Episode 186: Your Body is NOT a Machine

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, we've looked at our body as if it's just a mechanical thing, like a robot or a machine. The same way we now look at our brains, they're computers, because of the computer revolution. But maybe it's not like that. And if we have that kind of metaphor about biomechanics, we might be short-changing ourselves.

We're going to find out more about that. 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, typically starting feet first, because those things are your foundation, after all. And we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and the outright lies, you've been told. What it takes to walk a runner, play, or do yoga, or cross-fit, or hike, or whatever it is you like to do, and to do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively.

Did I say enjoyably? Trick question? Keep it up. So find something you like to do and do it.

I'm Stephen Sashan, your host for the Movement Movement podcast, and the CEO, Co-CEO now, and co-founder of ZeroShoes.com. And we call it the Movement Movement because we're creating a movement, and that we includes you, I'll tell you how I'm second. About natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do. And that we part is really simple.

I'm not, there's no secret handshakes, no money exchange, no, you know, theme song that we have. It's just that you can go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, nothing to join. That's where you find previous episodes, and all the places you can engage with us on social media. And of course, the simple request, give us a review, give us a thumbs up, give us five stars, like the hit us, get the bell icon on YouTube, like the drill if you want to be part of the tribe, and spread the word, just subscribe.

So let us have some fun. Sean, do me a favor, tell the humans who you are and what you're doing here? I'm Sean Flod. I'm a licensed physical therapist.

I've been, gosh, almost 25, going almost 26 years. I really look at Movement and how Movement actually is a very natural process and how we can basically maximize that potential for health and performance. And I love the feet. So it's great to talk to you.

You know, in the early days, when Zero Shoes was just a do-it-yourself, barefoot sandal kit company, there was a bunch of pictures and a bunch of videos of me and my feet making sandals. And I got a surprising number of emails and direct messages of people going, can you get more picture to your feet, please? And so I did not do that is the best thing I can say. So, so our little lead in about biomechanics, you and I were talking very briefly before we had this Jack, because for people who don't know the amount of conversation that I and a guest have before this conversation is like 30 seconds, because it's basically, hey, we're gonna have a chat.

Let's get started. Okay, here we go. So, but let's chat about biomechanics and the way that people are perceiving that or considering that now versus the way you're seeing it. Yeah, I think, I mean, back in the day biomechanics was really looked at as the mechanics of how the bones and the joints interrelated and maybe how the muscles function.

But over the years of really studying, I had a chance to study with Dr. Tom McPoyle and a gait lab at any of you that's wearing at my physical therapy degree. And we started to look at other ways that from the foot up the limb, what were some of the dynamics that were going on. So I got a hunger for kind of thinking out of the box about what biomechanics was and looking at functional movement.

And we actually even, we worked a lot of the athletes and he never casted orthotics or anything for the athletes that needed foot support at that time. He actually had them standing and we actually used a soft material that he would put in the baking oven and modify it and we would make some adjustments to what we felt were functional movements within the foot. So, well, so two things. I want to kind of parse that a little bit.

So first is if we're looking at a body not as a mechanical object that's basically hinges and levers and the things that move hinges and levers, how would you describe the difference in approach or the different way at the different viewpoint? Well, I think you're looking at it as an integrative system and how the foot actually responds through the whole walking pattern. And you know, you make those adjustments with a soft, that's what I love about the movement toward minimalist shoes is there's less rigidity with what you're trying to do with improving the foot function again is back to a natural walking pattern or running pattern or whatever that might be. Mostly dance revolution.

That's really our entire goal is to own that category, which we kind of do. And I only know that because a couple years ago, I got a bunch of emails from you right before a big international competition. Do you know that we're all wearing your shoes? Like, I did not.

That's really cool. Send me video. So, so, so, so, now the second part of what you said is that he would have people standing and then you would still make something the way you described it and still sounded like an orthotic. So tell me what was different with that.

I don't want to say device, but it's the only way I can think of on a Friday afternoon, which is when we're taking this insert. So tell me what that thing would give me a description of it and what it was doing or what how were you were making it or what the effect you were looking for or anything else you can say that's some variation of what I was trying to ask. You know, it was in a gait lab. So, we had the ability to have force plates for how the foot transferred its weight.

We had a tiddial rotation pointer at that time, which was new. I mean, in the research realm of what the lower legs started to do in relationship to the foot. So, we would look at the foot dynamic before and after and use just with simple digitation in cameras to make small adjustments in this soft accommodative. That was the word was accommodative.

It wasn't a rigidness to put the foot in a certain position through because, you know, you wanted that accommodative pattern so that the foot could do what it wanted to do. And then we would go back and, you know, pre and post with the camera and the force plate and then as well as what was the athlete's response to injury recovery and then improved performance. So, we modified that orthotic like every week during their recovery phase. Well, so let me dive into that a little deeper.

So, when somebody would come into work with you guys, were you doing this sort of gait analysis for everybody? I'm going to try and break this down into simple questions. Yeah, mostly athletes at that time. So athletes come in and then you're doing some gait analysis.

What are you looking for that would let you know? I mean, here I'll give you the fun one. Did anybody walk in? You did the analysis and you didn't have to make something for them?

Well, we were seeing people because they came with injury. Yeah, well, even still, you never know. Well, I would say no. There was always something that could be adjusted.

But what was fascinating is, you know, that was early on in terms of what we could do with the shoe and the orthotic. Right. We did. There was still PT doing some muscle training, but it wasn't what I know now and what you're starting to see in the foot research and the what happens with the intrinsic muscles of the feet in relationship to force trends.

I mean, just I'm amazed at the way technology, what we had then and what's available now to look at what really is going on in the foot. Oh, no, it's and getting better every day. I was talking to people this morning who got some tech that is mind-blowing. But anyway, back to that in a second.

So, people are coming in there, injured in some wake. And first of all, I love that you highlighted. This is something that you were doing and changing as they were recovering because this is. So, when I talked to Irene Davis, who is the, I will affectionately refer to her as the godmother of research on natural movement in minimalist footwear, her kind of wake up call because she was, at the time, teaching physical therapist or physical therapist and training at the University of Delaware, how to make orthotics.

And she had this realization like, when people come in with any sort of injury, our goal is to keep them moving as much as possible in a pain-free range while they're recovering. Why are we doing the opposite with the foot? Why are we posting the foot? Why are we putting an orthotic in there that is stiff and rigid and doesn't let the foot move?

And why are we doing that for things that have nothing to do with the foot often? And that's what she started kind of looking into this. And even there are a lot of researchers including Beno, Nick and Canada and many others who are the first ones to say, and orthotic was never designed, even a hard rigid one was never designed to be worn full-time. It was designed to participate in recovery.

The same way you put a cast on your arm, when you break your arm, or I'm sitting here after shoulders. So you're going to be on there and keep me from using my arm in any way while it recovers. And I'm doing movement things that are the limit of what I can do pain-free. And so, the idea that you are watching this over time and manipulating over time for recovery is the first thing I really want to highlight because that's, of course, a brilliant and b just man, not what people do.

I mean, if you go into the injury to most physical therapy clinics, they'll fit you for an orthotic and they suggest you need to wear it forever and they never look at it in any other way afterwards unless they want to sell you another one every year, which is usually the case. In fact, and I'll stop this rant in a second, when I was in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands, he used to be headed by mechanics for the US Olympic Committee. We watched a bunch of people running at super high speed in super high speed video, like 500 frames a second.

And he would have people wear every different shoe that they owned and we would watch their gate change with every shoe. And after seeing that, I said to him, this just proves that orthotics are bullshit. And he had a little rise smile as what he mean. As well, if every shoe is different, you need a different orthotic for every shoe.

And since those shoes had foam minceoles as they break down, you need a different orthotic probably every couple of weeks. Right. Right. Right.

Right. So, assuming that orthotics, we don't work at all in that regard, which these were exactly so weren't injured. They were just coming in for whatever, for improved performance, which means that probably, you know, wasn't necessary anyway. So that's all other story.

So, okay, so back up, you're having injured athletes come in, you're gonna make something soft and make some adjustments. So can you give me an example of like one of these, and I'm going to keep using the word devices until you give me a better one, what one of these devices would do, and then what you would see both before and then after, and then we'll get to how you would change that every time. Yeah. I think a lot of the majority of it was to look at rear foot mobility and rear foot instability.

So for people who don't know what that means, can you put it with the heel bone, and then the bone that sits on top of that that interacts with the lower leg bones, they call it the tailors. Right. The tailors and the calcaneus, and in between there, we call the sub-tailor joint. And so, midfoot was later, as I was starting to leave my graduate training, looking at what happened in the midfoot, and more or less the translation that was required back and forth between heel to toe, and then the return.

And that's where we're at now with current understandings of foot dynamics, which I'm just in love with. But the idea mostly, his focus was looking at sort of what was happening at the sub-tailor joint, and what then was happening up the chain into the tibial fibula, and then the ACL and the knee. That's kind of where we stopped. And so we were, we were just trying to see if we could gain back these sort of abnormalities or asymmetries from what he understood was sort of a range of optimal movement.

And again, it was more dependent, right? You had volleyball tennis, cross-country runners. So, we mostly focused on the runners. And so when you described that sort of that translation or that alignment between the sub-tailor and the talus and everything above that, you were making a kind of curving motion with your hand.

Was that just done? I assume that was not by accident. You were sort of a small one. The rotational spiraling that was occurring that you picked up with a pointer right at the tibial plateau below the where the patellar tendon touches into the tibia.

We would put, we would strap this, it was basically a wand with a dot on the end, and it would, you know, rotate and give us an understanding of what was happening at the chain. Okay, so let me try to do the PT-English translation. So basically what you're noticing is that the relationship between the calcaneus, the yelbone and the talus and tibiala is going to show up in how that shin bone for lack of their charm is rotating or not. And that's sort of one of your diagnostics is what's happening with that rotational effect.

And so what would be like, you know, someone comes in and you're looking in and you're seeing a problem, what would that look like? And then as you're, and then I still want to hear what one of these devices looks like doing and what you're then seeing to demonstrate that you've accomplished the intervention that you're looking for. So, we often saw a delay in sort of what we call outward rotation of the tibia during push off from like mid stance where the mid foot makes, you know, where you're basically your greatest amount of weight is down through the foot. What was happening in the tibia there and then what started to translate as they went into push off, because that's the power phase.

And so what were you, so again, give me an example of what would look bad. And then you saw very little rotation like there was a lot of activity. Okay, interesting. And so, and so then or what we often saw is, you know, either almost rigidity or just less power, like there just wasn't, it was almost like there was something happening at the foot and now we understand it more that didn't allow for whatever was going on in their foot with their shoe and the device that we supported them with that wasn't giving them that power to make the propulsion forward to locomotive or to, you know, to propel forward.

And so we're going to get to what it looks like on the good side once we know the description of what kind of, you know, an example of what a device might look like that would be helpful. So the devices were basically, we would use a, it's called plastasode. It was a material that underheat would mold and so they use those now like in ski boots and soles, you know, custom insoles. So we were using early on that first generation of plastasode and we would palpate them standing in neutral.

Where was their sub-tailor neutral? And I will tell you, looking back on it, there were very few people that could stand in sub-tailor neutral. They were already, their stance and this is something we could talk a little bit more just standing upright. They were already externally rotated in their sub-tailor joint.

So they were, they were unable to be in sub-tailor neutral, just standing. So yeah, people are just misaligned to begin with. Now, do you think this, do you think that was a function of the injury or do you think that was a function of something, let's say further upstream that was out of whack and what I'm thinking of, some going back, well, I'm thinking two things. I'm going back to Bill Sands, where almost every runner who walked into his lab walked out with a list of glute medius and, well, glute mass was mostly glute medius exercises because the glutes weren't firing well.

And if the glutes don't fire well, that will lead to your femur being usually internally rotated and that'll mess up with your, that'll mess up your feet, et cetera, et cetera. So how were you seeing or what did you see as the thing that was the cause of that misaligned injury or muscle disactivation or imbalance or. Back then, I don't, I, we were seeing the injured state. Now, looking at people both who don't have injury and people who are struggling, say, low back or hip or whatever, the dynamic that there's bringing them into my clinic that they are struggling with, I always look at standing.

And so in my yoga classes that I teach where people may not necessarily have an injury, they're fairly functional, you still see the tendency to be on the outside of the feet. And this bridges the gap between my studies once I left this with therapy to study with a manual therapist who looked at sort of more wholesomeness of the body and use the foot as a representation of a physical, physiological interaction with the rest of the body. And so that's where it's like, my guess is even that these kids, they were college students already had imbalances and then they were performing at high levels of where they were never screened. They were never properly screened for mobility or foot dynamics that aren't really in my world now, aren't based in biomechanics.

Like I thought I knew back then. So, okay, I've only said this one three times, I'm hoping we get to this time. Yes. So we're just, we would post like the heel to get them out of that external, you know, kind of being on the outside of the foot.

We might support them like in the, like we're the, you know, the bony part of the outer foot, the people will get real bony with that outer part. We might post that a little bit where the fifth digit comes in to some of the midcarpals mid-tarsals, excuse me. So we would try and post them in neutral standing and then look at what they did dynamically. That was a lot.

It was like, it was less about arch support. It was more about how we get them out of this work kind of pattern. So, and for again, I'll do the translation. So posting is basically just a fancy word for, yeah.

We're gonna stick something underneath your foot in some way. You know, we were over there by the standard and, you know, I love that because what blows me away is the way every time I was fitted for an orthotic, which had to have been at least a dozen times of not more during my life. It was some, well, either standing or walking over something, but then they would or stepping in a phone box and then they'd send that off and what would come back would be something and you're done. That's the thing.

No one's analyzing what happens afterwards. No one's modifying it. No one's tweaking it. And it was certainly not some pliable material.

It was not something that was there. It sounds like what you're describing. It's like we're trying to give the body a bit of a hint more than we're trying to, you know, force it into some pattern. Yeah, we were nudging it out of, you know, without trying to create some rigid, this is the way your foot needs to be.

And gosh, why do something rigid when our foot is not rigid? Right. Well, I'm starting to do this a bunch. I say to people, let me ask you what's going to sound like the dumbest question in the world, followed by a number of other dumb questions.

Number one, is weaker ever better than stronger? And they go, no? I go, okay, dumb question. Number two, if you're going to talk about your bicep, what do you do to make it stronger?

And you go bicep girls, cool. What do you do to make it weaker? Don't use it. Like cool.

So your feet, if you want to make your feet weaker, then what would you do? Not use it? Okay, cool. And so yeah, so now take your shoe and see how flexible your shoe is compared to your flexible foot and they go, oh, so it seems so screamingly obvious, you know, you've got all these bones and joints, they're supposed to bend move.

And people are like, oh, well, I mean, I guess I need to just have my foot not move for the rest of my life because I'm somehow inferior to all other human beings. It's a very weird thing. And so then I'm assuming what you're doing in terms of testing this device is you're making it, putting in someone shoe, watching them walk across the force plate and looking at that little tibial wand for the lack of better term and seeing if it's actually starting to get that movement translated into the rest of the lower leg as they're doing that propulsive takeoff after the mid stance and just modifying that until you're seeing what looks okay. They're actually getting forced out of feet.

And then over time, what are you then doing, because you were saying you're modifying this as they're recovering. So what are you then looking for? It's giving you the info for modification and giving an example of what a modification might look like. Well, the modifications would, you know, we would start shaving down that post theme, that shifting them out of that external rotation or being on the outside of your foot kind of pattern.

What was fascinating is I was more in the gait lab. I wish I was more in the physical therapy place. You know, they were doing the traditional thing which were like the teal grabs and the balancing on one foot and doing at that time what I thought were what we did for the feet. Now what I'm giving people for their feet, it just, I think it handled a lot.

They don't need to be baited. They don't need to be baited. Yeah. They're all our way.

So I'm guessing correct me if I'm wrong then. The number one intervention, if you will, over time, as people are recovering, is just less and less getting rid of stuff. Yeah. So you'll love the story.

I was at the International Food and Animal Biomechanics Conference a number of years ago. And a guy who's a very big deal, orthotics researcher, maker, etc. decided to try on our shoes and love them and set, came up to Irene Davis and said, I love these shoes. I think I'm going to put my orthotic in and he was doing it to try to rip her and like, you know, see if she was going to get her head exploding or something.

And she said, that's great. So do that for a month and then shave it down by 50%. And then a month later, shave it down by another 50% and a month later from away. And the guy went, oh, so I don't know if he ever did that, but it was super interesting.

I mean, I love that. I mean, it's great. And but there's, there's just not that. I mean, it's still growing and I'm hoping that that's well, I'll tell you don't continue just to like, the problem, this is going to sound not surprising is that there are people and by people, I mean companies and who hire people who make millions to billions of dollars, basically saying that we're full of shit and that everyone needs to be wearing some sort of support, some sort of orthotics, some sort of something for the rest of their life.

And so the change, and what I have found, much to my surprise, is that when you start pulling the rug out from underneath someone who's making a billion dollars, they don't just go, wow, sorry, I was wrong. Congratulations. They go down swinging and they swing hard. And they start your knees.

Exactly. And so I, I mean, obviously part of my goal in life is to make real what you just described is that we're going to try and get enough people to realize exactly what you're saying. Your feet can handle a lot, including you, and you don't need all this extraneous stuff that just makes them weaker over time. So they can't handle anything, including you.

And there's a book that I read recently about by a guy named Damon Centola called Change and the what's going to happen at some point or what has to happen at some point, have a significant change where, for example, all these companies making orthotics for all practical purposes disappear. There may be some for, you know, when you do have to immobilize the foot because it really doesn't need to heal and you don't want to move it. But by and large, you know, make them go away. We need to get 25% of the population to think that that's a stupid thing to do.

25% is the magic number according to all that research. That's when things go exponential after that. So just trying to get there. That's the goal.

Cool. Well, that's better than I thought it would be. I more like the third, you know, it's, it's a surprise. Well, the reality is it's 25% within a community.

And so if you start with, if you identify certain communities, you can get it there and then eventually becomes a population little thing. So you start doing it in small communities, though small communities are connected to bigger communities. And that's the way it happens. Interestingly, from this book, it doesn't happen from the top down, the celebrity is going, Hey, look at me.

I don't need this anymore. Because first of all, celebrities won't jump on the bandwagon until there's a bandwagon. Because they don't want to ruin their credibility by saying something where their entire fan base is going to go, Hey, moron. So they want their fan base to go, Hey, thank you know, you're part of the family.

I didn't know that. Yeah. So I think I think that they need to, I think the other change that I would hope to see is the foot is not separate from the rest of our whole body. I'm going to ask you to say more about that.

But I want to take a quick detour. Well, maybe not quick. I don't know. So you were talking about how most people that were coming into you, a athletes be injured were standing mostly on the outside of their foot.

Most people think about when they think about any sort of orthotic or any sort of insult. And what they're trying to deal with and prevent is what they have been diagnosed with, which is pronation. Can you Oh, you have that knowing smile on your face. Can you say something about that?

I don't know what you're going to say, but I want to hear how you would address that. First of all, pronation and supination are a continuum of movement. So if you're more supinated and your foot rolls in to accommodate for your mass above and whatever activity you're doing, you're going to look like you have more pronation, right? Yeah.

And so then on the other end of the spectrum where you have the flat feet that things collapse and the pronation is like, Oh my God, the flat feet, you have no support, like just the notion on both ends of the spectrum, the rigid, highly pulled up individual who, as the foot starts to move, you get more pronation and everybody's, Oh, that's the problem right there. When in fact, it's actually they're probably more held and rigid in their system, rather than it being about pronation. Are you suggesting that people with the hypertonic high arches, maybe rigid in other ways? Because, huh, that's all the time.

Oh, that's so what do you see? Because that's going to make some people lose their minds with the idea that we just told them that they're a little rigid, because when you tell people that they are something that they don't want to be, they don't want to be responding very well. So when I say rigid, I think more in terms of someone's not in their low center of gravity. So they have developed or been taught or even you think of when you have like back pain or hit pain, most people want to move away from that problem.

And in fact, they make it worse by leaving their center of gravity, leaving their center of mass where everything has its absorption and return of energy. I see it a lot. And oftentimes where you're where someone loses their access to their low center of gravity. And you know, basically, they've been uprooted.

First place of stability is either pelvic floor and mostly it's the respiratory diaphragm. That's the next layer of stability when you're not in your low center of gravity. That's an interesting idea that if you're if you have a chronically tight higher, arch height predominantly genetics, you can have higher arches that are totally normal. But you've got a chronically tight high arch that you might see literally a similar arch pattern and tightness in the diaphragm.

Yes. Fascinating. Yeah. And it's, I mean, I would say nine out of 10 people that I work with that deal with a rigid foot structure that you see a high arch, the pattern I see is this.

And that's you just sort of lifting up. So now when you're working with someone like that, do you do you start with a beat start with the diaphragm or do both at the same time? I start with a beat. And say why you do that and not pay attention initially to the diaphragm?

Because they need, you know, the foot has so much sensitivity in it. Yeah. I mean, besides the face, the lips and the hands, the feet have more sensory organs in them for vibration or sense in space for, you know, you name it. Right.

And so if that system is hypersensitive because it's been pulled up or it just hasn't in a period of time, maybe a whole lifetime, not been able to make contact with the earth and begin to interact with the earth in a new way that gives a different feedback mechanism up the system, they won't let go. They have to trust something below them. Right. Let go of the holding pattern that they're in.

So you're seeing people, you're suggesting that people when they're in the state are hypersensitive rather than they become desensitized? Like, because what hypersensitive to how their feet are working, like they just, they're very protective of their feet. Because some people get very bony, they start to develop those deformities in the feet. Right.

And so they become the minute that they start to feel pain, they pull away. Just like any other part of us when we, we pull away instead of what if it was possible to actually release into what really supports you? I love that. The reason that I asked that question is I'm thinking that, I mean, one of the, one of the functions of the brain, if you will, is that if you are going to subject it to some chronic stimulus, it's eventually going to habituate to that and you won't feel it until you, or with someone to help you do something to kind of remind your brain, hey, check this out.

And then there's an opportunity to do something different. But you know, we habituate to all manner of bad posture, misalignment, unpleasant feeling, I mean, whatever it is. So that's why I was curious about. Which is a comfort.

Yeah. Yeah, basically. It's trying to allow us to function adequately, not oftenly, just adequately. And so it is good enough.

Exactly. So if you're going to make that hurt all the time, I'm going to make it so we don't notice that all the time, because otherwise you're not going to get anything done. So interesting. So you see being used now, like vibration platforms, I mean, you know, the foot rubs ball back in the day.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was given this gift, like 12, you're actually now 18 years ago, when I moved to Southern Oregon. And I was like, Oh, this is great.

And now I started using it more as a desensitizer, not breakup, adhesions or anything, but actually just to bring sensitivity to the foot. And what my manual therapy teacher would say is circulation follows since your senses. If you don't have a safe environment to be in, or if you're painful, you're going to withdraw your circulation and the nerves and all that from that. So first of all, people who didn't see it, basically imagine something a little bigger than a golf ball with spikes on it.

Not too big, just a rubber ball, spiky rubber ball. There's a, do you know our friend Dr. Emily Slickill? Yes, I love her.

Great. So Emily, similar thing is the whole idea about circulation and movement. It's, I mean, we hear it all the time for people and I'm not making a medical claim here. We hear often from people who have like diabetic neuropathy that they're helped just by wearing our shoes and I go, it's not our shoes, it's just you're actually just moving your feet, which is increasing circulation.

And to it, something like what you just said, something to add some stimulation and you got the holy grail. Now it's not going to necessarily help everybody 100%, but it's certainly a good start. Right. Yeah, same thing.

It can be reversed. Yeah. It's happened to people in their late 60s working with simple things for their feet. Well, again, their feet.

Well, and my version of that is when I, when I, when in early barefoot running days, like 2009, 2010, when people were doing like barefoot runs all over the place, I'd meet people who they had been in shoes long enough and their brain, literally their brain had changed enough that they just couldn't feel if anything hurt. So they'd do a barefoot run and they go, Hey, that felt great. And their feet were like ripped to shreds and they had no idea. They had no, they just couldn't feel it at all.

And I'd say to them, you got to do something just to get a little bit of safe stimulation to remind your brain, you have something at the end of your legs, up in your ankles. And, and eventually you'll feel something and then you'll be able to make some changes because that feedback will be helpful. So it was, you know, even for people who were seemingly healthy, I'd see that often where they just, they had no idea what was happening at the bottom of their body. And then once that, like I see that too, people just, they lose that connection to their feet.

Yeah. And then they look like walking, just their rigid. So I have a play there of being held up, but also like, they're just, there's, there's no idea what their feet are doing. There's a woman in my neighborhood who walks her dog around the same time, I do, she's in her 80s, late 80s, I think, and she's kind of shuffling, barely walking, everything looks very stiff.

And then I go to the track to like the senior games and there's all these 80 year olds and some nine year olds who are moving quite fine, because they're actually using their feet all along. Now, there may be other reasons I'm making shit up. But suffice it to say, it's a very different world. When you go to master's track meet and you see these people who are old, who are functioning better than people 20, 30 years, they're younger than they are, or whatever I was trying to say.

Yeah. I mean, like what Emily was saying about once we decrease the stride length within our walking pattern, how that affects the entire system. Oh, there's a nurse at Duke University who did research showing a correlation between walking speed and mortality. And basically, if you were walking under, I don't know what it is, maybe two miles an hour, the odds of you dying in the next five years increased by some massive amount.

And of course, when people are not able to feel the ground, or they're in a shoot that's super high and they feel unstable, then they walk slower. I mean, I can't think of any other way of saying it's like, oh, you know, force push off too. Like, that's great. Like there's no, they just lose so much energy in that propulsion that is a return back from the way we touch the earth.

I mean, it's just, yeah, it's so interesting to say that I see two things about that that I find interesting one is the runners in my neighborhood, and there are a lot of really good runners in neighborhood, because I'm outside of Boulder, Colorado, where I used to say my friend who's a world champion runner, I may as well just have said my neighbor, because they're everywhere. But I see these ostensibly good runners who, because they're in some big thick high-heeled shoe, they run with technically good form. They're landing midfoot underneath their body, everything looks great, except that they, because of the heel of that shoe, they can't let their heel drop enough to actually use their Achilles and get that free energy return that that Achilles tend is meant to give them. So they're working harder with a big thick shoe.

That one always gets me. And the other one, in terms of getting that responsiveness, that energy return, when I hear people who get like one of our sandals and they'll say, hey, the sandal, the front edge flips down. No, the front edge doesn't flip down. You're just catching your toe as it's passing underneath your body and you're catching the sole, because they haven't, they've somehow lost that reflexive thing that after you wait your foot as you're coming off, instead of your toes coming down, they'll reflexively dorsiflex, come up towards your knee and pass over the ground nice and safely.

And usually, I just say to them, just give it a couple weeks and watch what happens. But no one's ever done research showing that for people whose toes basically drop, because they haven't gotten that propulsion that you're talking about by using it foot naturally. I'd love to see something that shows how that changes over time, because more often than not when people say I'm catching the front edge my sandal, I go, just wait. And it'll have a lesson lesson so you forgot that it happened.

I mean, my God, I can't remember the last time it happened to me. Yeah. Well, the other thing too, I don't know if you see this is a lot of people don't push off. No.

A lot of people lift their back leg to move forward. I have a different take on this. And we'd have to analyze a bunch of people. And this comes from something very fun.

There was a podcast I heard the other day with the writer, David Sedaris, who moved to Paris and now he's looking outside of Paris, I think. But his French friends say to him, you even walk like an American. And he said, what does that mean? And they said, you throw your legs in front of you.

And so I have the idea that people are literally kind of throwing their leg in front of them, the leg lands, and then they're pushing off kind of pogoing or almost pole vaulting over their front leg, instead of actually the, we're talking about the same thing from a different angle, instead of using that back leg to move them forward to propel them forward. Yeah. Okay. So I'm saying the same thing.

It's just that that propulsion and return, that elastic power that comes through, there is a signaling within the neurophysiology that says, click the foot will clear more you push off instead of let's hike the hip, let's pull the femur, got it, you know, to kind of, yeah, you're going to do it or pull it forward, however that is, but it's all I think in that whatever is happening for them in that lack of propulsion. Yeah, yeah. You're going to get a kick at this. I've been talking about this.

I think maybe just once or twice on the podcast. So when I'm walking the dog, we have a couple of big hills on the trails behind us. And I started doing this thing that looks dorkier than anything I've ever done. And I've done a lot of dorky things when I'm walking up a hill.

So I have my right foot planted, okay? And as my right foot is planted, and I'm getting past mid-stance, so my foot's starting to come behind me in the hip extension. I'm rotating my upper body to the left, okay? So I'm getting a stretch in my right hip flexor.

All right. When I put my left foot on the ground, as I start to rotate my upper body towards the right, the right hip flexor releases like a spring and my right leg comes forward with like almost no effort. And if I don't try to throw it in front of me, it just lands right underneath my center of mass a little bit in front of where my left leg was. And then I repeat, so basically it's twisting my torso left and right, and letting that hip flexor stretch release and just let the leg come back from that stretch release.

And it takes like no effort to go up a hill. Again, dorky as shit. So but what do you think are different in terms of how you're, you know, what you're doing is basically decoupling the upper from the lower. Yeah.

And that thing in the middle of the hip flexor is the is getting the effect. Yeah. And that sort of stretch release. In fact, there was a movement guy that I worked with when I was an actor 40 years ago who kept talking about when you walk you want to release your hip.

And I literally for 40 years had no idea what he was talking about till I started doing this. It's like, oh, that's what he meant. And you can do it without doing the dorky twist of your torso and just really feel like that hip flexor is just scratching a little and then relaxing and that relax allows it to move forward if you kind of get that timing right. Anyway, so.

It's something that's a whole it's a whole special plane of right now it's connected up into the the torso. And I think even Emily highlights that as well in her work about you've got to have good thoracic rotation to be with the pelvic rotation to get sort of this force translation to be efficient. I mean, it's similar to what Dandy Dryer talks about. She running it's similar image that he uses of having your torso and your hips doing this sort of contralateral motion to allow running to be easier to allow your legs to move easier.

Now, it just occurred to me that I said, you know, we're going to take a bit of a tangent. I asked about pronation. And then we went on wherever the we went on. I was not smart enough to write down where I wanted to come back to with what you said.

Do you have any idea what it was? It was about the physical physiological bridge that the foot's function is about. I love you. Okay, go.

So this is out of this is work out of more from a osteopathic circulation, fossil kind of perspective. So mechanical. And that's why I think we look at it more physiologically, because it's not in the physical realm of what most people understand as biomechanics. Got it.

So it's another another escape from hinges and joints or hinges. Looking at how is the body in its own intelligence, regulating the tensions and pressures, which we would call forces in the system. And that is based all in elongation tensions and pressures and in compression tensions and pressures. And the body protects the circulation number one.

Okay, so that's a nice high level something now we got to dive into explaining that to humans. And to move it what we end up doing is we will adapt how we walk the arrangement of the like break down the foot into three segments, back or rear, middle and forefoot. And I can share with you kind of how those relate in the body because there's a fun thing that you can do with this. And you will begin to pick up by assessing the foot how I work with the foot and understanding just mobility that the person has a restriction further up the chain that needs to be addressed so that the foot can function better.

And this is related to compression and elongation? Well, yeah, because we have elongation for our body has to elongate, which in the world that I live in is how blood moves out in the system. So as I'm reaching for the earth, all of the arterial blood and the connective tissues are all working in a way to give something to that leg. And then as the foot touches the ground, it has to be in relationship to the ground reaction forces that are coming up through, which is more of a Venus return.

So we know that by just simple, I mean, when I worked in the hospitals, we would use an AD pump, which is an arterial Venus pump on the bottom of the foot to prevent blood clots. And that pressure against the midfoot where the all the blood and we call it an astomosis or all the blood vessels are in that richness in the bottom of the foot, that would help prevent Venus clots. So if we're walking well, if our foot is moving well, the foot is acting as that pump that you are having to improve. Exactly.

It's interesting. And then there has to be, you know, what is the accommodative means of the body, like through the diaphragm, through the rib cage, through the neck. I picked up a lot of restrictions in the pelvis that show up in the rear foot, you know, where the earlier and so that gets me back to like how much of the dynamic is going on within the live structures of the pelvis that actually determine biomechanical movement. Oh, that's very interesting.

That's cool. That's really cool. It flips people's idea that, oh, we have all these biomechanics and we need to address biomechanics. Well, you can address it to the cows come home.

If that person has a restriction in the circulation, let's just give a big vessel like the abdominal aorta, which is below the diaphragm to your pelvis before it splits. If you have a restriction there and it's restricting or there's a sensitivity in the body that says, Hey, you're binding this up, we need to protect this area. It will it will shorten the stride. It will lessen the impact forces to protect the vessels.

Interesting. So what are the kind of things that's a great example? Because I was going to say, what are the kind of things that create these sort of restrictions and using the one of the abdominal aorta, that's an awesome thing to consider because what is going to be constricting on the inside of your body like that? And then what caused that?

And then what do you do with that? What do you do about that? How about somebody who holds themselves up? Oh, yeah, back to that holding themselves up thing.

So if I hold myself up, the vessels go through the diaphragm. Right. And if the diaphragm isn't allowed to contract and relax in its motions, it's a pump. It's a pump.

And blood pressure is only a compensation to overcome a blockage or a restriction in the blood flow to get to vital organs to the kidneys, to the lungs, to whatever. Interesting. So whatever is, you know, you can also have a abdominal fat, you can have other things, but primarily if we look at it from how we function in our lives, dominance with your right hand, like you're going to only be using your right hand for a while. So that asymmetrical dominant pattern sets up a functional circulatory facial pattern that you have to overcome.

Oh, tell me if I'm putting this together, right? Sure. So coming back from the beginning of our conversation, if we stop thinking of things as just, you know, hinges and levers for example, now we're starting to talk about things that are much more for lack of their own organic, much more fluid. More alive.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's motion independent of, you know, hinges and levers. So there's all this mobility that's, that's a bigger piece of the puzzle.

And yes, there's going to be joints and whatnot involved in that. But what sort of, I don't want to say underlying that, but at least working in parallel with that is this other perspective of this of the motility, the mobility within site circulation. I'm assuming I'm just, and obviously breathing is going to be a factor in here as well. Yeah.

Huge. And so like, I had a gentleman online, because I mostly want to see me with my hands, but this guy was online and rigid feet, hands were stiff. And I said, could you stand? And he stood and he completely was completely held up.

And you're like, this is how he stood. So yeah, head up like, like neck, neck fully tightened up. I mean, wow, just like, guess where most of this rigidity was in his foot? I don't know in the forefoot.

So all right. So that means all of the toes, like he had these really gnarly looking feet high arch, the perspective that I have, and I can pull a diagram if you want me to. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Basically the forefoot, the toes and the ball of feet represent or have a relationship to the collarbone, neck and head. So this is not, you know, reflexology, which I will. Yes, I will. I'm going to annoy a few people by saying it's not like reflexology, which is bullshit.

This is a, but that is an interesting thing. So you're seeing a relationship between both foot and toes and everything from basically clavicle up. So then the midfoot, yeah, would be part long diaphragm into the abdomen. So actually, I'm going to come, I'm going to, I'm going to retract my reflexology bullshit.

I'm going to suggest that what may be going on is a different thing than the idea of meridians and stuff that where, you know, this part of your foot is affecting your liver. But there may be a map that's similar, where some of the midfoot stuff is impacting some of the same places that you're talking about, but not for the same reason. Yes. Yeah.

There are, I think there are, there is some validity to the reflexology, but in terms of function, yeah, in terms of how I see people walk, jump, stand, I'm relating what I feel and what I see to function because that's what's going to get them back on to a more normal pattern or not normal, but a more a good pattern that they can work with. You know, it's funny. In a way, reflexology or the idea of, you know, the meridians is being a thing. So here's a spot on your foot, this related to your liver.

In a way, that's just as mechanical as thinking of the body as a bunch of hinges and levers. It's like there's this one direct connection, but it's not about movement. It's not about function. It's, I don't know how to describe that differently.

Well, I think it's more energetic, you know, whatever, wherever that system was discovered, yeah, it was discovered in terms of if I press here, I get an effect up here, which again, sometimes, but again, but the effect doesn't require or isn't even diagnosed with anything functional or movement based. Correct. And that's the missing link, I think, with most things, interventionally is we've got to get that person to somehow own the freedom that is given to them in whatever intervention they're given. If they just, that was one of big all-hauf from me about about 15 years ago, like great manual skills.

People come to me to see me for my manual skills and they would come back with the same repeated pattern. Because I wasn't teaching them how to own the freedom that arrived through the intervention that they were receiving. And so then how did you learn to do that? It was all the standing work in all truth.

It came actually from my hutha yoga practice. And that's a whole other tangent. My hutha yoga practice wasn't based in stretching or in any sort of do this to fix that. It was a very much an energetic practice that each shape had its own shape of the breath.

And if you understood how things interrelated, you would find a way to counter your habits in your life. That's a very different thing than get into 105 degree room and all the way. And all the way, just stretch, stretch, stretch. And so I began, you know, took about seven, eight years and I finally started to have a conversation with my yoga teacher and showing him some maps from my manual therapy teacher.

And funny thing is yoga teacher is born in Hungary. They're the same age almost. This is wild. Born in what is now in northern Serbia, my manual therapy teacher was born in Romania.

They're neighbors. They're neighbors. So somehow I fell into some brilliance that all of a sudden I began to parallel these worlds and use the freedom and look at movement and then begin to screen and adjust people to just gain some awareness of if you're on the screen all day, you're going to have a pattern. If you're standing in a certain posture, if you hold yourself a certain way, if you breathe in effectively, you're going to have patterns.

And those things begin to build over time. And eventually the body says, I'm not doing this anymore. If you're lucky, if you're lucky, if you're lucky. Yeah.

I mean, well, sometimes the pain signal, no, because otherwise, sometimes we're not going to do this anymore leads to things getting really bad. So well, dude, this has been a total, total pleasure. And we keep doing this for hours. I know.

And I'm hoping that other people have that same feeling like this is just the tip of the iceberg. That's a horrible metaphor, actually, but this is the beginning of something that can be much, much, can be explored much more deeply. So if people want to do that, how would they find you find some of the things we've been talking about, get in touch with you, et cetera, et cetera? Moving into harmony is my business and webpage.

Moving into harmony.com? Yep. Got it. And so there I have references.

I'm redoing the website to be a little because it's just the expands and the integration of what has come forward between the breath piece, physiologically, the yoga, it's just it's really kind of coming to a real sweet way of being able to present this to people. I have articles there. I also am teaching different classes, both in movement and in breath. But I really hope to bridge out more with this understanding of how can we bring the foot into its true function and potential?

And I just have loved what you have developed and have stayed in fortitude with an industry that has launched. Well, A, thank you. And B, we're not changing anything because we know this is the real deal. And so happily, we are not beholden to corporate overlords who need to make money faster by jumping on some variation of a latest trend.

And we have no intention of ever doing that because we know, did I say this is the real deal? Yeah, I know it. It's actually really fun in my perspective, because when you're arguing from a position of truth, you can kind of just keep beating on the other thing all day long because there's nothing they could say. It's funny.

I've had this fantasy of being on a panel discussion with people from big shoe companies. And I've been on these panels before, but I've never done the following thing. I want to pull out a giant stack of paper like Tufy High and say, so this is, these are pronounced of like every study proving all the benefits of natural movement. And then here's another pile equally high.

Here's all the studies showing the problems with quote normal footwear. And then like around the pile of studies showing the benefits of normal footwear. And yeah, there's no pile. And just we're just trying to get, because again, you can do things like that when you know you've got the truth on your side.

And then people bring out some study and it's going to say, Hey, this shows that you know running barefoot is called injuries like, yeah, two things. They never analyze people's form. It's not about the footwear. It's not the form.

It's about using your feet correctly. And by the way, the thing they call an injury is actually just what happens when your body adapts to working correctly when it has it for a while. So it's very entertaining when people try to argue about this and they know less about what they're arguing with than we do on our end, which is very fun. Yeah.

And you know, we also like we talked earlier, just about the insensitivity of the feet. And so that's barefoot who best for that and like, you know, the mental like, I'm just going to go out and run barefoot now because it's the thing. Just testing the driver. No one.

Right. Well, you know, back to the sensitivity thing. On the way to the office morning, I was listening to NPR and there was a guy who, wait, I got to see if I can get this right. Oh, come on, come on, come on.

It was what was the thing that he was the thing he had developed? I'm blanking on what it was. And anyway, the, the upshot of it was something that he had developed, camera what it was. And he was saying this seems to help kids with ADD and autism.

And he says, I thought it was because it was creating this dopamine response. And people weren't like kids with ADD and autism don't have a sort of low level dopamine trickle that that quote normal people have, neurotypical people have. And this thing that he was doing this intervention was actually creating that dopop and urgic effect. But then he tested and it wasn't.

And he says, I'm not sure what's going on, but it seems like there's some kind of stimulation. And I'm jumping out of my chair in the car going, no, that's it. It's the stimulation. And because, you know, we have all these parents were saying kids with ADD and autism, they're functionally better.

And they only want to wear our shoes. I'm going, right, because they're starting to use their feet. They're actually getting that stimulation. And it's comforting.

It's creating a little, oh, that's what he does. His whole thing was about white noise, red noise, all that kind of background noise stuff. And he was saying, we were trying to see what these do for kids. And what it's doing is it's creating a level of stimulation that is quiet, that quiets down the inherent incessant stimulation that's already going on in their head.

My way of saying it is when I lived in New York City, I could meditate better on a subway because the noise of the subway was a little louder than my thinking. And so I didn't pay attention. So you know, you don't need the dopamine thing. You just need the neurological stimulation part.

So and that's a whole lot of the thing. Again, we can give this all day, every day. All right. Moving into harmony.com.

That's where that's where you can find Sean. I encourage you to do that. I hope this conversation was as interesting and provocative for you as it was for me. I'm saying that to people listening at you, Sean, too.

I don't know why. But importantly, also don't forget go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. To find previous episodes, all the ways you can find us on social media and engage with us there. And all the different places where you can find the podcast, if you don't like the one where you already found this one.

And of course, where you can leave a review and give us a thumbs up and hit the bell icon on YouTube and subscribe to hear about future episodes. And like I said, if you want to be part of the tribe, the tribe moving this, being part of the movement part of the movement, then just you know, do that. And if you have any questions or comments or recommendations, people can think should be on the show. Or if you want to tell me I've got cranial retore orientation syndrome, I'm cool with any of that.

Drop me an email, move, M-O-V-E, at jointhemovementmovement.com. But most importantly, look, go out, have fun and live life-y first.