Welcome to the movement movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body. Remember, your body was meant to move. Now here's your host, Stephen Sashin. Most people think of Tai Chi as something that old people do that's moving really slowly and it's all very meditative.
But what if something like Tai Chi could help you become a better, faster, healthier runner that finds you running and moving more pleasant, more enjoyable and more efficient? We're going to find out about that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about how to have a happy, strong body usually starting from the feet first because that is your foundation. And on this podcast, we break through the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies about what it takes to run, to walk, to dance, to play, to do whatever it is you like to do more enjoyably and more effortlessly. If you haven't been here before, that's going to go over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com where you can find out all the different places that you can engage with us on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and all those things.
And of course, as people always say, make sure you like and subscribe and review and share. The simple thing is we are trying to create a movement about natural movement. We want natural movement to be the obvious, better, healthy choice way natural food currently is. And if you want to become part of our tribe, please subscribe.
So let me introduce our guest for today, my friend Danny Dryer, who you may know as the author of Chi Running and the person who teaches Chi Running. Hello, Danny. Nice, Stephen. Good to see you.
Thank you. I need to start with a bit of a disclaimer or so and that is that Danny and I have known each other for, he is quite a number of years before. We started Zero Shoes before. You started Chi Running in part because later my wife worked for Danny's wife like 20 something years ago.
And so it's wonderful intersection that we've had since and it's a treat that we get to do this. But I guess that's kind of when people disclose their own by someone or related to someone or something like that. Yes, Zero Shoes was just a twinkle in your eye back then. I don't think it was that.
But before we jump into related to Chi Running, because we are the movement movement podcast, I often like to start with a movement related to something and I asked you if you had a movement related to something that you wanted to share with the gang and you said, oh yeah. And so I'm going to let you jump right in. Absolutely. So what I teach is exactly what Stephen was talking about is mind-body connection.
And that's what you get when you're wearing Zero Shoes obviously because you get a much better connection with how you feel the ground. Well, what I teach is for people how to connect with their body. So right now the movement thing you can do is actually not even a move. Well, it is a subtle movement.
So I want you to put your focus on the crown of your head and just lift up at the crown of your head and it will straighten you up in your chair. If you're driving your car, it will extend your spine just a little bit. And so what it does is just lifting up the crown of your head brings you presence, brings you right into your body right away. And all of a sudden your attention span gets better, your breath gets easier, you're more located in your body.
So throughout this podcast, how many times you're going to remember to do that? I'm going to have to do this often because I often find myself when I get into the conversation like kind of diving in. Oh yeah, exactly what I do. I got to do the same thing.
Yeah, so that's a good one. And as soon as I did it, it was actually really nice that if you'll my neck lengthen and just everything just kind of lined up nicely and felt more comfortable. And of course, the second phase that I did was Africa kind of got there. I just checked to see how much extra effort I was applying to do that and then just let go of that extra effort.
That was my, my little two. Exactly. Good out on. Cool.
So, yeah, before we even jump into the chief running thing, I've got to tell you one of my favorite stories and memories is Danny was out here in Boulder and we were sitting in the Boulder tree path watching people run by and we both kind of simultaneously were having the same response, which was often things like, Oh, Jesus, stop doing that. Please wait, just cut it out. So, so many people who are running in ways that were inefficient, unpleasant looking, none of them looked like they were remotely happy. And I know both of us had this sort of urge to like run up and tackle people and show them a better way.
But you have been really doing this very actively with people. When did you start? She running. I didn't even know the answer to that.
Oh, 1999. Holy. Yeah. 20 years we've been doing this thing.
How outrageous and how many human beings have you taken through the chief running program? Oh my God, I can't even imagine. I would guess it's probably more than the licksit takes to get to the center of Tootsie Pub. Yeah, I would guess total with with connection with books and web pages and stuff like that over a million.
Have you asked super cool. Have you we're I think we're around 300,000 customers, which it's really fun when you start realizing that there's this sort of big impact. My favorite thing has been or one of my favorite things has been the number of times I've been someplace and there's someone with a copy of G running and it's very entertaining. How many times have you been near someone who's got that and they had no idea who you were?
Oh, many times actually. Yeah. What happens? The only thing is that when I walk, I sit next to somebody on an airplane or something, we just start talking about running and then I go, oh yeah, I did this book and they go, get out.
Yeah. There's a writer that I really adore to go any Martin Lainer who said that he'll know he's made it when he's on an airplane and the guy sitting next to him is reading his book. And he said anything like that yet, but he was on an airplane in the middle seat and this is back during the OJ trial around the OJ trial and there's someone on the right of him reading a book that was that was like supporting OJ and on the left was anti OJ. And he thought that was almost as good as having someone.
I think he introduced it to us. It's like being Eric clapped and walked out of speed having somebody like whistle tune. Yeah. Well, you know, boy, it never, I don't know about you, but it never gets old for me.
We had someone a guy named Dave Kavanagh who last week on the last week as of when we're taping this was in the Baltimore trials for American Ninja Warrior and I'm just watching American Ninja Warrior and suddenly it's like those are our shoes and it never gets old when it's people who I have never met. My favorite thing actually is when someone comes by and they're wearing zero shoes and we start a conversation and they have no idea who I am. Yeah, right. Let me actually take that shirt off every now and then, huh?
I always keep my zero shoes underwear on. So many people get. Just where the O is place. That's the important part.
And what that means. So people are making up their own jokes right now. All right. Let's back up to the she running thing.
If she running is about being mind-body connection. What else do you want to say about what it is and what makes she running? Actually, before we even get there, one of the things that amazes me is how people don't think they need instruction to run. They think all they need to do is put on a parachute and away they go because hey, we all run right?
Yeah, we all run wrong. That's why. No, actually a lot of people have asked me that has been 20 years. I've been getting the same question.
Why teach me to run? I've been doing it my whole life. My response is yes, you've been doing it your whole life but you do not even have close to the same body you had when you were 10 years old chasing somebody across the playground. Okay, that was before you were sitting in a car for years, sitting at your desk for years, being poor habits, poor eating habits, poor movement habits.
And so you are not dealing with that same external person that you internally feel. And so. Are you telling me that just because I have a pair of sweatpants that I had since high school that I'm not the same person that I was not what you're telling me? No, you're not legally the same person.
It's actually a point. Yeah. And so and that really makes people think about it. I go think about it when you're a kid you used to like run like crazy.
You didn't necessarily get all my dog. You were not injured every time you ran. You just ran. But now you know because you're adults and the other thing too is a lot of people they start running one way.
When they get to adulthood, it gets really less desirable to fall down. Because I always ask people, you know, is there anybody in the class that never fell down running as a kid? And nobody has raised their hand. And so we all did because that's how we ran was falling forward.
It's also how we stopped when we were little kids the way you stop is you get the ground. And so I tell them, I go, you know, when you get older, you really don't want to fall. And so what people do is they start running upright, straight upright. That completely changes the physics of how you move your body.
And so what I'm doing is trying to hit the reset button of how people used to run as kids. I'm not teaching somebody anything they don't already know or haven't done. It's just a reset button. It's like, if you don't remember, I'm here to remind you of how you actually used to move, which was more efficiently and with less impact, you know?
I love to point out I have a recording. I have to find a way to tell my phone right now. I'm here. Wait, I'm going to see if I can find this.
This is a recording from a track meet that was here at the University of Colorado. They have all summer long. And my favorite thing is watching kids. Because again, they get this crazy look on their face when they run.
I think it's called smiling. And they also just have no frame of reference for how to do it or not do it. For people who aren't watching this conversation we're having on video, they're not going to be able to get the real value of this. So I'm going to have to post it somewhere.
Let me see if I can show it to you because it's just my favorite thing. Wait, hold on. Here we go. I love taking pictures of kids like that.
This is the world's worst kind of production value ever. On your marks. I just love that. It's like, you know, it's just, they don't know what's going on.
They're waiting for the gun to go off. They're scared. The gun goes off. They don't know what to do.
And everyone kind of goes, run. And they run. And they can't stay in their head. They're kind of leading them off.
They get to the finish line. They're so excited. And we're all so excited. And that's the thing that I think the whole idea of natural movement does is it gets you back to just the simplicity and the fun that we had when we were doing this as kids.
Yeah. And the biggest challenge for me then is to have a system that kind of devolves all of the poor habits, movement habits, and everything that people have. So what do I get them to focus on in order to lose those bad habits? Because it's really neural training.
Right. Everything is. And that's all we're doing. And so they've gotten so many really strong neural links for doing the wrong thing that it's trying to undo that enough that they can actually neutralize how they move and be open to moving in a new way.
Well, what's so interesting is the neural pathways that we have for movement are so closely tied to our identity. And in ways that are very, very subtle. People don't even think about this very often. But so laying down a new neural pathway at all is a challenging thing.
I don't know if you know this. My undergraduate research was cognitive aspects of motor scale acquisition. So this is the whole thing. Oh, great.
Yeah. I developed a whole structure or it's got a big flow chart really for how it is we learn new things. And so it wasn't really about breaking out of existing patterns in a big way because they were learning something that you really hadn't done before tap dancing as one of the examples. No one has bad tap dancing.
Yeah. Right. So but when you have something that is already in existence, you've got to learn the new thing and kind of take the energy away from the old thing. And there's so much tied into who we think we are.
And we just don't like doing that. People seem to forget that process is let's call it mildly stressful. And the way people experience it is frustrating. And they think, oh, I can't do this because it's frustrating.
It's like, no, that feeling of frustration is just a phenomenon of laying down a new neural pathway. And then after you try it, you practice a little bit, you go rest and it gets more ingrained. And then you come back the next time it's better, even though you didn't do anything between. So people have to reframe experience of learning a new thing.
Yeah. And the thing about neural pathways is the more you use them, the more ingrained they get and the less you use them, the less ingrained they get. So that's how you break it up. You know, if you don't do it anymore, that neural pathway starts to dissolve.
And so what I do is I the same thing. I don't tell people what not to do. Right. I tell them what to do on a regular basis.
You know, so they're doing this one new things every day. And then they're just kind of their mind just kind of pushes that other path that crowds it out basically. So then it just doesn't get nursing and it goes away. Yeah, user to lose it is the gist of it that works neurologically.
We haven't talked about this. So no pressure. But I want to ask you for some examples of some of the things we're talking about. Before I ask you that, is there anything that you're going to be able to offer to people who are listening or watching this so they can engage with this and find out more later?
Because you don't have to say what it is. But if the answer is yes. Okay. I just want people to know that as we go into this conversation because we're going to I want to touch on some of the things we're talking about.
But I don't want people to worry that they need to get it all right now or that there's more and et cetera. So give me a couple examples of some of the like the basics of G running if you would that are examples of what we've been talking about. Okay. So the basic is the reason why it's called G running.
Yeah. It's because I've borrowed a lot of the principles from my practice of Tai Chi, which I have been doing over 20 years now. And a lot of the principles that make a good martial artist have to do with proper body alignment, moving from your center, relaxing the moving parts and all of that. And you can find it in any form of martial art, but Tai Chi is kind of the grandmother of all martial art.
So I went there. And so for example, the first thing I start everybody with in my classes is posture. Because if you're running can only be as good as your posture is. Otherwise if your posture is out of whack, then muscles have to compensate for what your posture can accomplish pretty easily with a minimum amount of muscles.
And then another part would be like moving from your center. Now here's the biggest thing that has actually given running kind of a bad name. And that is people think that they need to run by pushing with their legs. And that's kind of a myth, unless you're a sprinter like yourself, you do have to use your legs, but you also have to use your core.
And if you don't connect that to your legs, you are dead in the water right off the bat. Well, it's really no different. There's a book that I'm reading right now from my friend Joel Smith. I think it's called Speed Strength.
It's an incredible book about developing a strength as a sprinter. And the first, maybe the entire first chapter is all about everything you just said. It's all about alignment. His basic thing is you can't get stronger until you know how to move correctly.
Because otherwise you're going to be in a stronger place that aren't helpful. And if you move correctly, you're applying just the right amount of energy in just the right place. And so it takes less effort to do it. And when I was on the track this past weekend, we were doing some acceleration drills mostly.
And I did, we did nine of them. And the first eight, I just felt like I was working too hard. And the last one, it just felt like I was flying. It just like, you know, for whatever reason it took me a while till I got things lined up.
And back to the Tai Chi example you were giving. I did Tai Chi a long time ago. And I, after years and years, I said to my teacher who was this crazy Tai Chi player, this guy, when I met him, had been doing Tai Chi for 22 years and he was 27 at the time. And so I said, I realized that people have this mistaken idea that Tai Chi is about everything being relaxed and almost weak.
But what we're really doing is we're creating a structure that's like a 2000 ton steel girder, but it's on a perfect fulcrum so that it moves effortlessly. And then certain points in the fighting form of Tai Chi and at certain points, we just stop that steel beam from moving and people run into it and bounce off of it. And it's like, oh, it's good analogy. Yeah.
Yeah. And so very powerful is that this alignment is so key because that's your during your support phase when your foot hits the ground. That's when you need to support your body weight by your structure, not by your muscles. So if your body is lined up right, then that whole body support system doesn't cost you anything.
And then comes in the propulsion system, you know, and mostly what I teach are endurance runners. I'm not like a sprint coach because the rules change, but for endurance runners, it's very important that you use, that you engage with the pull of gravity. That's why there's a forward fall always involved with it. But the thing about Tai Chi is that you have this, it's always based on this principle of yin and yang, right?
Well, the yin is this gathering energy. That's your center line. That's this, you know, all the energy coming to your middle. Yang is this open, relaxed, expansive kind of thing.
So your structure is the yin and the moving parts of your body are the yang. So that means that you can be as really strong in your core and in your center, but the moving parts need to be so relaxed. So what I tell people is the faster you go, the more you relax the moving parts. Yeah.
And in fact, to the point where I coach people to the faster, I want you to pretend like your legs are just becoming increasingly invisible. I like that. And it works. Yeah.
It's interesting, again, thinking back to sprinting, when I met a guy named James Davis, who's a coach, a minor, good friend of mine. And when I first met him, he said, let me just watch you, warm up. Let me just watch you run. And he says, you're a fast runner.
You're just not a sprinter. And I said, oh, well, that's interesting. I hadn't sprinted since I was 15. This is when I was actually I met James when I was about 48, 49.
And he says, and I don't have to watch you. I just think, oh, I'll like to listen, I can just hear, just the sound of how your foot hits the ground, I can hear the whole thing. Right. Yeah.
I'm not really watching people. I go, the better you run, the less I hear, you know, you run so quietly. And so, like not like real strong push off, not real slap on the ground. Don't run yourself into the ground.
That's an old phrase you've heard forever, but it works for runners. One of the things I say is you don't want your feet to land on the ground. You don't want to be using them as landing every time. Then you have to push off every time.
How do you frame? I mean, it's a yin-yang thing or for other people, yin-yang, let's call the whole thing off. How do you frame the just this whole phenomenon that what I often talk about and what everyone in the natural movement world talks about is look, you have these built-in springs and shock absorbers called your muscles like a mincintendence and you want them to be doing the job, not your foot, we are doing the job. How does that frame what you're talking about?
Well, one thing to get really clear on is that there's a very different running style between sprinters and endurance runners. So right off the bat, there are two totally different. That's okay. There aren't many of us to begin with, so you don't need to talk to people like that.
Okay. But that being said, I would say that, you know, when you're doing endurance running, at least, you want to make sure that you're as economical as you can possibly be because you don't want to be carried away in a body bag if you're doing an ulcer or something like that, you know. And so the least amount of injury you can use, the better. And so when I say sprinters use more of that spring in the toes and the cows that can extend in all of that stuff.
Endurance runners use the recoil motion, not so much that tension and release. Now here's how I can explain that is that for sprinters, as you go faster, your legs turn over faster. Right. Because endurance runner, and what I teach people is that the faster you go, the longer your stride gets.
Now, sprinters don't necessarily do that. You know, you hit a certain point. Yeah, I mean, you're basically, yeah, you don't want to artificially, no, you don't want to artificially try and lengthen your stride. That doesn't work.
No, endurance running, it comes out of the longer stride, comes out of relaxation. So if you notice how long the stride is of a canyon runner, because, and their stride doesn't extend long out in front of them. I just want to. Behind them.
So what happens is when that extends behind them, they're stretching the whole series of fascia that goes all the way from their rotator cuff across their body, down their quad, around the back of their leg to the kille's. So it's like one giant rubber band stretching the fascia. So the road comes by, sweet to your leg up behind you, that stretches this whole full length body rubber band. And then as soon as your leg comes off the ground, that recoil brings your leg forward.
So you're not using your quads to bring your knees back to an original position. I think you're a very economical. I think you're a sprintist. That's the running version of your race.
And the reason that I say that is everything you just said is actually exactly true and the same for sprinters. It's just that there's more, everything's, it's not even that it's tighter. It's that it's, I don't know how to try this. It's not as relaxed as what you're describing, but it's exactly the same.
No, exactly. It's exactly the same. In fact, it was funny reading, you know, Gunther Joel's book and playing over the weekend. One of the points that he makes is a lot of sprinters try to keep their, when they're running, they try to keep their hands basically as if you're going to collapse.
They're facing each other and they want to, you know, and trying to keep them, move your arms moving just parallel to the frontal plane and just back and forth. And he's saying, what you actually want to do is rotate your arm by starting with your wrist. As your arm is swinging back, you want to rotate your wrist so your pinky is kind of pointing and exaggerating your pinky will be pointing out. And what that does is it internally rotates the shoulder and creates that whole kind of rotational spring thing that happens from the hip all the way up into the shoulders well.
And I had never really played with that. I played with that over the weekend. It was like, holy smokes, because it made my hip rotate back more and I got more extension. And that's where things started getting lighter because it just made the spring set up.
And I hit the ground, it just recoiled in a very similar way, but just not as open as what you see with this and runners. It's again, it's very similar. The subtle differences are significant amount of force you're applying to the ground and what some of the positions look like. But by and large, it's really the exact same biomechanics that you're talking about.
It's just that when you're doing it at almost twice the speed, the effect looks very different. Yeah, it does look very different. And not only that, but what you might find and I don't know if you've ever tried this or you've heard about it. But when I call this stride that opens up behind and creates this stretch and recoil endurance runners, what I'm training people to do is to allow that hip to even go back with the legs.
So it creates a little lower body torque. Yeah, yeah. Your shoulders always face for it. Your shoulders are always, but let your whole lower body twist as if your pelvis is rotating back with that rear leg.
Okay. That creates even more of that stretch. Yeah. You're so as and big hip flexor muscles.
Right. As a sprinter, they always train you never to rotate your pelvis and that it's really powered through the legs. Well, it's there's there's debates about that. I mean, one of the debates has to do with some people talk about the arms and some people say, well, the arms aren't necessary.
There's a guy who has no arms around a 20 second, 100 meters or 200 meters. It's like, okay, well, that's fine. But I mean, that guy is crazy and sane. Yeah, again, it seems like we're talking about the same things just with a slightly more restricted motion.
Again, simply because of the requirements of the additional speed. It's like you just don't have the time because you still want that same stretch reflex thing happening. You want to be letting your body. Yeah, yeah, well, not even shorter.
It's faster. It has to happen in a shorter amount of time and therefore it can't it can't be quite as extensive. It can't be quite as long, but it's otherwise it's basically the exact same thing. Like when people look at swimmersers and they see the front side mechanics, which is just what happens in front of your body with your legs and they see the high knee and they think that, oh, it's about lifting your knees up.
It's like, no, that's just the reactive motion of when you put force in the ground properly. That's just where your knee ends up. And again, that's the knee ends up way higher for a spinner than it does for an endurance runner. But again, it's not because they're doing something active.
It's just that's what happens when you put things in the right position and you're moving at that particular speed and you're all lined up correctly. So it's my favorite and my favorite, I mean, least favorite thing when I'm going to track me, especially high school tracking, I hear the parents yelling to their kids, get your knees up. It's like, it's too late. It's not an active thing that you do and if you're yelling that, it's already too late.
Yeah. So this thing that I'm talking about with creating this nice long recoil is that what you can do with sprinting or with running up hills, which is the same to me as sprinting, running hills, same thing. What you can do is instead of just allowing the road to create that torque is that you can actually create that torque if you're sprinting or going uphill. Now, imagine bringing in the strength of your obliques with every stride.
And that's why your arm is powering forward so that hip can power rearward. And that's really driving your legs from your obliques, which is a much stronger set of muscles than your quads or calves or any of that stuff. Very strong set of muscles. And people don't realize how important the arms are to engage those obliques.
And you have to really get this first phase of what I call passive stretch to actually actively driving that hip rearward, which is very powerful. And I can run up hills forever, not use unrest my legs the whole way up because I'm just driving from my legs. That's really cool. Yeah, it's a totally different take than anybody I've ever heard, but it really is powerful and it works.
So when I coach people to run halfs or marathons, like I've done a coaching program here in Asheville, and there's a very hilly half and full course that happens every year. And so we train on hills a lot of the time. And so for five months, we train how to do hills without using your legs. And these people, they finished and they go, oh my God, that took nothing out of my mind.
That's really interesting. You made me think of Arthur Lydiard, who's a coach out of New Zealand who coached more world and Olympic champions than anybody else coming out of a tiny little country. And hills were his big thing. Now, I don't think he had the idea that you had about not using your legs, but for him, hills were everything.
He always over trained his athletes. He always did more. If they were running a 10k, they did half marathon and they were training. He had his eight-year-old, he had his 800 meter runners training with his marathoners.
Right, yeah, exactly. Same thing. But I got to meet Arthur Lydiard once and gave a talk in California. So I went to go meet him and, gosh, he's probably died 25 years ago.
But he was talking about, yes, this whole thing about engaging your obliques, I'll say an interesting thing about the obliques is that you have internal obliques and external obliques. Right. So internal on one side does the same job as the external on the other side. So internal external because if you...
I'm trying to visualize that. So... So here you've got your external obliques that come down this way, right? So this one...
Wait, wait, wait, wait. For the people who are listening. So it's coming from the outside of your ribs towards the middle of your pelvis, basically. Yes.
Yeah. Okay. Now you've got your internal obliques that go perpendicular to that. Ah, okay.
From this way, the internal obliques go this way. Okay. They actually run perpendicular to each other. Yeah, so wait, again, for the people who are listening.
So you're just driving... The motion you're making is basically from your sternum to the outside of your hips. Right, exactly. Yeah.
And so if this external oblique contracts, it'll pull your shoulders this way or pull your hip then, you know. And so if this external matches this internal, you've got two muscles contracting in the center. Ah, okay, got it. It's the only place in the human body where two muscles, two different muscles, do the same job.
So you've got this powerful team of muscles that can really drive hips, especially on hills and like spring. So next time out there, think about it. So when your arm powers forward, that's gonna engage those obliques to drive the same side hip rearward. Right.
And then you can actually relax your legs. It's not really, you're not reliant quite as much on all that. I remember when I first again got back in the spring 15 years ago that I noticed demonstrably how the more I was able to relax the faster I was able to move. And it was now the comical thing there is people say, well, you have to relax your face and relax you whatever, which I'm not saying you don't need to do, but then you watch sprinters and every time you say, you know, you see his face is totally relaxing, people next to him, totally the opposite.
And they're going to see that's why he wants like no, that's not actually why he won. There'll be times where, you know, he will... It may have. But there's certainly times where like Tyson Gay, who prior to Usain Bolt was the fastest guy in the world, that guy looks like his head's about to pop off because everything's so tense.
And he was the fastest guy in the world. His face and his neck were tense, but everything underneath there just moved so beautifully. And so, yeah, so there's a lot of cause and effect confusion, I've noticed. And that's probably what you're describing as well.
It's just the endurance world, just that same sort of thing. So we got kind of into the weeds, which I like, but I want to kind of back up to a slightly higher, simpler level. What else can you say about a fundamental she running concept that people might be able to experiment with when they get out of there, whatever they're doing right now and go hit the track or the road or the trail or whatever? Okay, so one thing is we were talking about arm swing.
Yep. So most people don't hold their hands high enough. If your hands are low, it's going to slow down your left turn over. And so everybody knows that even endurance runners should be running somewhere between 170 and 180 steps per minute.
If your hands are hanging out your side, there's no way you're going to be able to do 170 because it's slower your lower body down. So that's one. The other thing is that... Oh wait, I want to pause there.
So what that fundamentally means is that what you're doing is, well, you're decreasing the flexion angle in your elbow. Another way of saying is you're basically bending your arm more. If you have your arms fully... Yeah, you're shorting the pendulum.
Yeah, you're shorting the pendulum. So keeping your arms bent more so that you're not letting your hands drop way low and having a longer pendulum with more effort to move something that's further out. So actually there's another version I want to ask you about because when I watch really good endurance runners, one of the things that I noticed, not only are their hands high, but the arm swing is really... You see the elbows going back.
You don't see a huge pendulum motion. You see just... No. The hands are basically barely moving really, but it's not...
The only thing moving is the elbows behind them. They're contracting the muscles in the upper back a little bit to kind of... Imagine if you lift your shoulders up and then roll them back. They're keeping their shoulders back as well.
So the motion is happening backwards. And of course, if we're talking about the running pattern where your leg motion is more behind you than in front of you, more backside mechanics and frontside mechanics, the only way you can really effectively balance that is if your arms are doing that. If your arms are also the opposite arms back, when the leg is back, it's the only way to do that. But it's something that again is you see good distance runners doing this.
And I'm amazed when I see more recreational runners not trying to do that. I mean, the joke is they want to get the same shoes as that Kenyan guy, but they don't want to move like that Kenyan guy. Well, the interesting thing is that the detail that a lot of people miss with this one is the reason why you get your elbows rearward is to counterbalance your forward fall. Okay, so you can actually balance yourself in more of a forward lean and gauge gravity more.
So even though your elbows are swinging back, that's how you adjust how much lean works for you and doesn't work for you. And this whole thing with the bending the arms, the same thing pulls true with bending your knees. Now there's a lot of people that shuffle when they run. And if you shuffle when you run, you are going to create more impact.
People think, oh, I'm just going to shuffle because I don't want to hit the ground and I'll go, guess what? It's more impact. And you're going to get the edge of the leg and your leg is coming out the road. But if it's up and over, then you get into that, you're going to be reducing that deceleration that happens.
And sprinters are all about no deceleration. You know, as little as evenly possible. Well, you know, I think it was your analogy of just a map and correct me if I'm wrong, if it's not yours, and if you don't like it, then definitely correct me of just a map. I don't like it.
I'll take it. Okay. Perfect. Of just the image of your feet or your feet being on a wheel and your feet only hit the ground.
Like at that one point when the wheel hits the ground and you just want to have that feeling of like their bare, you know, the wheel is moving across the ground at the speed you want to go, your feet are rotating along with that. So they're just like catching the ground, not landing on the ground. Is that yours? Exactly.
Yeah. And you know, that comes, like I said, that comes totally out of my practice of Tai Chi. So in Tai Chi, any martial art is that when there's a force coming at you, the last thing you have to do is be meeting that force head on. Right.
Okay. So one of the forces that's coming at you when you're running is the ground on coming road. Yeah. So you move one way.
It's amazing how the road comes at you almost exactly the same speed. And I jam you road. And so you need to know how to handle that force coming at you. And so this circular stride is your foot comes up and over and when it comes down, it meets the road in the direction.
And the road is going. And that's, you know, that's what creates more, I mean, less. Yeah. I love this idea of trying to mess with your perception so that the way it feels when you're running on a road is if you're on a treadmill and the treadmill is the earth.
And so the earth is rotating underneath you and moving underneath you and you're trying to catch it the same way you want a treadmill. I do a weird, you know this when for the 100 meters when I'm at the start, I look at the finish and I kind of remind myself that we only have 3D vision because we have two eyes that are separated. And so the whole concept of three dimensional is a little bit an artifice. And it does a weird thing in my brain where I can, where suddenly everything flattens out.
And so like all the visual information is just landing on a screen. It's all landing in the same place. And so when I look at the 100 meters, it looks like I don't have to go anywhere. That line is very close.
At the same time, I look at the 100 meters like, who put that finish line so far away? But it's a fun thing to play with. Just mess with perception and see if these weird little perceptual cues change the way you relate to the environment that you're in. Yeah.
Yeah. One thing that you should try next time you do 100 meters sprint is find an object that's straight ahead of you on the other side of the finish line. And focus your eyes on that target and not on the finish line. Yeah.
And don't blink. From the time the gun goes off to the time you press the tape, don't even don't take your attention off of that spot. I can't do that because the first 20 meters on basically head down during the drive phase. So I don't copy that.
But when you come up, you want to go, okay, it's like a heat seeking missile. All right. And it's amazing that that distance disappears. Yeah.
Yeah. All you're doing is picking one spot and that doesn't change. Right. You just move it and then all of a sudden you're there.
Did you ever see the video that I made it? You're showing the track that I'm on is all appeal of both ways. No. I'll put a link to it.
It was just, I did a sprint workout. I mean, people wonder why sprint work out is so hard. Well, here take a look at some cones out on the track. You can see the cone that's further away is higher up.
And so this is uphill and check this out and I run down the other cone the other way. See? It's the same way going backwards. The further cone is further up, so I'm going uphill both ways and for people a lot of us are serious.
Yes, track was designed by WCA. M C. The mC. There's a guy who's drawing on the track with both hands and they're drawing each other.
It's crazy. This was a bit of a tangent from other simple things. It was arm motion was one. Keep your hands on one.
So arms going to the rear is important. If you bring your arm forward, you are going to over stride. What that does, when your arm comes forward, all of a sudden you create a recoil on the front side of your body. It's going to lift that too far forward, and you're going to land in front of your knees or in front of your center mass.
So I never coach people, except for sprinters. I never coach people and doors to not each board. The arms for sprinters, again, if you look, we're so misunderstood. If you look, you'll say, I'm a poor guy.
I said, why don't people understand? You'll see, actually, and you say, all this is a great example of this, and you'll see that his upper arm stops moving barely. His elbow is barely in front of his torso. It's really kind of an abridic thing, and his hand is coming up like right by his chin.
But the arm swing is not a big open thing where your elbow ends up way in front of your body. Quite the opposite. But in a way, it looks like that's going to happen until you look at it in slow motion, where you see that it's not at all happening. So this weird optical illusion about what's happening with arm motion for sprinters, where they think it's this massive big thing.
But it's actually pretty. Yeah. I like that one. Or unless there's someone else nearby and you've got to get into their ribs.
Exactly. That's another thing that I find really interesting. I never was a basketball player, so I didn't know this about basketball. And again, as a sprinter where I say in my lane, I didn't know this about running.
But oh my god, when I started paying more attention to track and field events like the 1500, and saw that it's a fight out there, I mean, people are practically doing judo. It's insane. Did you ever do? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you're jostling. I mean, seriously, it's not a non-contact sport. Did you ever do any of those events where you're knocking people down practically? I've never done that.
I've never actually knocked them down. You know, there's just a lot of contact. I mean, again, like using basketball, I never realized how much contact there was under the rim until I started paying attention to basketball. It's like, that's a boxing in there.
It's amazing. People just think of it as, you know, people just doing their thing. So that's elbow in the ribs. That was like, all right.
So we did a bunch of stuff for this. Oh, well, yeah, that's a whole other story. Well, soccer is like a mass wrestling match. Well, it's mass wrestling with the added bonus of Academy Award-winning acting.
Like, oh my god, that kicked me in the shin. Yeah, that guy's on the other side of the field. He's not even playing right now. But he's still kicking me somehow.
There's that opportunity. I love it. Yeah. So we're back to our main points.
Oh, yeah. We're all those bingernies. Let those heels come up behind you. You know, make sure that that's right.
It becomes circular. I tell people it's like having wheels on the bottom of your feet. You're, it's no different than being clipped into a cranks out on a bike. In fact, when I coach triathletes, I, that's how I coach them.
I say, you know, you're already on the bike. So when you come into T2, you know, you want to really start up on the pedals, pull up on the pedals, just get to respond. Those muscles start firing, you know, get those neural transmitters firing. So when you go off the bike, you're not running through a concrete, you're actually, you're off the ground.
And so those are really good ones. And then the other point about, you know, running quietly. So if you're, if you're just lifting your feet off the ground, instead of pushing your feet off the ground, it's less impact than your lighter on your feet and everything. I talk about this one a lot as well.
An analogy I came up with, I said, imagine that you're stepping on a B. If you step on a B to get off the stinger, you don't push down harder. You lift up to get off. It's a reflexive motion off.
And the sound, I love the whole sound thing, because especially like in a pair of some of our thin sandals, there can be some slapping noises for one of two reasons either that you have them tied way too loosely. Or it's just a coach. It's just showing you there's a stride glitch, because it's possible to run really, really quietly. And so the sound is just an incredible coach.
Oh, absolutely. And sound in general. Again, like we talked about. I'm not changing that aspect.
Yeah. It's one that people, oh, it's well, we're so responsive to sound. And we don't take advantage of it. Or again, really understand the value of it.
Like what happens when you're listening. And even running hills, same thing. When you run hills, you can hear the difference between just placing your foot and kind of trying to drag the hill underneath you versus getting your feet underneath you where you're just flying up the hill. And it's actually, I should remember this, I had some, I never got to record this.
There's a guy who runs right outside of one of the windows in our house. And he's in a pair of maximal shoes, big, thick, massively cushioned shoes. And I can hear this guy coming from a block and a half away. And people talk about our sandals.
They go, well, they're making noise. Like, no, no, you're making noise. And you can find a way to not make noise. Here's an example of someone not making noise.
I want to have him as the example. It's like, see, it's not about cushioning. Because listen to this guy from a block away. He's like, wham, wham, wham.
And maybe I haven't seen him this year, because he can't run because he's an user shot from all that cushioning that doesn't really do anything. But it's incredible. He's watching TV, windows open. And it's like hearing the ice cream truck coming.
You know, I was like, here it comes. Yeah. When I teach my rain classes, the cheering classes, I always give a talk during lunch hour usually. It's a full day class.
So it's break time. We're sitting around. And I talk about shoes. And when I talk about shoes, I tell people it's not about cushioning.
It's about how you run. And then as soon as we get done with lunch, I have everybody take their shoes off and run across the floor. So I'm usually in a big gymnasium or something. And I say, now, notice, you might think that you're going to hit the ground really hard when you take your shoes off.
But just have an open mind. And just see what it feels like. And see what it sounds like. And so it's amazing.
So there's obviously people running around this gym and you can't hear a single thing. That's because they're running barefoot. And then when I say, OK, so what you all still have here, whatever running shoes you have. And so the idea behind what entrepreneurship I teach with she running is barefoot-like.
It doesn't mean you have to be barefoot. But it doesn't mean you have to run like you're barefoot. And that's the biggest difference that people don't really get. And the shoe companies really believe it's their shoe that's going to make the difference.
Which is complete marketing bullshit. I mean, the line that I say, it's not about the footwear, it's the form. It just so happens that certain footwear or lack thereof is the most expedient way to make the adjustments to your form because you're getting that kind of feedback. So I read Davis talks about this.
She breaks things down into, I think she maybe called them traditional shoes, and then partial minimalist shoes and then minimalist shoes. And she and I had a chat. We turned into a podcast. And I said, I think when you say that you're being politically correct because I refer to it as true minimalist shoes, fake minimalist shoes, and quote normal shoes.
And her point is that the partial minimalist shoes, which are the shoes that the big shoe companies sell with the term minimalist for barefoot are actually worse because they still have so much cushioning that you don't get the feedback that you need. And you're applying more force in the ground. And you're not, you don't end up having that barefoot-like form. And people, and it's amazing.
It's not the right word I find it infuriating. Obviously, it's one of the reasons we started zero shoes. It's like, how can these people be lying for so long, and everyone believe for so long? Yeah.
The joint politics in America. Oh, well, don't even get me started. It's actually, it's a fascinating thing because with what you're doing with what we're doing, we're both in many ways just overcoming what's essentially 50 years of propaganda. And now that it's over two generations, the parents are teaching the kids.
The big shoe companies don't need to do it anymore because they've already taught one generation who's now teaching it for them. But just what it takes to overcome the status quo, to overcome common wisdom and wisdom in air quotes. Obviously, it's an inspiring opportunity. We both feel that.
But it's also an incredible challenge, both practically and intellectually. And I mean, it's very compelling. And the good news is, though, it's fun to be right. I mean, really with that.
But you know, I've been doing this for 20 years. So I was a salmon swimming upstream for the first 12 years of that. And we're going, come on, give me a break. Yeah, you meant these now.
The runners were like, total pandas when we first came out. And since then, we've had numerous articles and runners were all saying how cool it is. And so it just had to work at changing the perception that people have. And it's starting to actually change enough.
Actually, because my first came out, there were no biomechanical studies saying all the stuff that you were talking about. And then I'm talking about, hey, it didn't exist. And so it was my word against runners' world. And I had about it, you know, or my word against new balance.
Irene gave me a really interesting stat. She did a search for the phrase running injury and couldn't find any scientific studies that use the phrase running injury in the title till 1977. That's not surprising. No.
Have you ever had a chat with Phil Maffetone? I have talked with him, yes. Yeah, he's a big guy. Yeah, I door Phil.
And when I first became friendly with him, because I remember getting his books back in the late 80s. And one of the things he talked about was go out and get the cheapest pair of shoes. You can get at Walmart because that's going to be the best pair for you. And don't worry about it.
You want something thin and flat and let your foot move. And I asked him, and this is the point of the story, to you. I said to him, now that people have caught up with this idea, 30 years later, do you feel vindicated? Or do you feel like, why did it take so long?
He's kind of that. Because at first the same thing, he was having all these incredible arguments with people who just didn't want to go there because he was basically saying the big shoe companies are lying. And so go do the following things. Like, well, they must be right.
Look how much money they're spending telling us these things. What? One prediction I made way back when the minimalist thing was first starting, because back before minimalist shoes, they were racing flats. And so racing flats were the only shoe that people were for many, many years.
And I predicted this was way the hell back. And I said, you watch, racing flats right now cost $45 a pair. You know, this catches on. Basic flats are going to cost over $100.
People are going, no. And there you are. You're going to make boom flies for $500 or something. Well, I was going to say, thanks for the insult.
We're releasing that. So it's actually, it's kind of a point. Ooh, there we go. It's actually, it's kind of like, for us in particular, when people say, well, how come this shoe costs, whatever the hell it costs, because it doesn't matter, whatever the cost is, people have a complaint at some point.
But some people love it, but there's always someone who's going, hey, it's too much. And they go, well, there's nothing in the shoe. Why does it cost so much? Because the materials that are nothing cost more than the materials that are something, it's really counterintuitive.
It's challenging from being a guy who sells shoes perspective, because there's another psychological thing where we just naturally assume bigger and heavier things have more value than lighter things. Bigger is better. Yeah. But you know, if you want to offer a $5,000 tread warranty, $5,000-wide warranty, you've got to pay some money for that.
Well, there's that too. This is a conversation. I actually did a podcast about this recently. And it was a conversation I had in Germany just recently about the whole sustainability thing, where that's like the big buzzword now, and everyone's using it as marketing propaganda.
It's like, look how sustainable we are. Because we got 20% of something that we got from unicorn farts, or whatever the hell they're claiming. And I said, yeah, but you're surely less or 200 miles. So they've got to buy 50 pairs and catch up with what we're doing.
How is that sustainable? Like, oh, yeah. But I mean, I mentioned unicorn farts. I mean, come on, those things are amazing.
The amount of hand waving of just like, hey, look over here. Well, something else happens over here from Big shoe. It just, what's so motivating for me about that is I just don't like it when people lie to other people to get their money. And that's what's been going on for 50 years.