and into your lower back so it's not uncommon for runners to have you know back pain or low back pain or hip pain and a lot of times it's just they're they're striding and they're smacking the the ground super super hard i was talking to a peti friend of mine the other day he was he owns a peti clinic as well and one of his his guys is really into running and uh he was running on the treadmill um this peti friend of mine and his other his colleague came in was like dude you are so loud on this machine it sounds like you're trying to bring down the building and a lot of years from that over striding so you know a few things that he did was just he shortened he shortened his uh his stride length increases cadence and the sound went from like sunk sunk sunk sunk to more like tap tap tap tap tap and that's what you want when you're running and we address it in the book as well like think about think about how fast your feet or moving because the less time your feet are in the ground one it means there's less force coming up the back it also means you're running quicker there's less impact it's good for everybody so that's kind of like the first phase is we're working on this cross training we're working on strengthening the right muscles every single day you're doing these foot exercises and you're walking around for least two hours a day barefoot some of our folks will try to break it up like i did a morning in the an hour in the morning an hour in the evening sure the goal is just to increase over time i always tell people like unless you're in public there's really no reason for you to wear shoes i would argue that even if you are in public um it's not like well depends on where you live uh obviously and like if you're in a beach community then it's really easy to do that so there's times where i'm in Costco and bare feet nobody like you know parent and kids and the kids will go mommy that means not wearing shoes and if parents are nice they'll say why don't you ask me about that why haven't you know where she was like oh have you ever been to the beach and they say yeah i go where she was they say no i go why don't you just pretend we're at the beach i go okay they're totally hit to it um it's also it's also a spiritual problems everywhere now well that's my goal um it's also really fun like if you haven't been in a grocery store in bare feet where the floors are nice and smooth and cold on a really hot summer day and then you go to the produce section right when the mister goes off and you just hang out there oh man that's the best nice so um so so um as we kind of bring things in for a landing if people want to find out more about you and what you're doing and and the program in the book um let them know how they can do that sure yeah they can find us at pro-active com we've got a tab there for running resources but the book is called the natural runner um an eight week trading program to transition to barefoot or natural natural running without injuring yourself i think there we go and i love that you adopted natural running because my favorite thing i wanted to bring this up earlier is you watch kids learning to run and this and everything we've talked about is how they naturally do it they don't need any instruction this and there's one other thing they do when they're running this way which is um so uh weird smiling you know they have a good time um so um so so so ronnie this has been an absolute pleasure and i'm thrilled to hear your story and i'm hoping that more people kind of inspired by it and understand just those little idiosyncratic differences as well i mean i like talking to people who have taken a dive into this not just from their own experience but also from the research side as well but to highlight that it's not you know people always ask you know is there a program and while you create a program i'm sure your experience has been that for some people can go faster some people takes a little less more time less time and and and that thing that you described of basically becoming your own coach by listening and experimenting that's the best thing from in my mind because then you're not um you're not swayed by people's stories of um that they think that they can make you better with some magic technology that doesn't really have any validity and you know that's another one of my goals to make people immune to marketing bullshit yeah well there's a we quote this article in the uh in the book but there's the quote is something along the lines of like we've invested so many millions of dollars in um in technology running technology but quote like the perceived benefits of injury reduction with this running technology has not borne out in the in the literature right not even in the literature in the people who are doing the actual running i mean that's the thing in the early days with max and less shoes i was training with handful of olympians and i said to them in two years you want people to run again and they're like are you putting in more miles never with these things i mean yeah i know um you're gonna your knees will be blown out two years and two years later they'll switch to cycling so um you know they could they literally couldn't run and it's and ironically they could now if they transition properly and got back into natural form but um that again you tell people something that they don't believe and their natural reaction is to just leave you especially you know coming from somebody like me where i'm not an academic i'm not a researcher i look the way i look and i'm a sprinter put it all together um and i own a footwear brand i mean i mean i wrote this line on the other day i started a footwear company because i hate shoes so much and um which i think i have to make a video where that's the opening line just to see what happens because people don't really get it but anyway um do me a favor give me the give me you one more time for everyone sure it's pro dash active health calm and then the book is called the natural runner and eight week transition program something or other it'll be obvious when you get there that's the point yeah yeah perfect well um a thank you again and b you know i want to um we'll have to talk offline because i'd love to help you know what you're doing since obviously it's what i believe in and you've codified things in a way that um we can add to our library of things for people to to jump into and and by the way speaking as a former competitive rope jumper um i love it uh you suggested that as well because undeniably that can help build strength better advanced or something other than running frankly so and for everybody else um thank you thank you for joining us a reminder again just head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com you'll find all the previous episodes of which there are a bunch um and you'll find ways you can find us on social media and if you want to like drop me an email with a suggestion a comment somebody think it should be on the show whatever you want to toss in my direction just use it to move m-o-v-e and join themovementmovement.com and until next time go out have fun and live life feet first