What is the number one thing, the most important thing to know, pay attention to, adjust, tweak, etc. If you want to be a happy, healthy runner, well, we're going to dive into that today on this episode of the movement movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting first, you know, those things that are in your legs that are the foundation of the rest of your body. We're also going to break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or yoda or cross-vader skydiver, dance, dance, revolution or play golf, whatever it is, you know, especially if you want to do it enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. Did I say enjoy it?
Sure question. I know I did. Good. Look, if you're not having fun, you're not going to keep doing it.
So do something that you enjoy. I'm Steve Asachian, co-founder, co-CEO of Zero Shoes. I got the teacher to prove it. And I'm the host of the movement movement podcast, which we call it that was almost a sentence because we, and that involves you, more about that in a second, it's really easy.
We are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do and not getting away. And so the way you can get involved is really easy. Go to our website, www.joinit.movement.com. There's nothing you have to do to join.
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Just spread the word, you know, if you want to be part of the tribe, subscribe. So here we go. All right, let us have some fun. Do give me a favor.
Tell people who you are and what you do and why you're here. Well, that was a great intro. I love that here. I love the movement.
I've done it like 200 times. It's just, you know, I just try now. I hit the button and it comes out of my face. But thank you.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. I'm in. I'm starting off the movement of myself here. So I am a giant running nerd is probably the best way to describe me.
So I'm a physical therapist by trade. And I got a shirt on to show that I'm the CEO of RunDNA since we're just tapping our shirts here. So I basically, you're ready and they provide the tools and the training for people that want to specialize in working with runners. We provide that infrastructure.
So if somebody's looking for education or technology or resources and they say, Hey, I love the running community. I want to serve them. I want to help them. And I'd love to make a business out of it.
We are the source for that. And so yeah, but I'm going to interrupt you because for people who aren't looking to have a business helping runners, let's get into the part that's my favorite part, which is the how you're doing that or how these people are doing the same that you have developed, which is what we're going to be talking about predominantly. Right, because it all comes back to the runner at the end. And that's what I've spent my career on.
And so I, because I'm a giant running nerd, I work with runners all day every day and part of building RunDNA was also really building up my own running practice. And I now work a lot with the military. I am the team PT for a professional Adidas running team. And I basically just work with running and runners all day long.
So lots to share with the actual running community as well here. Okay, I'm going to, you're not getting the one I'm looking for. So here's where I'm going. The tool that you use, that is the primary thing that you do to help these runners is what?
Gait analysis running. Gait analysis there. Yes. Yeah.
There's more to it than that. I want to put a bookmark in that because there's more to it than just gait analysis. There are a lot of people who are trying to do gait analysis, you walk into almost any running store running to store. They've got a treadmill with a camera and a 20 year old kid who learned how to hit rewind on the tape recorder and they have video reports, whatever they have, you know, to look at it and tell you something, but you're in a whole different game.
And so actually, let's talk about what you've developed first. And then I want to talk about the next thing I want to jump into is the where we met part and how relevant that is to where we met and how this relates to anybody. Listen to this, we either is a runner, wants to be a runner, knows a runner, used to be a runner, thinks about running, you know, running. So talk about your magic technology, which is really, really cool.
Yeah. So maybe get a little bit of background of how it created it might kind of take us to it there. So I, physical therapist, like I said, had started. I was really lucky to have great mentorship with Irene Davis, which really Lynn Sander-Mackler amongst others and just learn gait analysis as a student.
And then in my early career, I was really lucky to see just really the research side of that. And what we discovered as we were going about is that there's not actually, there's no perfect way to run, but there are imperfect ways to run that can put a lot of stress on the body. And addressing those things makes a huge difference. And one of my favorite running studies shows you that for people that think gait analysis is out of reach for them or doesn't benefit them, it's for everybody.
It's for every level of runner from a new person up to the very highest level. You know, I've worked with people that run 346 miles and I've worked with people that run 10-46 miles. Gait analysis is a crucial component of that. So what we did is we started realizing that these imperfect ways, there were categories and that there are certain things that runners fit into.
And we made up these five categories that we actually noticed were very related to research items that we found that were correlated to high injury rates and poor performance. So we took these five categories and I started teaching courses called Certified Running Gait Analyst. And we got a lot of great response to that. And we started teaching this and now we've had about 10,000 people go through our courses.
And we've had a lot of great response to that. And we've got people all over the country over the world now that are certified to analyze gait, which is a huge benefit for runners. But then we started realizing that to do it at the highest level, we need the most accurate information that's available immediately. So I looked around at camera systems and to do gait analysis and quickly realized that I didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in that.
So I built my own camera system that was really designed for clinicians and for runners to get immediate feedback and for them to understand, hey, this is my most important thing that I need to do. And this is how I'm going to change it. And then when they do, you can quickly retest and see did they actually make a difference. So that's that's what we really kind of led us to this point.
And then we've done a lot of work with the military. So we got grants and funding to the military to develop our technology even further. And now it's got all sorts of algorithms and apps and everything that go with it. But the net net of it for the runner is that when you get a gait analysis with R3D, you understand what category you're in, exactly how to fix it, you get an email every day telling you here's what you need to do.
Here's a video of how to do this exercise where there's drill and how to go and make a significant change. Because if you make a 10% reduction in stress with each step, you can run twice as far before your body breaks down, 10% is easy to do. If you're looking to make a big impact in your running and you haven't had a gait analysis, that's probably the thing that's holding you back from achieving goals that you really want with running. Now I got to put a pin there because again, there are lots of people and lots of places where they claim to do gait analysis.
And more often than not, like again, if you go to a running shoe store, they're going to put you on a treadmill, they're going to film you from the knees down, maybe if they're smart from the hips down or smarter from the hips down. And they're doing this. So they can say to you something like, Hey, you pronate, hey, you supinate, hey, fill in the blank eight, and therefore you need to wear shoe. Would it be fair if I just made the statement or you can tell me if you disagree with the statement, that's all bullshit.
I think I would agree. So I'm so here's the thing. Right. Here's, I knew I was pushing you on that one, but I couldn't help myself.
Oh, I love it. And it's like, here's the thing. Like for those of you, why, if you can't, if you're not watching it, and if you're listening to it, I'll explain what I'm doing here, but I'm turning my finger to the side right now here. And if I'm holding three fingers up, if I hold it in two dimensions, it looks like I'm giving it the middle finger here, right?
So, but if I turn my hand, now you see that I'm not giving you the middle finger. And that's really what, yeah, yeah, explain it just for the fun, because actually this is a fun thing that people can do, you know, like put your four finger in your tip, your four finger to be your thumb together, so making a circle hold your other fingers straight up. And then from the side, you know, it can, if you do it the right way, where the thumb and four finger facing somebody can look like you're flipping somebody off. And otherwise you see it holding a game.
So that was a, I think that was a good politically correct way of answering my question. So, yeah, well, so there's some, the scientific way of answering is that our eyes only see about maximum 16 frames per second. So when somebody just watches you run, if somebody's just watching you run, you have to be very careful, because they're, there's something called brain sponging that your brain actually fills in what you want to see if you don't have it at high enough frame rate for it there. So if they're filming you in 3D, 2D, and they're using higher frame rate, like 60 frames per second, they're going to get more information.
But like we just did with the middle finger experiment here, it's okay, but you're not getting all of the information and a runner needs the most important information for them. So if you're not getting 3D, you're not getting a whole picture. And best case, it doesn't help worst case, it makes you worse. Well, what I love about your system is you developed, you're doing it's doing two things.
You develop something that will give you all the joint angles, joint moment arms, I mean, all the physics that you need into something with 3D information with the simplest setup I've ever seen. You know, normally you'll go somewhere for any sort of get analysis, and it is this like, looks like it's out of some sci-fi movie for what you have to do and your stuff, I mean, I'm exaggerating for the fun of it. It practically fits in a suitcase in where you go. I mean, it's really just the technology itself is quite brilliant.
And the information you're giving someone is quite impressive as well. And to the point about frame rate, when I was in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands, he used to be the head of Biomechanics for the Olympic Committee, he wouldn't do anything under 250 frames a second. And he would say, you really need that.
And I said, and he was actually filming at 500 frames a second, which needs a lot of light, which makes you very hot when you're under those lights. But regardless, I thought that was kind of overkill until I saw in my own gate analysis that right before my right foot was hitting me around, it was everting, turning out to the tiny bit in a way that was putting strain on my hamstring. And literally at anything under 250, anything under 260 frames a second, you wouldn't have seen it. So it was like the last two frames in that 500 frames a second.
So it's pretty wild to see. So there's a back component. But backing up to my rather bold assertion of male cows and their excrement, the thing about what happens when most people go into a running shoe store is they're trying to, they basically learn to tell you something that they can then use to sell you something. But I'm going to use pronation as an example.
There's a footwear, let's call it analytical. In fact, I'm not even mentioning any of the video footwear guy who used to be Mr. Anti-Pronation and then changed his tune. And when people ask him why he changed his tune, he said, because in the research, there's now enough showing there's no correlation between pronation and injury.
So it's not something that needs to be corrected. Now that said, there's hyperpronation. There are other things that are related to that. Of course, now that I said that, everyone's going to go, well, I must hyperpronate.
Otherwise, they wouldn't recommend the shoe. So trust me, the odds of you hyperpronating are very slim, unless ironically, unless you're often wearing one of the shoes they recommend. So, and to explain that, just to get into the physics, but then I want to back to you for the wind dog, if you have a shoe that's recommended with a big flare, like if you look at the heel of the shoe, you look at it from behind, and if the sole flares out, then there's a high probability you will be an over-pronator, a hyperpronator, because the thing that touches around first that outside edge of the sole is actually making your foot kind of slap the ground as it comes to being essentially horizontal, and that can cause hyperpronation, because if you don't have the muscle strength to control that, and most people don't, especially if they end up wearing those shoes. So that's the need of here or there.
But so, one of the things that I really loved, we met at an event called the Mount Land Running Summit, which is put on in Parks City, Utah by a physical therapy rehab training facility, and they bring about 200 physical therapists in from mostly around, you know, Utah-ish, but people flying from all over as well, and it's a bunch of researchers talking about the cause and cure of running injuries. And the thing I want to really harp on, because we're getting into the five categories of problems, but I want to start with my favorite, because A, it's my favorite, and B, you did something that I adore that I want people to play with. So I've been at these events for years, and usually there's arguments about, you know, what causes running injuries. And this time, there were some, let's call them, minor variations on a theme about what causes running injuries.
But there was one thing that every one of the people who has anything to do with gait brought up, and they all agreed on this, and that is a, perhaps the number one cause of problems is over-striding, is laying their foot too far out in front of your body. They all said that. That's the first time I've ever seen that happen. And these were, you know, people with very disparate backgrounds, very different practices, some from just total researchers, some clinicians, some trainers, but every one of them, over-striding was a problem.
Is it fair to say that that might be one of the five categories of things that are problematic? That is the number one category of the most problematic, so you know that there. Well, now here's my, the next favorite thing. So you had a treadmill set up with your system recording people, and you get this cool 3D stick figure of you showing how you're running.
And I don't tell me if this is accurate. It's probably not. But everybody that I saw that you did analysis for, and these are physical therapists, and some of them are really accomplished runners, every one of them over-striding. I think it would be that conference particularly, I think it probably was about 75% were over-striding.
I didn't see every day. But the part that I also loved is the people that were over-striding, if you asked them, if they were over-striding, they would have assured you that they were not. Yeah, 100%. Yeah.
That's what's challenging about running, and why I say that running is one of the most highly skilled activities that people ever do. Far more challenging than even something like golf, that everyone thinks that golf or hitting a baseball is really hard. But those are discrete activities where you get feedback about a very definitive start and end. And running is a continuous activity that you get no feedback.
And how fast you run is not a determinant of how well you're running from a form and technique standpoint. So running is one of the most challenging things to actually know if you're doing well. And that's why the 3D information gives you the feedback and the information that you need to actually make a difference. Brilliant.
And you know, I want to highlight that because a lot of people will look at some analysis that someone has done of professional runners, which first of all, it's just to the point we made before, video at between 16 and 60 frames a second tops, where what you're seeing can be easily misinterpreted because what an elite runner is doing, especially with how fast they're moving across that ground, is very different than what you're doing if you're going at half that speed. So someone said, well, that guy landed on his heel. It's like, yeah, his heel barely touched the ground because, and his leg is moving so fast as it's coming back underneath his body that for all practical purposes, he didn't. Or more importantly, who gives a shit?
Because that guy is trying to make as much money as he can before he's washed up because he needs to support his village. So the fact that someone is doing X doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for you. If you want to have a long, I don't even want to say career, a lengthy I'll say career, a lengthy running career, even if you're a career as a total amateur who's just doing it for fun. Yes.
Yeah. 100% replicating professionals is a great way to get injured. I like, when I first started working with professionals, they were trying to replicate each other. And that was causing all sorts of issues too.
They're like, Oh, well, I see the Kenyans run this way, or I see, you know, kip joker is running this way. Like, I should run this way. And it's like, no, you shouldn't run that way. Like, that's not the way like, and what you're doing that you think is running like that professional doesn't look at all like what they're doing too.
And they just don't get the feedback. So it's very challenging for them if they don't know what it actually looks like. Well, this is what you just said is basically researching Ben Onig. He's basically staked his career on what you just said, which is don't arbitrarily change your form because that's going to get you injured, which I disagree with.
And I would imagine you as well, the arbitrary part is the key part. But he basically says don't change your form. There's a way that's natural for you to run. And you just want to do that, which I disagree with because A, you learn that form in part because of the shoes you started wearing because those impacted form and B, you know, you give someone the right cue, the right feedback, it will change your form.
And if you do it smart in a good way, I mean, you know, he would never say that about gymnasts. You know, it's like, there's a right way of doing a double backflip. And you know, or the way you do a double backflip is like, and no, no, there's a way to do a double backflip fundamentally, no minor variations. But the overarching things identical about anyone who do a double backflip.
I give two analogies with that. I say when I was five, I would shoot a basketball underhand because that's how I knew how to do it. So nobody in the NBA shoots underhand because that's how they learn to do it. But runners think because they were born to run a certain way, this is how they should do it.
So it's not true. And then for my physical therapist group, I say, hey, if you saw a pitcher and they're throwing and their elbow is dropping way down, would you fix that? Oh, yeah, of course, right? Yeah, you know, problem, right?
And then you say, well, you see somebody over striding when they run, would you fix that? And like, I don't know, you're like, what do you mean, you don't know? Like, it's the same thing. But here's the thing, the reason they say, I don't know, I would contend is because a, they see so many professional runners seemingly over striding, or maybe they are over striding, and they don't know what was being presented by all these researchers, that yeah, that actually is a cause of many, many problems.
And maybe because they don't even know what to do about it. So they don't want to fess up and go, yeah, I'd want to fix it. So why don't we, before we get into the other four categories, let's start with the number one, let's talk about over striding and talk about why it is that it causes the types of problems that can cause. Yeah, so when we run, right, our foot hits the ground, but the ground hits our foot, and there's equal opposite reactions, right?
So when you overstride, what happens is that there's also often a very large horizontal and vertical ground reaction force, meaning that the ground hits your foot harder, and there's higher forces experienced, and it causes a breaking moment. So I, when somebody's over striding, I asked them to stand up, and I have them put their foot in a position of over striding, and I say, does this look like you're speeding up or slowing down? And like, oh, it looks like I'm putting the brakes on, and it's like, yeah, that's exactly it. When you overstride, you're slowing your momentum down with each step that causes a very large amount of force opposing the way that you're trying to run.
So that puts a lot of stress and it goes up the body. And additionally, what we found is that the position that you're in in over striding is not conducive for absorbing the forces. So I say like, people have heard of like the kinetic chain before, right? I kind of use a trained analogy.
Our body, our lower body, and our upper body too, but acts like a trained stop, right? Each joint people forces get off at each train stop. If you're not getting off at one train stop, the next train stop is overcrowded, and everyone has to get off. So if you're not absorbing force adequately or ankle or your knee, guess where it's all going to your hip, your back, all of the areas on the next stop.
So with over striding, we see that you're often in a position where the knee is straight, you're in a heel strike position, the foot is very far out in front of the hip. So you're not only increasing the forces, but you're increasing the torque on the body, right? And the way to explain that torque is if I were to give you five pounds of weight and have you hold it next to your chest, you could hold it for a long time. If I asked you to hold that five pounds with your elbow straight out in front of you, you could hold it for not nearly as long.
So that's torque. The further something is from you, the more stress it puts at the center of the rotation. So my holding the weight example would put stress on my shoulder, the overstriding example puts stress at the hip. So it increases the forces and it puts your body in a way that it's not really designed to absorb those higher forces.
What do you say to people who say, yeah, but all that shoe companies and when I go to the running shoe store, they tell me I'm supposed to go heel toe heel toe. What do you say to them? It's not as much about what part of the foot hits the ground as opposed to where the foot lands in relationship to your center of mass. And now saying that, the closer you land to your body, the harder it is to land anywhere but the mid or forefoot.
So when you're doing it, you know, for people at home that want to learn that lesson very quickly, jog in place for a second if you're healthy to do so. Jog in place for a second. And now, where are you landing on? Right?
You're landing right underneath of your center of mass. So you're probably landing on your, like on the front of your foot. Now, try it on your heels and see how that feels. And all of a sudden, it will not feel so good.
You'll start shaking your teeth. There's so much force is happening there. So, I'm running in place. That's different, right?
He says, sir, can you ask? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, yeah, but it's true. Like when, what we see is that the further the foot is in front of the body, the more stress that there is. So when we look at overstriding, there's a qualitative way to look at to see if you're on overstriding. Whereas if you do get a video or a picture of yourself running from the side, there's something called the Malleolar line.
So if you draw a line straight up from your outside ankle bone, and if that line you draw it straight vertically, if that line goes in front of your knee, you likely have some overstriding characteristics in your form there. So when we've done- That's a running version of you might be a redneck. Yes, you might be an overstrider. Yeah.
You might be a redneck. Defox right there. Yeah. Yeah.
So overstriding is the most common thing that we see. And when we teach our courses, we teach the therapist the hierarchy of these. Because what we see is we talked about these five categories, and we haven't introduced the other ones, but it's rare that somebody just has one of the categories. If you think about it, when you overstride, your body has to find a way to absorb those forces.
And so our next category is the Collapser. And that's one of the most common things that we see, that somebody that overstrides may also have some collapsing mechanics, but the collapsing mechanics go away when you fix the overstriding, because they don't have to overcome the high forces. So the whole thing we do is let's prioritize and personalize what you need, so that you don't try to fix your collapsing mechanics there. And wondering why you can't make a difference because you're still overstriding.
So our technology lets you prioritize. Can you describe what collapsing is? Yes. Really, please.
For the, yeah, sure. Exactly. So for the bio-mechanist and the nerds out there, right, you're losing the frontal and transverse plane battle. And what that means is that when we run, a lot of people think that we're just going straight forward, and they kind of say, like, oh, it's a single plane sport.
You're just running in a straight line. You're not, that's not very athletic, but you're fighting the forces of gravity that are pulling you in the other planes of motion. So what happens when we run is gravity pulls things like pulls our knees together, and it forces our hips to collapse. So when we see collapsing, collapsing can happen in multiple areas throughout the body, but that's what we see typically with the excessive or hyperpronation.
Genu-vogous were the knees coming inward and the pelvic drop where you stand on one leg and the opposite hip drops down. So that's where we typically see collapsing mechanics. There's an article that I used to send out, and I don't even know if I still do actually, where Glenn Mills was using Bolt's coach, said what turned him from a very good 400 meter runner into the fastest 100 meter runner in the world, was working on getting him to stop collapsing. Basically working, I don't want to say, of course, that's a little misunderstood, but that's the gist of what he said, because it was more to it than that.
But basically making him a tighter spring, a more taut spring, rather than any of those things collapse. And that, if you watch him run, you see that. When he hits the ground, when his foot hits the ground, you don't see everything being like a slinky just going, there's just a tiny bit of vertical oscillation, mostly from the difference between when he's on his toes, when he's not on his toes. I mean, that's really good.
And that's what they worked on for a year. So you hit on a very interesting point. I don't know if you noticed this during the gate analysis, but we have a measurement called stiffness, and we look at somebody's stiffness. And there's still, I'll put a little disname on this.
The literature around stiffness is still developing. But what we're starting to understand now that we've done it, interestingly enough, here, we've been measuring stiffness for years with our system. There's something called the spring mass model system. And it looks like exactly, if you described, if you have more stiffness, the spring would go through less motion.
Like, if you have a low amount of stiffness, you would go through more motion as this ringer like an accordion goes. So what we found is that from a performance standpoint, when we find a more efficient form, the stiffness goes up. And the reason that we think that is, is that because your body is efficiently using its natural springiness, and it's naturally getting recoil. So people don't always, this is a little bit of a clickbait kind of thing, but running is largely passive.
And what I mean by that is that when you run, your body absorbs forces during the first half of your time on the ground, the absorption phase, when you are propelling yourself forward, that is largely passive. 95% of the energy that you absorb in the first half of stance can be returned in the propulsive phase, if your body is lined up in the appropriate position. So running is not a large push off activity. It is a large set your body up for success and put your body in the right posture so that you can passively get the return of what your body did working to absorb those forces.
So you have to really be an efficient spring. And that's why my professional runners, I wear all runners, but I really work a lot on jumping mechanics and landing and plyometric type activities. Because that springiness, that stiffness is really important. I may be bragging when I say this next thing, if you know what I'm talking about, and I imagine you will, do you know the RSI test?
RSI, no, I can't say, yeah, hold on, it'll like me here. I want to hear about it. RSI test, you put your hands on your hips, and you have to videotape this at like 240 frames a second. Put your hands on your hips, kind of squat down, and then just jump, and then keep your knees as straight as you can, and basically just bounce your feet and ankles like 10 times.
And you just average the amount of time you're in the air. And the number, there's basically some math, math goes along with this. The gist of it is the higher you're able to jump, the more airtime you have, the springer you are, starting with your feet and ankles, tiny bit in your knees, very little in your hips, anything over, I'll get into that, all the details. If you have an RSI score of like over 2.5, you know, you're crushing it.
If you're an RSI score over three, you're like one of the most elite athletes in the world. And I'm dealing with a lot of basketball players, and I'm, you know, 5'4 on a good day, actually I'm 5'5 on a good day, 5'4 on most days, because I got to spine issues blah, blah, blah. But anyway, you know, when I hang out with these guys, I need to do something to get a little respect. So I'll either do a standing backflip, or I tell them my RSI is 2.71, and they go, what the?
So it gives me some street cred. But it's a very, very cool test about stiffness, because the only thing you're using is feet and ankles tiny bit in knees. In fact, your knees barely have time to do anything propulsive. It's fun.
Yeah. And that would make sense, because I will say, you know, especially here talking about zero shoes, even like somebody that doesn't have good foot mobility and good foot control, will never have good stringiness. Like their stiffness score will always be limited. We have a foot assessment we do, and they're normally junk on that if they can't do our learning levels there.
And the foot strength thing, you know, this is where what I say to people. So I ask them, is weaker, better than stronger? And they go, what? No.
I go, how do you make your arm, like you want to make your arm weaker? What do you do? They go, I don't use it. Yeah, they put in a cast, right?
They go, yeah, sure. So you know, put in a cast day, which later comes out, what? We're stronger? They go, we're cool.
What happens if you put your foot in something that doesn't let it move? And they go, oh, yeah. And then they look at their shoes. It's like, wait a minute.
Yeah. You know, it's just like the opening gambit, if you will, because even then they're going, yeah, but but I need that cushioning. In fact, let's go back to overstrawding for a brief second. There are people who think that even if they're overstrawding, landing with a relatively stiff leg, etc, etc, that the cushioning in the shoe is supposed to take care of that thoughts, comments, responses.
Yes. All right. So one important thing that you brought, like, when we were saying that, I think it's an important topic to bring up running injuries have a four to six week delay. Interesting.
So because it's micro trauma, it's not football, where you break your leg when a 400 pound lineman rolls on top of it, you break your leg slowly, one step at a time, over four to six weeks. So wait, are you suggesting that we run with a 400 pound linebacker, who would that first normally just tackles you and you're done with it? You're out of your minutes right there, right? Yeah.
That's one of your systems. That's one of your differences. Here's a 400 pound guy. So got it.
Yes. So sometimes the way I've described the excessive amount of cushioning that's in shoes these days here is that it doesn't fix anything. It just makes you not care. Yeah.
It doesn't actually change that. It doesn't absorb it. It's just it's enough of a reduction that you just don't care. But what happens is, is you get that shoe and you go run on it for four to six weeks and you start getting injured.
And you're like, well, it can't be the shoe because I've been running for a month and a days and it's fine. But what happens is that it's micro trauma and it's happening time and time again. And I think one of the big issues, and this is where we combine really well, right? Because when you're getting shoe, when you're looking at it there, you really should be looking at how it impacts your mechanics.
Because when we've done this, we see that somebody with a very high stack height with their shoe. So just how far your foot is actually from the ground. That causes a lot more control. And you talked about the lateral flare on a shoe as well.
Right. So those types of elements can really significantly change some of your biomechanics if you don't know that it's happening there. So when you're evaluating a shoe, we do an analysis all the time to look at it to say, Hey, listen, it might feel great when you're walking around the store and you feel like you're walking on clouds. But what's going to happen when you're five or six miles into that and your hips are having to control all that excessive angular velocity that is happening from the increased stack height.
I mean, I'll give my personal story with like, you know, I got my zero shoes on right here, right? Like I'm wearing them right now. Because I'll never forget that I had a shoe on and I have a knee injury. For those of you that don't know, we were followed a little bit of social media there with me.
I partially told my patellar tendon. And at the point that we were in partially together, I was rehabbing and doing well. But it's a good story here. I got I went for a run and I got to the top of a mountain and there was a giant moose up there.
So I had to haul down the mountain to get away from this moose. And I'm rehabbing a torn patellar tendon. And it's a partially torn. And so at the conference that day, my knee was hurting.
I was standing there. I was like, man, my knee hurts, right? And so Steve becomes up and says, I was like, let me try them on. Like, I'd love to try these on.
And instantly I had knee pain relief there. It was like, it was almost automatic there, where I was like, Oh, wow, this feels so much better because I'm absorbing more forces through my foot. I'm engaging it more. So yeah, I think I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I'm sure I'm sure that's right.
Because you said nice things about me. So and I got our brand. Well, you know, it's funny. In the early way that when when, let's see, should I mention this brand, I'll hide the name.
It's a bloke. So when people start wearing bloke issues, there was a bunch of like Olympian level runners that I was training with. And I said to all of them, in two years, you won't be able to run anymore. And they're like, what are you talking about?
I'm putting in more miles than ever with these things. They're great. And yeah, I know in two years, you'll be done. And without exception, two years later, they're all cyclists.
And the irony there is they don't have to be cyclists. They can go back to running. They just have to get out of those shoes and stop putting those forces into their knee. It's like, I don't know if you know Isabel Sanco.
She's a researcher, a doctor down in Brazil. She took elderly women and who had knee-ester arthritis and put them in a minimal shoe. There's like a really inexpensive thing. You can get in Brazil and track them over.
I think about six months. And for many of them, their knee-ester arthritis went away. For the remainder, just their report of pain was significantly reduced. Their use of pain medication significantly reduced, but for some of them gone.
And I said to her, I know the answer, but I want to hear from you, what changed? Because they started stopping over, striding. And they started using the muscles around their knee to actually act as protectors, in addition to moving them forward properly. It's like, yep.
So it's an amazing thing. But we have this idea. It's like, you know, cushioning feels good. You go to sleep on a temper, your mattress feels great.
And so that's where I was going to go. So what you said for you just don't notice it, wherever you said it, my apologies, you're not remembering verbatim. But the way I say it, I get a little more into the physics. I go, there's a difference between pressure and force.
So the pressure gets spread out on your foot so you don't feel it. But the force is still going into your body. And the difference between pressure and force is if you find there's a video, many of us have seen it to one of the first films ever made. It's a slow-motion film of this big fat guy getting hit with a cannonball in the stomach.
It was like, he was like, and so you see this, the cannonball hits him and you watch the fat and all of it's all body respond to getting hit with a cannonball. But then it also throws him back into the strampoline that catches him five feet behind him. And so the pressure is what makes him not get injured. The force is what shoves this 300 and something pound guy way back into the air practically.
And that's what's happening in your body. You don't feel it. It's still going there. And if we go back to our stiffness talk, what happens is that our body can adapt almost instantly to different surfaces and it adjusts the stiffness.
So when you run in a very soft surface, then you're going to go through increased excursion unless your body automatically adapts it. So what do you have? You have increased stiffness at all of your joints in the not beneficial way, right? Where all of a sudden you get very stiff at the hip, at the knee, at the ankle, because you have such a soft cushion surface that you land on.
So the stiffness up at the knee goes way up and you go through very little excursion. And now you're using a limited range of motion in order to absorb the forces. Yep. Okay.
Well, by now, if people aren't thinking cool, what are the other three categories we've got over-strawding, we got break, well collapsing. And so let's hit the next one. Yes. And just a little caveat too, like there's four types of over-strawders and three types of collapses too.
And there's like subcategories of these for those that are really nerdy like me about it. But we, with our military studies, we're actually able to say, hey, if you over-stride it and we figured out you do this, you'll get better. And we showed a 90-second improvement on the mile and a half time and zero in three rates. So the next category, and these ones are about even prolifically that we see them.
But I would say probably the next most common one is bouncer. So this is one if you could tell with you, but you couldn't tell with me, and for those of you that can't see this, I'm bald. So a bouncer is somebody with those who can tell us I'm the opposite of bald. You're the opposite of bald and I have a shiny head bald here.
So we call it like the ponytail sign, right? So somebody's got a high amount of vertical oscillation and they are, their ponytails whipping up and down because they're going through a lot of excessive motion up and down. So this is again a physics problem. What goes up must come down.
And so there's higher forces as you go. So as you go up, then you have to come back down. So it often puts higher forces and again some breaking type forces there. We're going to, by the way, we have to do the categories we're going to talk about something intervention to give.
And I made a note about that one because there's one in particular that I get a kick out of. It also became a very common theme at the Science Learning Medicine event. So whatever the hell is, Mountland Running Science Learning Medicine is a different one that Irene does with Brian Hidershite. I forgot powers, this first name.
Thank you, Chris. I don't know why I'm horrible at names to begin with. And now that I'm 61, it's even worse. And certain names, yeah, it makes me crazy.
So bouncers, so basically, we'll come back to the intervention for that. What's our next one? Probably one of the most common ones. And this one's hard to fix because your brain doesn't like the fix right away.
It's called a glute emi-jack. So this is, wait, give me that again? Yes. Yeah, glute emi-jack.
So you're, you've ever seen, if you ever, we can have earnings, right? Remember the, the dead guy and that he kind of like leans back and he's like walking like this. Yeah, that's somebody that is shifting loads off of the posterior chain and shifting them to the anterior chain. And they lean back when they run.
And I've got a great story about this one, because this is one, like we always talk about for our people that take our courses, like if you want to be a hero to runner, you should take our courses, right? And this is why. So I had this guy. He was a big time, he was in a fortune 10 company.
He was in the C-suite. He was like a big, big guy. And he's like, Doug, I'm going to fly in. I want two days of your time.
I'm running a marathon. I need you to fix me. Like, okay, sure, pace for two full days of my time. We come in, we chat.
He's like, I, you know, I just want to like, I need to get to the point where I can run at least six miles without pain. Like anytime I get to like five minutes in the run, it hurts, right? I'm like, okay, well, let's figure it out. And we got him up on the treadmill.
I do a game analysis and I'm like, it's so you that he's just leaning way back. I'm like, okay, hey, try this. Try like you're running uphill or you're running into a really stiff wind. And he does it.
And he's like, he looks at me, he's like, it doesn't hurt. He's like, okay, we'll keep running. So we run for another two minutes. It doesn't hurt.
And he's like, all right, go back to your old way. Does it hurt? And he's like, yeah, okay, go back to the new way. Does it hurt?
He's like, no. He's like, okay. What else do you need here? What else do you need here?
Right? So he's like, all right, I'm going to go have dinner. I'll come back tomorrow morning. And if it still doesn't hurt, like you get the rest of the day off.
And so he came back the next day, it didn't hurt. He got back in his private jet and flew home and he was fine. You know, follow it up a little later. Yes.
So it's just, it's again to the point of like, you just have to know what the right thing is for the right person. So who do I need to act? They, when they lean back, it puts a lot of it increases the distance of the force application on your knees. So somebody has anterior knee pain and they look like they're kind of sitting back or leaning back when they run.
That puts a lot of stress on the front of the body and take stress off the back of the body. So we teach people how to lean forward from the ankles, not from the waist. Yeah, and the right amount. Because that's a funny thing.
There's been this whole idea that came out of a number of different sources about when you're running, you know, run tall, like goes, you know, up like straight ups like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. First of all, because most people don't know what straight up is. Secondly, the odds of you being leaning back slightly when you're doing that is very, very high and more. It's just not the right cue anyway.
So the glute amnesia thing or glute amnesia. We're going to label somebody now. There's going to be this whole anti-glute amnesia thing. It's like, don't glute amnesia, shame me.
This is something that I see a lot. So let's I want to break this down a little bit for the fun of it. So the thing that moves you forward is mostly your butt and your hamstrings. They're prime movers.
Having them move back is what moves you forward. And I see this often where, you know, people don't know how to use their butt. And I know I read Davis as a thing where she'll literally just, you know, stick her finger on someone's glute max and say, just squeeze that. So you kind of push my finger out.
And some people can't do it. And I noticed this as well. And then I do something just to do something really weird. I know this sounds like I'm being creepy.
I promise you I'm not doing this for my own fun. Stick your hand on my butt and I feel it while I walk. And I just take one step and they go, oh, Jesus. It's like, you know, yeah, that muscle is actually working.
Now I exaggerated a little bit for emphasis. That's the thing. I go, now try and do that. And amazingly, many people can, you know, get better just because they felt the difference.
So that's a very entertaining thing. And that right amount of lean, you know, when you said that, all it made me think of is I was on the track during COVID, actually. And there was a bunch of little kids running around and not only were they not overstriting, but had the perfect amount of lean. I mean, it was perfect.
They were and they had this look on their face. I call it the really weird look called smiling. They just were having fun. And everything was right.
And you can see they're using their butts properly. And it's kind of the difference between like a good sprinter is like all butts and a mediocre distance runner has none. And so, you know, and there's so many things. Do you want to talk about the things that happen further down the chain when someone's glutes are just not functioning correctly, when they want to use them?
Right. Yeah. So, so, just right with running here with walking, the glutes are more active from a propulsion standpoint, what we said with running, the glutes are actually their highest activity is right before the foot hits the ground. Because they're extending the hip backwards so that we're not overstriting too much.
Then the role on the ground is more actually keeping us stable and keeping us upright from falling over there. And not as much with propulsion actually, which kind of says that running is in a pushing activity. It's more of a pulling activity. So, but if you don't have the glute, like if your glutes aren't properly functioning and you're getting some of that pelvic drop, what's happening is that that contributes to a lot of those collapsing mechanics.
Because then as you drop your hip, then the knee goes inward, the foot goes out, everything down the chain gets interrupted. And they see that that drives a lot of the stress down the chain. And so, people that are even having some foot pain or things like that might be coming from approximately the hip. And because the body part that hurts is the one that's making up for something else not doing its job.
Well, this is a great diagnostic thing. You can see it, you know, many people, they may not be able to see it in their own running because they're not looking down or seeing it from the right angle. But a quick video can sort of determine some of this. I saw something I'd never seen before on the trail by my house, not too long ago.
This woman runs by me and it's important for the story to say she was decently overweight. You know, probably, probably weight about 180 when she probably should have been about 130. That's only relevant because when she so as she's running by me and I'm seeing it from the side, I can see that her left leg is tracking well. Her knee is pointing forward, her foot is pointing forward.
Her right leg, the knee was pointing in basically almost hitting her left leg and her foot was pointing out, which struck me as the crazy thing I'd ever seen. And then she gets by me. And her left glute was a nice full thing for 180 pound woman. And her right glute looked like someone who weighed 100 pounds.
There was nothing. Now, I literally I didn't stop her, of course, that would have been way too crazy. But you know, it may be one or did she have some surgery, some accident, some, some logical, yeah, or you know, what she just doing this for so long that just that muscle attribute so much. But I had never seen such a screaming obvious visual explanation for what was happening with her, everything from the hip down, then see her, you know, out of sync butt.
Yeah, yeah, it's wild. Then you'll see that there's a chance that she had no clue. Yeah, you know, question. Yeah.
And I've seen, I've seen professional runners like this. In fact, I've never seen this one. I was, I remember this, I was driving to brunch with some friends and I see this woman and you know, you can kind of, you can tell when someone knows what they're doing to a certain extent. And so she had that I'm a serious runner thing going on.
But same issue, you know, her back, she had a bad sex or knees were practically hitting each other, toes pointing out. And just, you can also see the form. If you know, look, she just was not, her butt was just turned off. I mean, she was, she was, she was like on the mental level, amnesia on that one.
Oh, yeah. I was trying to solve the crime. So the OG go down, me Jack there. Yeah.
For people who don't know what that reference was, go watch them with me. Memento is great. All right, we have one last category. All right, let's say weaver.
I think that would be ready to cover weaver. Yep. So, yeah, like Mueller, Mueller weaver. So you're with weaving, you have a narrow base of support.
So instead of your feet being a little wider apart, your feet are close together or even crossing over the other side. So anybody that's experienced IT band syndrome or some of those issues before, this is putting those structures on the outside of your leg under tension. And that can cause some of the issues that we're seeing with the weaving mechanics there. So this one's actually a really easy kind of fix.
This one is sometimes this is again just like the lean forward. If you're blue, then you Jack, there's the run wider apart. If you're a weaver and so I always tell people find a line on the road, preferably the white one, not the yellow one. And so you don't get hit by a car, but find a line on the road and put one foot on the line and put the other foot don't let it touch the line as well.
So that gives you a really good external focus of attention that allows you to say whether you're on a track or a road or things like that, pick a line, one foot can touch the line, the other foot can't and that will increase your base of support and take some of the stress off the lateral structures. I would say if you're on a road, that's a one foot on, one foot off works if you're on the track, I go for one foot on either side because the line is narrower. But that's just the lines there are. Yeah.
Yeah. Before we get into this before after, let's do this. Let's do this before. I want to talk about interventions, but I want to ask you from your experience, and I know there's going to be a lot of individual variation.
We're talking about engineering new movement patterns. This is my undergraduate research. I did research on cognitive aspects of motor scale acquisition. And one of the challenges we have is our brains don't like to learn new things.
It's energy efficient to learn new things, especially movement patterns, also because certain movement patterns identify us as part of a group, typically our family, you see families who all move the same way. That's not because of physiology, more often than not. There's also one other component where typically the way you learn a movement pattern, you start really slow. So you can make sure you're doing it and you build up over time the speed as you get better at it until it becomes a non-conscious thing.
And actually, the fourth thing is we experience it as frustrating, which is actually just the experience of trying to lay down a neural pathway that we misinterpret as a problem. No, that's the signal. It's telling your brain to try and do something new. Put all that together.
What's been your experience with how long it typically takes someone and it'll be different for each of these different categories, perhaps how long it typically takes someone to fix any of these issues? No, about five minutes. So here's the thing, I'm being kind of very simplified here, but did a nice job of laying it out. And what we found is that we use cues, right?
So I tell you to run wider part, I tell you to lean forward. Replicating the cue is not the goal. The goal is for your body to experience and feel a different way of doing the activity. When you have the access to the information with a three day, you know which cue is going to make the biggest bang for your buck.
So I'm not joking. I say, it takes me five minutes to teach somebody how to run and improve their form with that. And if they have the strength and the flexibility to do so, I can get them to change in five minutes and it sticks. Now they need to practice and we have them go through a three week motor learning gate retraining program.
But when I bring them back at one week, three weeks, three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, they do it because they feel it. One of my favorite things to do during a gate analysis is I get them to change their form. I teach them the drills, I teach them the cues, they run, they feel different. I say, well, how does that feel?
They're like different. Okay, go back to running your old way. And what does that feel like? And they're like, no, I won't.
I won't run that way ever again. I don't want to run that way. That way hurts. This way feels good and maybe it's harder to do because when you change the movement pattern, you're not efficient at it first.
And what the literature shows is that it does take about two to three weeks for your body to start relaxing and not using every single muscle on board to get the movement pattern. But when you do, it's far more efficient and it feels way better. And so somebody that can experience a difference instantly will be able to notice and that they can adopt that very quickly. And we take them through.
I don't, Hey, I've had, like I said, American record holders, national right, like I take them all through a walk run training program. I don't care if you can run a three, 46 mile, you're going to walk around because your body needs to adapt to the stresses that are changing from your old form versus your new form. So in about three weeks, like they should be able to feel instantly, they should be able to know, Hey, this is different. But it's solidified at about three weeks.
So many people by now are thinking, okay, I want to get some data analysis, we'll get there, I promise you, but in the interim, for people who won't do that, can't do that, et cetera, let's talk about some of the interventions. And I need to preface this by saying one that you, I hope you mentioned if you don't, I'll cue you to do it. You are, I'm going to say this and be somewhat self-aggrandizing before I compliment you. I think I'm pretty good at coming up with cues for people to learn to do things differently.
You crush me, dude, you come up with things that I've never thought of that are so good. And both metaphors and cues that I just adore. And so, and there's nothing that I find more fun than someone who makes me go, Oh, shit, why did I think of that? So, and then I don't feel bad.
It's like, no, we got to hang out. So just as a FYI, I'm just so impressed with what you came up with. So with that, you know, a little smoke going up your butt, tell me, let's talk about some of the interventions some of the cues that you'll give people to make some of the changes to some of these categories of problematic running. Yes.
Is that, are you alluding to the paper towel roll cue? Did we talk about the paper towel roll cue? Oh, no, I can't wait to know. I'll just give you the hint on when I'm talking about soccer ball.
Yes. Soccer ball. Yes. All right.
Perfect. So, yeah. So, you'll love the paper towel roll and cue. So there's even more, right?
And this is what I do all day, right? So I've had to think about it. And the way that I come up with a lot of these cues is I ask people actually, I will tell them something. And then I'll say, well, so what were you actually thinking about?
And they're like, I wasn't thinking about what you were telling, like, you know, like, I was thinking about this, right? And that's how I've come up with a lot of these cues. So I'll give credit where credit's due because it's not always made there. So I take back everything I said, you suck.
Okay. I just listen. Yeah, which is the key, like that's the key there. So, but so the cues are to help you experience the form and the posture, right?
So for an overstrider, one of the things that we will have them do is a technique called knee drive. So with knee drive, what we're trying to get them to do is recover quicker and get their thigh and their shin in the correct position during the swing phase of the mechanics. I want to pause there for people who are not hip to this in running biomechanics. The word recover is basically from your foot.
By the time your foot comes off the ground, getting it moving forward and then eventually down until it's, you know, basically getting moving forward. Swing phase. Yeah, swing phase. Yeah, we're foot's off the ground there.
So we're trying to get into that position a little sooner so that at the time that your foot's hitting the ground, you're now extending the leg and your leg is going in the same direction as the way that you want your body to go. Whereas an overstrider, they're typically their legs still moving forward and it's jamming into the ground and then the ground's jamming me back. So we do a marching drill and we have people pretend we have a march in place and they're just, you could try this at home again if you're safe to do so. You just start marching in place and think about that when you have somebody in front of you and they're throwing you a soccer ball and you're kneading the soccer ball back to them each time as opposed to juggling the soccer ball.
And it's a, it's kind of a tricky way of teaching somebody that their position of their shin. When your shin is in the right position and your foot stays behind your knee, you're not going to overstride. You want your foot to stay close underneath of your center of mass and you can let the knee go forward but you want the foot to stay underneath of you there. So kneading the soccer ball is a way that gets you to get your foot off the ground faster.
So we're reducing ground contact time. It puts your thigh and your shin in the correct position so that you can absorb the forces when you hit the ground and it causes you to land closer to your center of mass. So it kind of hits all of our buckets in one queue there and it really does help a lot of people with their form. I'll tell you, I sat at this very table two seats away from me was Nicholas Romanoff from the guy who came up with pose method and Nick will videotape you and then show you the videotape and say, you know, here's where things are out of whack.
And the basic idea behind pose is there are a couple of different positions that your body will be seen in if you're running effectively, same way for ballet, if you're doing a plie or a juté, there's, you know, certain positions you have to hit to, in the process of doing that move because you don't hit those positions, you're not going to move correctly. So he took a look at my running and I was, I'll say, in a fun way, three frames off. Basically my, my recovery leg was not getting forward fast enough by just a couple of frames when you can see it on the on film. And I said to him, so what's the secret to fixing that?
And he goes, awareness, I went, that can't be it because I'm really aware of what my body's doing, but something's happening that I can't find because I've been working on this one. I can't find it. Now I've been on the track for a little while because I had shoulders here recently, but using this queue, I think may have rectified that. I'll know the next time I can get on the track.
And because, because I want to highlight the thing that it does for me is it gets, it's what everything you said, it gets my foot off the ground faster with my knee moving in the right direction immediately. And again, minor change for what my form is, but significant. I know that sounds contradictory, but it's small in terms of distance and et cetera, et cetera. But it makes a big difference in force application when you're sprinting.
Right, it's exponential change. Does an exponential benefit doesn't take exponential change? If you can change a little bit, you will see a very large exponential growth with that, because it's going to just a little bit goes a long way. If that's studied, that I said earlier, 10% reduction lets you run twice as far.
Yeah. And again, I can feel when I do this, I'm typically doing it just practicing because I can't go full speed. Amazingly, a shoulder injury prevents you from running at full speed. I can play with it there.
And backing up to just giving you the time, the idea of giving people the time to learn a new movement pattern, it's something that I'm deliberately thinking about. I can definitely feel the difference, but it's also easy to go back, especially this one. It's easy to go back to something habitual for a while until it just becomes, and it takes a while for your brain to lay down neural pathways until that's the way you do it. I just decided to say a friend slash world champion runner slash sometimes coach of mine used to say about doing running drills, you want to do them, you're going to do them wrong until you can do them right.
And then you want to do them right until you can't do them wrong. Yeah. It's yeah, I like that. And it brings up a point that I try to relate to runners to try to get their mindset to shift.
Running is one of the few sports that doesn't practice. There's some exceptions, right? A lot of people like sprinters are better at this and there are exceptions to that. But runners just train.