If you are a barefoot or minimalist runner, you have probably tried to talk some of your friends and to also becoming a barefoot or minimalist runner and they have probably provided some resistance. On the podcast today, we're going to be talking to someone who might have met more resistance than you will ever hear about and look at it in the specifics but let's dive in on the movement movement podcast. In today's episode, I'm Stephen Satchin, your host for the podcast where we will discover the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy body and strong as well starting from the feet first. We're going to get rid of the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that you might have heard about what it takes to walk to run, to play, to crossfit, to be yoga, by letting your body move naturally.
Hence, the movement movement, in fact, we're creating a movement, we want natural movement to be the obvious, better, healthy choice way. Natural food currently is and we want you to be part of that community. If you want to be part of that community, you know what to do, go to jointhemovementmovement.com where you'll find all the different places that you can interact with this podcast and you can like and share and subscribe and if you're on YouTube hit that little bell so you hear about upcoming episodes and leave reviews and all those things you know how to do. I don't need to explain it to you so let's jump in.
I'm very happy today is not one of my normal rant days. We get to talk to an old friend of mine, Dr. Mark Coogazella and Mark, I don't want to even do your intro because I won't do it justice. Do you want to tell people who you are, what you do, where you are right now and then we'll jump into the whole natural movement story with you.
I'm in a gods country here, Stephen, the other gods country here in Boulder, Stone Boulder, some right outside of Boulder where I've got actually probably being in boulders, you're right up against the foothills, you don't get to see them so we're right outside so we have that incredible stuff. Yeah, away from all the people. So I'm in West Virginia, so we're a town of 3000 here. It's what maybe Boulder used to be right before you and I were born.
Again, I would say my claim to fame is I'm a friend of yours. Oh, yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very outside Governor's Island at the New York City barefoot.
Oh my God. I think that's the first time I met you. We talked on the phone. That was like seven years ago?
Years more than that. I saw a picture that my kids looked about nine years younger than two now. So it was a lot of good. Do you want to do you may know this?
You guys in 10 or 2011 something like this? Yeah, I'm going to confess to something that I did there. So I wanted to be one of the sponsors of the New York City barefoot run. It was the first big barefoot run that anyone was just had your little do-it-yourself kit then.
All we were selling was a do-it-yourself kit and I wanted to be one of the sponsors and the guy who was putting the event on who's now a friend of mine said that I couldn't be because one of our now competitors was already a sponsor and was actually a good friend of his and so they didn't want me there competing. So I just showed up at the suitcase full of do-it-yourself sandal kits and we're just selling them underneath a tree. Yeah, I remember. And then they slap my wrist.
You can't do that and I just totally feigned in a sense. Oh really? Oh man. I didn't know.
I totally knew. I was just trying to get in there and do what I could. So I was hustling. That's what I was doing.
I was hustling. You're hustling. I learned about your sprinting day. So I got to learn a little at your back store if you've disclosed your stand-up comedian.
I'm like, how did you get into this field because your video is at that time? That's the fun video. I'm the one interviewing. I'm not going to answer any questions about me.
So let's do you on that. Well, actually I'll do the quickest how. The quickest how is simple. I got back in sprinting.
I was getting injured. Someone suggested I try running barefoot. By doing that, I learned why I was getting injured and how to stop getting injured. I wanted to have that natural movement experience as often as I could.
So I started making sandals based on this 10,000 year old design idea. And then you remember Michael Sandler, right? Yes. So Michael had a book that was coming out called Barefoot Running and he said if you had a website, I would put you in the book.
So I rush home and I pitch this idea to my wife who tells me me it's a stupid idea that won't work and I said, yeah, you're probably right. So after she went to bed, I built a website and here we are nine and a half years later. We're, yeah, it's gone from a do-it-yourself sandal kit to a wall full of shoes and sandals that people use for everything from taking a walk to running ultra marathons and speaking of the wall full of shoes and sandals, wait till you see the new stuff that's coming out for 2020. And for those of you watching or listening, Mark will have access to this before you do because he's going to be at certain trade shows.
But dude, this stuff is super, super amazing. But again, enough about me. So I introduced you as a doctor. What kind of doctor are you?
Tell the humans. So my day job is taking care of hospital patients in a small rural community hospital where 24-bed it's got a critical access hospital serving a rural community. Then I also do a lot of work with type 2 diabetes. And the same way you and I are trying to fix people's feet when get rid of the injuries.
I try to fix what they eat. Diabetes isn't really drugable, but it's foodable. So we try to treat them with food. This is type 2 adult type diabetes.
All one is different. So we have a whole cohort of people here getting rid of sugar, which should be pretty obvious, losing weight and coming off of medication. So it's a little disruptive. Talk about disrupt away.
I'm going to hit you with this question then that came out of nowhere. So what do you know about it? What do you think about the rice diet? I'm not sure what the rice diet is.
Are we talking just rice as in rice product? You've got to look this up. So the rice diet was, and there's a woman who Lane and I adore named Denise M-I-N-G-E-R. She wrote a book called Deathly from Pyramid.
Denise was the bell of the ball in the paleo and low carb community because she was a die-hard raw food vegan in her teens and then was having a bunch of problems in the chain. And then of course was eating nothing but meat and everyone loved her. And Denise is a smart science researcher. So she decided to look into counterfactuals, opposite stories of what people were telling to see if there was any validity to them.
And one of the things she looked into was the rice diet. The rice diet was something that was administered by a number of the guys named Duke University, which is where I went. And he, I'll cut to the end of the story, he was kicked out of this and they stopped really doing the rice diet because this particular diet that I'm about to describe is so difficult to stay on that he was literally like whipping people to keep them on the diet. Now, while I was a dude...
That's not like a good idea for my patients. No, but wait, but we'll get to the interesting part in a second. While I was there, one of the people who was there to do the rice diet was Buddy Hackett, the comedian Buddy Hackett. And he, one day his big Cadillac drove over my foot as I was trying to cross a...
I was going through a crosswalk and he ran the stop sign around over my foot. There were dominoes pizza guys who were making $1,000 a night by surreptitiously delivering pizzas to people on the rice diet. But that's not the important part is the rice diet. And I might be getting this a little wrong, but the gist is correct.
All you eat is white sugar, fruit juice, and white rice. It sounds that way, but it was the exact opposite. It cured people, literally cured people, like morbidly obese type 2 diabetics, cured them of diabetes, dropped them down into reasonable BMI. People who went from 400 pounds to 150 pounds, kept it off, had no problems afterwards.
And the fundamental idea is that it was basically forcing your pancreas to go, oh jeez, and start working correctly. But it's not definitely not for everyone, really hard to be on. But her point, the point that she makes in actually a blog post that she did on her login, I don't really know about your look up Denise to find it, is that she has this theory that what works for human beings when it comes to diet, especially when you need a big intervention for health reasons, is either going extremely low fat or extremely high fat. And the in-between thing is where we have problems.
And I know that you're a low carb, high fat dude. I would actually agree with Denise. And I think it would make sense. So basically, if you did anything to someone who's eating the Western diet, which is two thirds of it is processed oils, vegetable oils, added sugar, and refined flour, anything you did to detox you for 30 days, 60 days, you could not eat, you could eat meat, you could be a vegan, whatever you did just to get you out of that mess.
But then ultimately, you got to eat food again. Absolutely. Absolutely. This is an interesting thing.
This is the interesting thing about the rice diet is that they maintain these results, even if once they transition back to regular food. And I can tell you something from my experience, just for the fun of it. And again, if they had broken their food addiction, like when they transition back to real food, probably. I'll tell you something fun.
As a sprinter, I don't know any sprinters who are on low carb diets or any power athletes. I think they should be. Right. I've never heard of one, never met one.
The only time I went super low carb, I called the guy who was monitoring me while I did it after a couple of weeks. And I said, Hey, dude, I just did something in a workout that I've never done before. He goes, what's that? I said, bailed.
I couldn't get off the floor. Oh, yeah. You just have a very difficult time doing a quick, quick workout. Exactly.
But about a year and a half ago, I deliberately went on a very high carb, very low fat diet, just because it's closer to what I've been eating my whole life anyway. And I was curious. And it had a really surprising side effect. I completely lost my desire slash cravings for sugar.
So I used to yesterday was my birthday. They brought me all these cakes. I've had like slivers because that's just too much, which is really interesting. And I'm not on that diet any longer, but that was a year and a half ago.
And it just something changed in my system from doing that as fascinating. But that's not why we're here. Although that was fun. Yeah.
So the bottom line for those listening, absolutely, you got a junk food and the rest of it all sorts itself out. But you're someone who's on the more lean insulin sensitive side. So you're a well person. When you take people who I see are on the sixth spectrum, they're a little bit different than you metabolize the sugar, Stephen.
So they have to experiment a little different. They're already so far down the road of sickness. They're resets a little bit tougher. But that's for another day.
They're stuck at all kinds of more of the running stuff. To that point, so your day job is playing doctor, but you were also, you have another day job as well, which involves the location that you're in right now. So would you tell the humans about that? Yeah.
So this is part of my job too. So I do a lot of sports med, running rehab, gate analysis, trying to get people to solve their plantar fasciosis, or resolve their running injuries. And we have a store here called Two River Strads. We're at Year Nine now, which is cool.
So we were the first store, I think, there's none other popped up on the radar. So we were the first store that really opened as a true natural footwear store, meaning when we opened was when you started your business and we started chatting because we had no shoes with elevated heels, narrow toe box, structured shoes, all the shoes that we opened with worked functionally with a human foot. So some were more minimal than others. So when we opened, I think people barefoot was around.
Vibram was just starting to get on the rage. Newton running was around. Salkany made a shoe called the Kinvara, New Balance made a shoe called the Minimus. And that was it.
That was the wild. And then lens came along. They used to be called STEM. So that was like the first lifestyle shoe.
And then when the sandals started coming along, I'm Luna and you guys zero shoes. So yeah, now it's all the walls full of multiple brands and with brands like your spectrum, you got the boots and the lifestyle shoes and the sandals, but all built on the same friends. One of the things that I've noticed, and I'm curious what your take is from the retail side. When you talk about the Kinvara, which is gone, when you look at the Minimus, which has changed from what used to be a good minimal issue to not what's been your, what have you seen from the retail side about how brands are dealing with the whole idea of true minimalism and how the general public is.
Yeah, so I think everything pendulums shift from one direction to another, then they end up back in the middle where they should be. So when we opened our store, not everyone was convinced the world should be super minimal. And I wasn't either. A lot of people do need some protection, but everyone needs to strengthen their foot.
So the Kinvara had cushion, Newton had cushion, some folks were dabbling in Viva, but they were barefoots, which had a shoe called an EVO, which had no cushion, Minimus had a little cushion. We'd see where people are and what their goals were. We never put people coming out of a bulky ASX tiger into a five finger that would be silly to do that. And I think that's where people had trouble.
I'm going to pause there because this is a conversation I've had with Irene Davis as well. And Irene actually will put someone into a shoe like ours right away, except that she'll be done a bunch of strengthening a bunch of other things first. Correctly. Yeah, that's it in my argument again.
In fact, I did an episode about this. The whole idea of transition shoes is just complete nonsense. It was made up by companies who were going to go to a true minimal shoe. And they wanted something to sell.
They wanted to capitalize on this idea. So they made up this concept of transition shoes. And from my experience, just now, with hundreds of thousands of people, if you do, you can make that switch directly, but you just need to build up slowly. And I don't want to say intelligently, you just need to be paying attention rather than just, I'm going to put on a new shoe and away we go.
In fact, this is kind of begging the question that I asked you is that one of the things that I noticed is that some of the bigger brands, including Vibram, they positioned the whole idea of natural movement as just put on this new shoe, you'll be fine. Yeah, you need training, exactly. So what you're saying, there's actually really important. So the people that I would do exactly what you said.
So the people that were broken ran horribly, shin splints, dress fractures, I would get them to try to run completely barefoot on the street. Not a lot, 50 meters. That's the only way to really retrain the gate. But then say you had someone who came in who was an efficient runner already wasn't hurt, was in a big bulky shoe and preferred a little cushion.
Sure, they just pick what's comfortable. But if someone really had injury issues and wanted to fix those injury issues, yeah, you can't just put a transition shoe on and hope it all goes away. Yeah, they really need to. That's how I discovered it too.
You've seen me running on barefoot on the streets and it teaches you something every time you go out because your feet give you messages. So and then you see what does the person want to do? Not many people are truly willing to just they're all type of age. They're like, okay, I want you to I know you've had eight stress fractures in the last year.
I want you to run 15 minute miles barefoot. Yeah. It makes them crazy. Then they do it.
Oh my god, this works. That's funny. The story that I used to tell I haven't told it in a long time. It's been so long that I'm blanking on the name of the woman.
There's a couple here in Boulder and they're both Olympic distance runners. And when she had I think two kids, maybe three kids. And then after having kids like went back and became Olympian again. And when she was pregnant, she was some people like keep working out when they're pregnant.
She just couldn't. She would just take the whole time off. And after she would have the baby, she would get back into training again. And the first month was just walking.
And then the second month was walking interspersed with really slow long distance. Very long and would take nine to 10 months just to get back up to speed again. If this is what an Olympian does to get back up to speed, why do you think you can do it way better, faster, different? And people just think that they can make these massive changes instantly and granted, there are a couple people who do and they just ruin it for the rest of us.
But but it is amazing that people are the lack of patience is fascinating. I've been doing it wrong for my whole life, but I should be able to figure this out instantly. Yeah, we really try to teach patients similar to folks who need to lose weight, they need patients and do it correctly. But that's my care of Goucher.
If you're out there with Adam Goucher, because she lives in North Carolina, it wasn't care. It was all Olympians live up there. When I go to the track, pregnancy, all the fascia is just that easy slow jockeying versus walking, you're training that spring again, but adding very low stress so that adaptation. But then when they finally decide to dial it up, the fascia is ready to go and they won't get hurt.
So that probably does take a year, I would guess after after delivering a baby to get everything back to normal, normal tension like for fascia, because it's all detentioned. The interesting research experiment, like when is the fascia back to the point that it could take the stress that it did prior to pregnancy in the same way? That is known. And I wonder if it could be accelerated with something like prolotherapy or anything where you're just a healthy diet, eat your own broth, stuff for your collagen.
I don't know. Interesting. One of the questions in this in the same vein, what was your experience and also what's your take when we try this in a different way? One of the things that really put a crimp in the whole idea of natural movement was of course, when there was a class action lawsuit filed against Vibram because they made an unfounded medical claim saying these things were making your feet stronger, which there wasn't some explicit study that showed that, but there was enough dots you can connect where obviously if you're going to use your feet, they can get stronger, they get weaker.
And actually our study is now showing that. I know there actually was then too. There was a study that came out years before Vibram on the Nike free, which was about as minimalist as a pair of stills, but regardless, it was more flexible than previous shoes. And the study showed that by wearing that shoe, you built intrinsic foot muscle strength compared to a regular shoe.
And I think that's probably why it was it was an advertising error, not an unfortunately, they didn't lose. They just settled. They didn't lose it. No, they didn't lose.
They didn't lose. But the media took that in a way that was completely opposite. And it was like a minuscule amount. I forgot.
It was $3.75 million after about a year and a half. And so it was absurd. And my theory, and I talked about this in a previous episode. I'm not going to my lawsuit for major companies.
And he's well, yeah, the toning shoe, the claim that if you wear these toning shoes, it's going to make your butt look better. I think that case settled. It's really great. Yeah, it was settled for $120 million.
So whole different game. But regardless, I'm curious, obviously now I know what your take is on the case itself. But what did you see again, since you have a retail facing presence, what did you see as a result of that? And how did you how have you dealt with that?
Because people still bring it up. Yeah, it didn't really affect our business. Steven, because we just as we were chatting, we just basically tried to teach people how to run. And I could explain to people that I'm out here in West Virginia.
So people aren't following the Google search minimalist blogs. They just come in and want to get in a shoe. And they don't come in. What's nice about being here is I don't think I've ever had some because we're not like in suburbia running culture where no one's coming in.
I've always worn a six or I've always worn this. They just try on shoes. They don't have they're not so brand wedded. Yeah.
And maybe I don't know someone said this, trust me, I'm a doctor or something. I've seen that on people's shirts. And for some reason, our staff here, they're very well trained, highly educated staff. And so they we take time with people.
We listen to them. We look at their feet. We show them where their problems are. They try shoes on and they don't like it.
They can bring it back in 30 days. So I think that's how it worked. It didn't really affect us at all. But I think what we were doing is was right.
And it's no different now than it was nine years ago, because this is all just the basics. It's interesting. The last year, we're on the gate, slow down, train starts. Oh my god, I try to get runners to take one day off and do some strength training.
And they act like I'm telling them I want to sell one of their children. Yeah, I do my strength training. We have kettlebells here in the store. Yeah, learn all that.
Have you seen did you? I made a video. I'm gonna have to point you to it. My favorite new exercise device.
We have one here in the office. It's called the K box. It's an eccentric flywheel device. Have you seen one of these?
Oh, super cool. We'll be very cool in the store. We'll talk about that after you got the show. Yeah, it's super cool in the store because it's we'll get into that.
That's a whole thing. It fits in your backpack. It's not quite, but it fits in the back seat of your car and gives you all the resistance you could possibly need for all the exercises you want. Oh man, I'm in.
Yeah, they're super cool. We'll talk on to other things. So one of the other things that I know you do rather than just asking about this. And this is the teaser that I did at the beginning of the episode.
You have done a bunch of work with because oh, so let's back up. Not only are you a doctor, but you have military credentials. Yeah, just retired after 29 years. Congratulations.
Air Force Doc. And I know that because your email has that built into it. One of the things that I know that has been a big concern slash mission of yours is to get people who are in the military, for whom running is a big deal to do that safely more effectively, more efficiently with fewer injuries. Can you chat about that?
Yeah, actually, I just wrote a book that came out last year called Run for Your Life. And that would explain the whole story. But yeah, it's injuries in the military, whether it's Air Force Army Navy, Marines, the Muscular Skeletal injuries are huge, costing the taxpayers, you are listening billions and billions of dollars of direct cost of the care and lost duty days, early retirements, disability payments. And it's all self-inflicted, meaning if you go to combat and you get injured, that's the cost of doing business.
But if we're supervising you, doing physical training, we call it PT, physical training, that most of these injuries are happening under supervision of cadre leaders, fitness trainers. So it's broken. And I went on a six month assignment. They assigned me, you know, let my job for six months to dive into the fitness test, the failure rates, the injuries.
And you know, I came into that with some hypotheses and I learned a lot of new things because I wanted to just throw everything away that I thought was true and look at people that traveled 50 bases. But I described it in the book, but it's all the basics of what we teach here, slowing down aerobic development, proper form, we're still working on the shoes and we're getting really close. I have a good colleague on the basic training. So now we're looking at getting a neutral shoe with a little drop and a little bit of cushion and lightweight.
So we are close, because the military still gives these 18 year old enlistees this big 15 ounce bulky trainer that's posted and you would hate it. I couldn't run a step in the damn thing. We wonder why they hate to run. So this is the thing that I was teasing at the beginning.
I mean, you would think that given the literal and figurative cost of all of these injuries that the military would be highly motivated to make a change for something that works. Now, I'm going to throw out a quick thing. I know that Irene Davis, who's a mutual friend of ours, who's a doctor at Harvard, Irene was trying to get funding for a study through the military about to see if switching to middle is where we were be helpful and they wouldn't give her a grant money. It's like, why wouldn't you want to spend a couple of dollars to find out something that could be better for people and they didn't do it?
So again, you would think that they would be highly motivated to find better solutions, but that doesn't seem to be the case. You would think this is how it is really, I think in any institution, whether it's in health care, large hospital systems, the DOD, the US military is changing institutions is very difficult. What does it take for an institution to change? I think that's the unanswered question.
So if you take million army troops that do this way and this is the way it's always done, for that kind of big it's like turning a school of fish. It's so low change. So you and I are like, why didn't this happen yesterday? It's crazy.
Look at the data, all these people are getting hurt, but you're talking about changing an entire culture. Yeah, so. Yeah, I like that. But it's cool because now like that we have made change in basic training.
We just the footwear is the last abdominal to fall so they slow down dynamic warm up. We teach running form like all the stuff that you and I are teaching outside of we don't have the right shoe there yet. But man, it's going to be the holy grail. We get this shoe and then we start to look at data and okay, what are we doing?
Is this helping? Because you got to get data too, but yeah, people are listening. It's just not as fast as you would think that's why it's working at a small hospital's nice because we got sugar doing side of my hospital. It's a 24-bit hospital, but if I walked into a 3,000-bed hospital and wanted to do that, they'd throw me under the bus.
I'd be like taking away their human rights or something. It's all wisdom of the crowds and the people that change. It's interesting. One of the things that I found and I'm curious if you've had the same experience is the one place where I've had no resistance.
And what I mean is that I just keep hearing from this particular group of people over and over about how they made a switch and then was footwear and even our original do-yourself sandal kit, special forces, and those guys are like, they can do whatever they want. They recognize it. And I'm amazed that it hasn't just filtered down from them given their experience. A little bit, but you have to look at those folks and I've worked with them with running clinics.
So they're elite athletes, perfect form, perfect strength, perfect biomechanics. They could deadlift you and I and your wife. I could deadlift you and I and my wife. I can't, but they would think of the Jeff Vernon.
Okay, so that's a whole different story. For people who don't know, Jeff version is a friend of ours from Trueform running, they made this awesome curve non- you can find that one and post it. Because they're in and out of water. So that shoe, the original KSO was like the rockstar shoe for those guys.
Because all they do is they ask the person who has survived X-number missions, hey dude, how do you do that? Why are you wearing those five finger things? He explains it, simply make my feet feel good. I can run through water and knock a shot.
But look at, there was an article yesterday in the military times about the military now looking at low carb diets. So which group of the military do you think have been on low carb paleo type of diets since before the word paleo even existed? Special forces guys because they that's how they work. So they just ask the cadre, the guy who's the senior instructor now, who's been on X-number missions.
It was fun talking to those guys like seven or eight years ago on this topic because you just what do you guys eat when they drop you out of a plane and you've got to go market target and come back on maybe that's two weeks later when they carried like knots and jerky and things like that. They didn't understand that that's a low carb keto. Yeah, they just knew the most calories in the smallest amount of space. Yeah, and they didn't understand that ketones gave you mental clarity.
They just knew that they worked for them and they weren't hungry or hangry when they have to have this immense attention and clarity. But yeah, it works for them. But now they're looking, Jeff, look at studying that. But that's not a study, they're just individual.
But everything is learned from human experience and science launches up. It's just physiology. But again, they're different animals. I took an 18 year old new recruit.
How do you think those guys move? Do they move like a seal or do they move like your average high school kid who's worn big bookies shoes? They run horribly. So those folks need to be trained.
So for them, that's when it's hard to train a thousand people at a time in running form. So what about the 12 true form runners now at Air Force Basic Training, which is really cool. Like some traditional run on the true form. So when you're working with them or when you're working with people in your store, and I'm going to ask you to modify this slightly for people who are watching slash listening, what do you teach people or how do you teach them to make the gate adjustments that are basically back to what's natural?
What people have actually done is gone from natural to something unnatural and now they're unlearning relearning. So what's the process that you do for that? Actually, pretty damn easy. I'm not to be an advertisement here for true form.
I'm not funded by them in any way. We give people some cues. We teach them posture. We teach them arm position.
We teach them rhythm just the basics. So talk about what when you say teach the posture and teach the arm position, say more about what that is specific. Yeah, so running. So think of it if you're really tall.
Like when there's really long foam rollers like there's 36 inch foam rollers. If you throw it down to the ground, it's going to ping bounce back up nicely. If it's all bent and crumpy, throw it down to the ground that just doesn't come back or a super ball. How good posture is going to be the body's in alignment starting at the feet jumping rope.
So think of it. If you're to jump rope as effortlessly as possible, but you don't want to burn calories jumping rope. Just imagine you had to jump rope for two hours. What's the most efficient position and you'll find it.
But it's just tall and a lot of people aren't in that back seat because they've been wearing heels. So they're in that kind of shoulder back position. So we teach them to compensate a little bit forward, which feels weird, but they have to feel that. So teaching the basics of posture, rhythm is just the spring.
So we get them jumping rope. Now if their feet are all jacked up and the toes are caved in and the arches are collapsed and they try to hit the ground like here. They're like that. Okay, let's get your foot in a better position.
That's wide natural toes, short foot posture. Now spring. Okay, now it has that feel. So that's the rhythm.
Arm position is pretty easy. We even use this little sling. It's like a little yolk that attaches your thumb almost right to your chest. So as soon as your arm flies too far in front, I'm sprinting it probably you need to because you're generating power.
Actually, no, if you look at your hands tight, sprinting like tight. Look at spinners. The final hand position is called a cheek and it's literally. Okay.
So it's very similar. You're actually it's a little different because with distance running, it's similar in where your elbows are. Yeah, because of the amount of force that you're generating, we're sprinting your elbows don't your elbows coming too far forward, but your hands are basically coming up here more rather than always. Yeah, we're just trying to teach people to, to snagrin, David puts a great land soft and land stable.
So you want to soften the landing, but you have to be stable. So we get them to get that body position, but then we put them on the true form runner and for those we could link to it. But it's a little slightly curved treadmill. It doesn't have a motor.
So you have to make it go. So if you overstrive, I think about like you got a little curved treadmill for Flintstone. So you have to make it work. If you're super tight in the hips or you're over striding, you know, just comes to a stop, you can't make it work.
So then we just like maybe you're going to a driving range, you can't watch a video and go hit the ball, you got to go like slow and practice and get, you got to feel it yourself. So we start people super slow, make a few adjustments, and they usually, whoa, like they'll find it. You get out of the way, don't overcoach them. Give them a few cues, get them to try to fire their glutes open their hips so if they can't make it move, use like a little sled drill, we touch a bunch of their waist and get them to sprinting, right drive away.
So that, okay, you feel that using the glutes or if they're super tight in the hips, we'll have to do some mountain climbers, now get back on the true form. They're trying to feel a little tweaks. So I'm going to pause there and just highlight something. So what you're just talking about with mountain climbers and the sprinting drill for people who are listening, or watching, or back to the whole idea of firing your glutes, it's an amazing thing.
The biggest, one of the biggest muscles in your body is your glutes and then your hamstrings, your lacer also there too. But ignore those for a moment. These are things called prime movers. They are the things designed to make you move.
And from, for many reasons, it's the one set of muscles that people don't seem to use when they try to run or walk even. And so just, and it's not that you can't, it's just that you've turned it off enough and you need to feel that again, to have that sense of, oh, that's what it means to use these things. And so these, both of these drills, the only way you can move forward, if you're having some resistance, you have to lean forward, you have to push out of the back. Because if you put your foot too far in front of your body, you can't pull hard enough.
These are important. I'm tired. We even have a little tire with a, like a little strap, like a wedding strap. And let's put it out on the curb and get to me.
No, no, no. You just maybe think of something last time you and I saw each other at the running event, this trade show for running shoe stores, there was a guy opposite me who had a tire to drag. But he had some, yeah, this elastic thing that made it so it didn't bounce too much. And I watched all these distance runners do like a barely pull a thing.
And so then I had him give me the heaviest tire that he had. And I'm a sprinter. And it's like, whoo. And just like, you could sit in the tire and you would still pull it.
But it was, but again, it was just because for sprinting, you have to use your glutes and your handstrings. There's no other way, but there's a lot of people who are distance runners, who are, they would call themselves accomplished runners. They found a way to move. Yeah, they compensated.
They've totally compensated. They're not. They know that gear, these people have another gear. They could get so much better.
Yeah, I agree. They wanted to. I mean, it's people come into the running store just wanting to get healthy, get off medications. They're not really, they could care less about using their glutes and their 5k time.
But then another group actually wants to get well and beat and win. So you, I just want everyone not to get hurt and learn how to, and when people run correctly, it's more fun. It's, wow, this is fun. In terms of not getting hurt as well, it's another reason to actually learn to use your glutes.
It's going to support your lower back. And so people having back injuries, actually using your body correctly can help with that as well. These things work if you let them work. They work.
What a shock. Yeah, so people should just check out. I think the true form runner now has a model that's a little less expensive. It's the same kind of quality, but it's a little more light that you could have for the home.
Yeah, I think people purchase them for home through. I was actually talking to Jeff about that just the other day. In fact, I'm trying to get him to give anyone. But yeah, it's a great device.
And it is one of those things you get on it. And if you're not putting your body and your feet in the right place, it just, it clearly feels wrong. And then there's when you get things aligned, it just, it suddenly gets easier. It just feels more fun.
And go outside. I think, gosh, if everyone had something like that, he was having issues, run for three to five minutes on the true form, just like you're going to a driving range, get the seven iron blade and just get your swing dial in, then pull out the big birth. So like, just warm up on it, get the rhythm. And then most people, I prefer being outside.
Then go outside. But it's a good thing to do that with too. There's a guy that we talked to a friend of mine here in town named David Clark, who's a crazy amazing ultra runner. And he did a 48 hour run on a treadmill.
And it was just on a regular treadmill. I can't remember. I think we talked about true forms. I know he's using the lusim, but I wonder what it would have been like if you'd done that.
It's a little more work on the track. But that's part of it. I actually get a lot of work without a lot of load. So like, say you really wanted to do some strength running without loading.
And there's a guy in South Carolina actually got some data on it. So the faster you go with that, yeah, you use a lot of metabolic equivalents, but the load on your joints compared to going to the track and running 200 meter repeats far less. It's also, like you said, since you're the one moving the treadmill, even with perfect form, it's not just gravity making a move. You're having to use your glutes and your hamstrings.
And the first time I was on one of those, I got off and banned my whole poster chain from my calves through my hamstrings through my butt. It was just on fire. Yeah. He doesn't send me one free treadmill after this contest.
May I send you a little demo there for your studio or something? Well, we're doing a little renovation. So we're going to have some rooms and we can get people on things like that we're really excited about that. Anything else about it?
It's huge. He's already got five pairs of my shoes. So that's the easy part. Has anything in their socks and crazy, big like that?
He's going, we'll think of something. Anything else that you can think of in terms of just the tips and tricks for getting started with really starting to understand, experience natural movement? Yeah. So the other thing, if you're not afraid to do it, I don't think anyone should be.
So we've got this beautiful, smooth sidewalk right in front of the store. They just did a whole streetscape thing as far as we moved our store here from our past location. And like today, it's a beautiful day. Take your shoes completely off.
And we do a lot of little run clinics and just go run softly down the sidewalk and your bare feet. And people start smiling. Wow, this is just chosen. They can land painlessly in their bare feet, but they go like super slow.
Yeah. So two lessons, you know, for one, it's okay to do this just down to the curb and back. Super soft. You hit my favorite thing.
I often say, you can spot a bare foot runner from a mile away because they're smiling. Yeah. Yeah. If they have a grimace on their, if someone has a stress fracture, wouldn't make them do it.
But most people who are just learning how to run again, a little planar fasciosis, they can do that. I want to come back to planar fasciosis in a second. But before I do that, the whole idea of running and landing softly, Irene and I talked about this. I've seen people do something that I never imagined they would do.
They have, they've read or heard somewhere that you're supposed to land on your forefoot. So the thing that they figure out about how to land softly while landing on their forefoot is still reaching their foot way out in front of their body and pointing their toes and like gently getting their foot down, but then pulling the ground underneath them. I'm assuming you see the same thing. I'm curious what you do.
People just will learn they just need to practice the body will teach them. So certainly if you had even a minimal shoe on, you could stab into the ground really hard while moving forward and create a lot of friction and friction's bad. But if you had a shoe on, like everyone who has wear patterns on their shoes are creating friction. But if you take your shoe off and say you're, imagine we're going like 10 minutes a mile or something and you're going forward at 10 minutes a mile and you stab your foot into the ground going forward.
You're going to leave some skin on the pavement. But gently just let that foot land softly and just get a little bit of push back. You're bringing it back at the speed you're going forward. But you can't overthink this.
You have to feel it. Your body will naturally just let your foot do the right thing. But you can't, you just have to go do it. But start like really slow.
Yeah, really, really slow. I say 20 seconds, 30 seconds tops. And they feel it and let the heel come down. Don't prance.
Just let the heel come down. Whether you touch gently and roll from the heel or touch gently on the forefoot. And then your heel touches, I don't think there's any one place. The best runners have the most variability when they film them through races.
So they're, I'm going to argue that one because there is variability but there's two factors that. One is that a lot of these runners are training in a higher heel pad at shoe and then racing and racing flats. They've already developed a certain movement pattern. And the other thing is just when you look at video analysis, it's very deceptive because watching where someone lands on video is very different than what happens on a force plate where you see where they're actually applying force.
They're loading out. I've read stuff you've read stuff and it's probably, it depends. It's the only answer. But if you watch the Elite Pack at the Boston Marathon, for example, so like at mile seven, Thomas shot at some amazing video.
Yeah, they're touching and they're touching pretty on their heel and they're rolling forward because at mile seven, they're just trying to cruise along and try to conserve energy and they're just going to probably mix it up. When I can't do the same marathon races going down a hill, you modify a little bit and that's for all. Yeah, totally everything. Yeah.
And so it's hard to know when you see that film is a completely flat flat, but what is about a mile ago or half mile ago, those who are still in the money, the rest of them are done. Those are the money. Then they get on the ball of their foot, just like the last lap of the track. So not all of them, but most of them would when you see it.
That's like the last lap of a 10,000 meter race because then they're like all in at that point. And they could hear less that they trashed their fascia because they're applying so much power because it's half mile from the finish. You just raised another point that I've also commented on, which is people love to use elite athletes as the example for hey, here's what you should do. But these are often people who are just trying to find the best way to make a living frankly, to win a race.
And they don't have a lot of concern for will I be able to do this when I'm 40 or 50 or 60. And the other thing is, and someone said, someone said, someone said, particular marathoner does the following and I say, I don't want to be the one to break the news to you, but you're not 105 pound Kenyan. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we're talking about the elites for the average runner.
I don't have them focused that much on what part of their foot hits the ground. That's why I like the true form. I just want them to develop a movement pattern that's correct, that's soft. You can't pound into the motorless treadmill.
It stops. Most people prefer a little bit of question because that's like they're making a couple of changes coming out of use. Actually, I'm making growling noises, but it's not but just for fun. I want to put this.
There's cushioning in your cushioning. Let's say that way. And there's also what feels good when you're just standing there versus what feels good when you're running or what affects you running and what doesn't affect your running. And these things are all very different.
And there's been a lot of confusion, I would argue about what's good. When I watch people go into a store and they put something on their feet and go, I like all the cushion, it feels really good. Yeah, you have to run. Yeah, so Hintu Soft is a bad thing.
When we teach, a type of paedic mattress feels great and it would be push-ups on it. Same thing about running. We actually have people stand on an Eric's pad, which is super soft. And they're like, oh, this feels good.
But how would that feel at mid stance? Yeah, it doesn't work. Eric's pad for those listening is like a PT pad. When you're doing an inquiry, have this like a soft phone.
Yeah. Yeah. It teaches you to train your body to deal with instability, which is not what you want when you run. You want to land on stable surfaces.
Yeah, the whole instability training thing is another one that makes me crazy. Hey, you're training to be unstable. So no, actually you can get stronger if you train stable because they run on some trail and that'll teach you. Yeah.
But this may be maybe just good for business, Stephen. But to be honest, but most people don't want to buy two pair of shoes. I don't know why they go by a racing bike or training bike. They all buy all this other crap shoes are inexpensive and like yours last 5,000 miles.
But I think if everyone got like a true minimal sandal issue and something that they may take on the trail and mix it up and then go out as a recovery day, go out and it's not on a big, sharpie trail, go out and run and sandals run barefoot super slow. And then the next day you want to load it up a little bit and you just want to, you want to pound the ground a little bit, put on something a little bit of cushion, whatever your practice is. This is something Irene says as well. It helps.
Irene says look, if you're going to be an overstrawing heel striking runner, get some cushioning under your heel. I don't recommend it. You stay that way, but if that's what you're going to do, then do it. Yeah.
You know, in Golden Harbor, I like how he explains it. But you've got three feet of spring, which is pretty much your hip down to your arch or an inch of cushion. Right. What do you want to utilize?
Yeah. My version of that, I say. So, which you think is going to be more effective? A piece of foam that starts breaking down immediately upon use that is basically tuned to a particular weight and speed of which you are neater or an almost instantly, infinitely adjusting spring like mechanism that evolved over a very long time to handle pretty much anything to throw at it.
Yeah. And then 4 and 52. And I got on. Was that your, but I'm a distance guy.
So I've got like 120,000 miles on my legs. I'm a sprinter. I've got 120,000 tons of force on my legs. Yeah.
It's probably pretty equal when we had to know because you put nine Gs on your frame. How many steps are 100 meters? Four and elite athlete for Olympian 41 to 43 for me. I think I was somewhere in 48 to the last time I checked.
I'm not sure. And that doesn't seem like five or six steps, but it's everything. You have time, intensity, ply metrics, single bound for 10 steps, one leg bound. Most people were trashing.
So it's completely insane. But I can't think of anything else. So back up to your comment about planar fasciosis, which most people think of as planar fasciitis. So we do do need two favors and talk about why you say osis and not it is.
And also what from a natural movement perspective is the way that you talk to people who come in presenting those symptoms with for whatever they're going to do to deal with that. Yeah. So it is just going into medical terminology means a true inflammatory condition. And most of those things are going to either be infectious or autoimmune.
For example, something like rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune attack. You've got hot red swollen joints. There's actually active damage going on. So an osis is more a degenerative, hit and repair type of process.
So most back disease is degenerative. So there are occasional things like discitis, which are infections or things like that. But so most planar fasciosis is degeneration, thousands and thousands of steps and micro terrors in the planar fascia. And it hurts the repair process becomes dysfunctional.
But there's no active attack on it by your own body's immune system or infection. So it's an osis doesn't sound sexy, doesn't sound druggable, right? Because the industry wants you to think it's an itis, which means there's, which is druggable by an anti inflammatory. Now the truth about those are they will inhibit the body's repair process.
The body has this innate repair process. Like you say, how many years have we evolved more that shit than I have? zero is if you're looking, we've evolved with a lot, you cannot treat a degenerative injury. You can't treat it to make it repair faster.
You can only support what's going on and reteach it while your body repairs it. So people think you can treat these injuries like you take something you inject something with some magic widget and it's going to heal faster. That's absolutely not true. I said hot tubs.
Nothing will make it heal faster. That's just the way it is. Drugs will make it heal slower. And they have their own list of side effects.
So when I was in college to share stories, so we all were broken. I was running in college and we took all these anti-inflammatories and aspirin's and I was just like my freshman year and I'm wondering like behind you was a white wall and my roommate looked at me one night. He said, you're looking kind of pale. You're okay.
And I said, I don't know. I feel like shit. I'm like, you can't keep up and practice anymore. And I got this stomachache.
I don't know what it is. I just felt like shit, but you know, you're a knucklehead 18 year old college. And he calls his dad who's a pharmacist. He says, yeah, my roommate doesn't look too good.
He looks pale. And his dad says, he's taking any medicine. And he asked me, I'm not taking any medicine, but they give me the stuff at the trainer's room. And asked me what it was.
And it was like some kind of ibuprofen. He said, he better go down to student health. And I went down there. My hema-globin was six, which is a third.
So I'm like running, I'm going to practice with half to a third of my blood volume. But at least I was like, oh, at least I'm not like psycho or something. That was my last, then they did the upper GI, the swallow, the chalk. And I had like hundreds of holes in my stomach and do I know that was a rough year.
I lost all the iron. Yeah, it took a while to get back to just feeling well again. You've lost, because it took a lot of lose all that blood. But I see the hospital pay.
But that's another just don't take ibuprofen. If you're listening and if you're taking ibuprofen for running injury, don't repeat that. If you're taking ibuprofen for running injury, stop right now. It reminds me when I lived in Manhattan from 1993 to 1993 roughly.
And I lived right around the corner from a health food store. And I was in there every day. And there was these two, I now say young guys, they were in their 30s. They were over the night I was who ran this health food store.
And one day I'm checking out. And they had some packet of some supplemental thing sitting on the counter by the register. And I was looking at the ingredients. And more energy, more vitality, more whatever.
And I'm checking it out. And one of them slaps it out of my hand. And the other looks me, because you don't need that. You need a nap.
And it's the same thing for runners. What can I take for this? Time off. I'm off.
It sleeps. It was powerful. You need to rest a little bit. So when people have a fasciosis, and anyway, I did a thing about plantar fasciitis.
And I was like, I'm going to share the ebook out. We did it in a previous podcast. But there's a story that I tell the guy who said, I've had plantar fasciitis for 20 years, but you can't have an information for 20 years. That doesn't work that way.
So what do you say to people or what do you do with people when they come in presenting plantar fasciosis? Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, symptoms. Say that 10 times. That's the victim.