Episode 207: How Should You Walk Barefoot?

All right, when you're walking, should you be landing on your heel? Should you be rolling over your heel? Should be landing flat footed? Should be landing on your forefoot?

Should be landing on your toes? Should be floating in the air and never touching around? I don't know, let's take a look and find out on today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy strong body starting to peak first. This thing's going to be under your legs.

And we're going to break down the prop again in mythology and sometimes the flat out lies. People have been telling you about what it takes to run or water, hike or to yoga or cross it or play in whatever way you like to do that. And they do that enjoy it effectively and efficiently. Can I say enjoy it?

Trick question? It's the most important thing. If you're not having a good time, do something different than you are because you won't keep it up if you don't enjoy it or unless you're a glutton for punishment and where's the fun of that? Unless you're a glutton for punishment and then I guess that's fun.

Anyway, be that as a may. I'm Stephen Sashan, co-s born to run like the rest of us. Read born to run everyone saying read to born to run. I said, ah, born to run it's a bunch of hippie stuff, right?

I don't want to hear that. I read born to run changes my life. And I realize that my injuries because when you're in New York, you have your shoes on all the time. I grew up in a shoes on in the household.

I had the formities in my feet just like everyone else in the Western world. Bunyan, plantar fasciitis. I had a tailor's bunyan in my pinky. I had very severe foot weakness.

And I was jumping from shoe to shoe, a Nike Pegasus. I eventually settled once all the foam ran out on hoka shoes with a big thick cushion. And I said, if only they made a shoe with even more cushion because I ran out of cushion on that and I ended up running the Brooklyn half marathon and heel striking through it. And I got sicker back pain.

I said, how could I have severe back pain? I'm just like, I'm running on clubs. It's like I'm running on zero gravity. And that's why I read born to run.

And then I saw at Harvard University went to I think El Dorette Kenya and started looking at the college kids running and said, they don't run like we do. They have a fascist strength. They have foot strength. They're running on the ball of their foot.

And I said, that's curious. They're running on the ball of their foot. And the other thing is, I'm so what I'm actually good at. I'm 225 pounds.

I'm not a good runner. What I'm actually good at is a hammer throw and Olympic weightlifting. And the hammer deal in the snatch in Olympic weightlifting are the two most technically demanding movements in sport. And that's one in two with a hammer being first snatch being second.

I have a very good knowledge of technique in general, which made me question the fact why I didn't know how to walk or run. So I'm in the 2022 New York City Marathon. I'm getting ready for the photo station. They let you know so you can strike a pose.

You know what pose I struck? A massive raging heel strike. Just like that, I was probably 600 meters from the finish of the marathon. I'm looking at it later after reading Born to Run.

I find out that heel striking is not good for us. And it causes back pain, ankle pain, headaches, everything that I've experienced in my entire life of 22 years in the sport. I used to work for the New York Roadrunners who put on the New York City Marathon. So I'm 22 years in the sport.

It was the first time I had ever heard it. I had spoken to thousands, hundreds of thousands of runners, even elite runners. I'd gone through coaching with Olympians at the Armory in high school. I'd an Olympian coach us.

I'd never once did they tell me I should cure my heel strike. And I reborn to run. I look at this. All of a sudden I say to myself, wow, the running shoes that were being given are causing our injuries.

And I've spent so much money on these. And so I said, okay, and I still haven't come to the conclusion of this experiment. But I said, before I start telling everyone else this, I need to ditch the shoes. And I need to see because if I end up in severe crippling pains the rest of my life, at least it's just me, but I have to do an experiment where I start off in the zero shoes.

I start off in zero shoes, the zero pre-os, but I still wear today. I have a couple of them. And there's the popular ones too. And then there's the ones I experienced.

I run into zero shoes up to my local Costco to get some smoked salmon or something. And I heel strike the way through it. And the next thing I go, oh, my back hurts like absolutely crazy. But there was something different about it this time because now I knew.

Now I knew. I said, whoa, don't heel strike in minimalist shoes. And then I go online, I find run four foot dot com with Greta Richards, Greta Richards, who's a Canadian running porn practitioner who focuses on four foot running. And she has, and I see this woman running without shoes over rugged terrain.

And I see that before that, I thought was impossible to do. I said the human foot was not even designed for this. You look at stress fractures, you get all sorts of things. And I see this woman doing it.

And here's the other thing. She's not wincing her. She's annoying it, which is incredible. And this isn't even the minimalist earth-runner type samples.

This is like straight up unshot, straight up not even first world type thing. This is outside the Western industrialized world kind of no shoes. It was incredible, but it was mostly incredible because she's in Canada. And I'd only seen people ever do this in documentaries in Plains of Africa and all these places where they went all the championships.

And she says that the difference between the four foot running and the heel strike running is that you get to use your Achilles tendon when you run on your four foot, which has 850 pounds of force absorption capacity, much more than the squishy shoes, even the new Nova blasts with all this. And you don't need the stiff-selled running shoes that are actually hurting you. I go for a run the first time in the zero shoes. I'm sorry, the second time.

After I learn no heel strike, I made it to the other side of Central Park. I can't run another step. That was it. It was probably something like 400 meters.

Now I'm stuck on the West Side. And I can't take another step home. So I have to decide whether or not I'm going to go on the horse carriage or the petty cab, both which costs a week salary. But I end up just walking on my heels back home.

You would again make it around the whole loop after probably three, four weeks of this. But each time getting totally stranded at a different part of Manhattan, trying to work my way home. But then I start to see improvement in my feet, but most importantly, improvement in my low back, which I had eight months of chronic back pain from my running, which no one should ever have this sort of back pain from running. It's good for you running something that should help you.

And I eventually saw that my feet were the only things that were getting working, the only things that were improving. The rest of my body actually stopped having the orthopedic pain. Eventually I ran nine miles down to my wife in the zero shoes. Now I'm 225 pounds.

Nine miles to me is equivalent to you, 30, 40 miles. You missed under 30, 40 miles. I'm doing that in a car. Yeah.

Or enter. I don't even take turns at the end of the track. That's two. Because first of all, I don't have a GPS watch.

I don't like getting lost. Yeah. I don't understand distance at all. It's very confusing to me.

So funny about it is you, so everyone says the same things to me and you being, you having lived in New York that in New York City and probably London as well, where I live, there's a modesty culture behind shoes. It's almost, and what do I mean by modesty culture? When you go to some parts of the world and you're not supposed to not cover your head, it's the same in New York City. And I've had people have public freakouts where I'm in the park.

And when I'm in the park running, barefoot, I'm headphones in, put up, stop talking to me everyone. I got to get my workout in. But you obviously want to spread the word. But every time within two or three minutes, you're running, someone's going up to you saying, your phone's out.

I need to ask you questions about what you're doing. And they've never seen it before. I had never seen it before. And I've been on this experiment where now I am a fairly comfortable long distance barefoot runner and I can run on rocks on the bridal path, which is all rocky and sandy.

I can do that for long distances. I run on asphalt. People say, oh, why don't you afraid of the impact of asphalt? And they just don't understand.

The impact is absorbed and recycled by your Achilles tendon when you just get out of the stiff soul shoes and get up into that forefoot position. It's like a bow and arrow and it goes boing like that and it protects your orthopedic system from shock. And they all are so confused about what is healthy for you because when you show them the hokka shoes with the narrow toe box and the two inches of foam, they all say, I want that one because that's going to protect me. But that is why we have 80% of injury to our back and feet.

But in the Western world, when people in the non-industrialized world who grow up barefoot can still use squat toilets into their 90s and can still run long distances into their 90s. So we're losing this battle, Stephen, but we got to keep fighting. But everyone outside, the foam is getting worse, the heels are getting worse, and the solution that people have is now new niche shoe companies with even more foam and they're rolling ankles and all that. Oh, it's even crazier.

There's an event every year called the running event. It's for companies that are selling to running shoe stores and not only have things gone higher, but they're now making what I'm referring to as single-you shoes because that's what they are. They're basically got rid of the outsole, the rubber outsole. They're basically just using the midsole foam and the idea is that you'll wear these for one race and then they'll be useless.

And guess how much they cost? $500, the DS ones. $400 to $500. Yeah.

And the, now the interesting thing is I can make an argument for why they may make you faster. And the argument is simply that they're so light that there's less energy just moving your legs. They're not slowing down your steps per minute, slowing down your cadence. And because they're so high, they're basically allowing your stride length to be slightly longer because of the height.

And if you have your stride frequencies saying the same and your stride length getting slightly longer, that makes you technically faster. And but it's a fake out. It's a fake way of doing it. And but I was blown away by saying even like new startup companies going for even higher, even thicker, even whatever else.

Now that said, I also think that when we're the only game in town in a place like that event, then things are going to turn and they are starting to turn into the number of ways. So while we haven't, I don't know that we're losing the battle, but we're definitely gaining some ground in the battle. Just we haven't taken over the opponents. We haven't made it across their fictional border yet.

Yes. That's the way I can see that. So I went for a run on the bridal path and I ran into a guy who was a financial guy. It was sort of financial genius.

And he stopped me on his way to work and he stopped his commute and said, what are you doing? And I was like, don't you need to be somewhere. So I asked me these questions, but he got me in contact with the BBC who was not even on he's just like, let me call this financial guy at the BBC and get you on television because we need people to see this. And I spoke to the BBC about this with a guy who went to run and still wears super cold cushion ultra-insurance.

So that's the weirdest one because you get people who read it and then they do opposite. You're having read it. I have been in a number of orthopedic offices in my day in the last 14 years and the number of times where they have a number of books in the office is very high and the number of times born to run is one of those books is almost 100% and then everybody walks in wearing their quote normal shoes. And they all talk about how they love the book.

It's like, but you didn't get it. It's because the group dynamic especially in urban centers is crazy. And in terms of the claims, not others the claims. I've seen the $550 single use super shoe.

If you put that on a mid-level athlete because this was to make you faster and the alpha flies for the slow group, unacceptable, carbon plate for the slow group, unacceptable, the roll-off technology, unacceptable. And you know what I do all day? So from my marketing, I don't have any pay that anything. I just go on Facebook.

I Google foot pain from running shoes. I look at everyone who made their comments off of a pain running shoes and then I just say, just repeat points from born to run over and over and eventually you get into their head. But it's one person at a time and then in some ways, I don't recommend ultra shoes because ultra shoes have other problems, which is the cushion makes us stop our feet and cuts off our 200,000 urban things in the bottom of our foot, which are there to guide us and learn how to run. But they're like harm reduction because the people I talk to have Bunyan and they have all of this and then they have the heel and they have technology and then they have clunky and clunky shoes.

And they need something. And when you see these technologies, especially on Christmas time, people get gifted shoes and then they'll go on the forums and say, they don't have experience with these shoes. Should I return them or so I keep them? So they don't have any love for these shoes yet.

But that's where you need to be like, return those shoes, get those back into the thing. I've got a book recommendation for you. First of all, Kootbows knew for engaging the conversation. And you're right.

The biggest thing that impacts people is what they think other people are doing and what those people in their social circle or circles would think if they did something outside of the norm. There's a book called How Minds Change by a guy named Dave McRaney. And if you're going to be dealing one on one of the people, I'll give you the readers' digis version of the book. The first thing you need to do is basically build reporter people by helping them realize that you're more than willing to hear their story and hear what they believe without criticism, without questions like literally letting them tell you more and more about their experience.

By the way, they're like four people who develop variations on this technique. The second part is getting them to, and this is what leads to all the rest of it, is getting them to think about their thinking in a way that they haven't done before. And one of the ways that almost everyone has come up with is you ask them something like, let's say we're talking about art support and they've been talking about how they get art support and they're trying on different products, et cetera, you say on a scale of one to 100, how confident are you that art support is the solution? And if they say anything other than 100, the question is why not 100?

Why isn't it higher? Or what would it take to be a little lower? Or where were you before you even heard of the concept of art support? If you can remember back that far, which pretty much means that you were in the womb.

So once they explain something about why they're not 100% confident, and it may be something as simple as I try a bunch of things and they don't seem to work, then that opens up another conversation where you can start to get them to think about their thinking, how they come to the conclusion, where they get information. The first person who recommended art support, tell me about that and what made you decide to believe that person versus something else. And anyway, it's very interesting. And then you ask them again at certain points, where is your confidence level?

And sometimes with some of these conversations, you can get people from one side of the fence, I'm 99.9%, to I'm 0.1%. And sometimes all you're doing is getting people to be a little curious. Yes. That's a little curious.

That's not 100%, but it's often good enough because that wasn't there before. And then maybe they're going to look at something. Anyway, now the trick for me is that I can't do, I don't have the time to do just one-on-one all day, every day, 24, seven. And so I'm actually talking to the people who develop these various techniques.

And by the way, they have all given up on the idea of trying to change some ones. Actually, one out of the four is undeniably there to get people from one side of the fence and the other. The other three, they are there to just have the conversation wherever it goes. And they've dropped all intention of having someone change their mind, either in real time or at all, which is admirable.

I'm trying to change people's minds. I'm literally talking to the four people in the book. I've already talked to one and the guy who wrote the book to have a conversation about this. But anyway, be that as it may.

So that's my kudos to you for doing that. I think you might find the book interesting because it might make some of those conversations more interesting, which brings me to a question I wanted to ask. When you are, oh, two things. It's not just major metropolitan areas where if you are in bare feet, people are going, what the hell's going on here?

Here I am in the middle of Colorado. I spend a lot of time in bare feet and I get it all the time. It's a weird thing that when I'm either in bare feet or what I'm wearing now, which is shoes, two different colors of the same style, you do anything unusual with your footwear and people notice it from 50 yards away and they've got opinions. My favorite barefoot one, and I'm going to come back to you for a minute, is when it's in the summer and I'm going to Costco, into Costco and I do go into Costco and into our grocery store and into our favorite restaurants.

They all know me right now. In fact, Costco, I'm sure I've felt the story. I was in the line of the pharmacy in the guy behind me and he says, hey, your shoes don't match. I'm looking up and says, he's wearing shoes today.

So they know who I am, but I'm walking in once at a little kid, five years old, says, mommy, that means not wearing shoes. And the mom to her credit said, why don't you ask him about that? And he's not going to be wearing shoes. I said, have you ever been to the beach?

He says, yeah, I said, do you wear shoes on the beach? He goes, no, I said, how's that feel? He goes, oh, it's really fun. I go, same thing even when you're not at the beach.

He says, oh, and mom was like, okay, got to go. Yeah. There's ways of engaging in the way. There's things.

So I am curious when you are out and about what is either the most entertaining or craziest thing anyone's ever said to you? I had a woman who was wearing probably three inch heels, which were not anatomical, run, which was very impressive. That's the first thing. It was a very impressive run over to me and meltdown in front of me saying bare feet.

There's glass out there, be very careful. And then she started to hyperventilate. And then she ran away from me. It was insane.

It was totally nuts. I have people. So when I'm in New York and I'm on the bridal path walking with my wife, so just doing some bare foot walking and keep in mind, I don't really do this as a cultural thing. I don't really do this as a spiritualistic thing.

I do this as a sports performance and medical rehabilitation thing. So I don't really, if I could snap my fingers and then cover my feet up with invisible blanket, I would just be like everyone else, but I can't do that because I'm not going to put my health at risk by doing that. But everyone within a 400 meter radius is looking at me. Nobody's looking away.

I'm in Central Park. They're worried about me. They're disgusted by me. They think I'm a totally different person.

No, no, no, no. When I'm in a pause, they're worried about you. This is an antithetical to what people think about New Yorkers. Granite, they're misguided, but they're concerned for you.

They worry, New Yorkers are so compassionate. They just need to be a little off base. They're a little off base. And the history is interesting too, because when people from England came to the American south, they came from the north of England.

And this was less rich at the time. I think it was a little bit less rich than the south of England where all the Queen is and all the 20 people are. And then they came to New York, by the way, the Queen is not there any longer. Of course, I know this Queen was Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth, so she's not there either anymore, less in peace, while due respect to the Queen.

But the history behind the forces, the history behind the rounds at toe box was to fit into our horse store. The point at toe box, and I was questioning as well, you do need a, you do need a shoe to fit in your, it helps. And then the heel, unless you're riding bareback, which Native Americans used to do, which is incredible, and probably can't say much on that. But then the heel as well, and this is a cultural thing that was heavily, heavily concentrated in the south of England, because Elizabeth and England, you started getting widespread access to horses.

And just if you're in your car, people are willing to talk to you because they say, oh, he's the car owner. He's must be in the community or something. I've noticed that since getting a car a couple years ago and had never done that in my life. But it was the same thing, having a horse, maybe you were a person of respect.

And those people who had the horses came to New York, the people who did not yet have access to horses came to the American south. And I find that in places in the American south, northerners will make fun of certain communities in the American south that have acceptance for unshod lifestyle, their lifestyle, laugh at them. I've seen this multiple times, but the problem is that the shoes that people wear in the north are quite literally causing them all sorts of damage. And it's the other thing is why do you think a lot of sprinters with good fashion strength are coming from Florida, beach town, and Texas, which is slightly more welcoming to people with their feet.

I'm sorry, Jamaica, unshod culture. You can be classy person in Jamaica. I keep saying Australia, but they're the same thing. The other places are really big.

Barefoot culture, good track and field teams. And we can't even keep up with East Africa in the marathon. And people say, oh, it's there in the mountains. But then there's people in Colorado in the mountains who can't keep up.

And then, but the reason why is because they run barefoot in cross country up until sub-elite. And then when they get into the elites, they put $500 single shoes on them. And they only have to use it once. And they get their payout.

But if these shoes really did make you faster, you would find the people using them, get getting faster. But people get faster when they run barefoot. And when they go finally, their elite level or sub-elite level in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and even fake Kipi-A-Gon, I think came in bronze metal place in the world cross country championships barefoot. That was a modern version of this.

And it's really bad because the culture here in New York is so damaging. And people start to age here at age 30 in the same way that people who survive until that age of rural China, age of 90. And it's, and they say it must be genetics. It must be genetics that those people out there.

But the second those people move to the United States and have kids, their kids put on the other shoes. And then they start to have the same wear profiles as we have in the New York area. So the question is, this is all one big long rant going back to do the $500 shoes making faster. If we were to do a real estimate of that, we have to look at everybody who wears the super shoes.

I would say 60% of them within a couple of weeks will be going zero miles an hour because they'll get injured from it, because super shoes get you super injured. And then the other 40% will probably see a slight, you know, what they can last outside of being injured, they'll see maybe a slight advantage from some spring. And then eventually as they lose the ability to use their Achilles tendon, they'll get injured in the next year. And then the one guy who is already running two hours, nine minutes marathon, barefoot, or whatever is going to get the shoes, get his shoe sponsorship.

And then his kids are going to go into shoes and then never, that's why he's ready. It doesn't seem to be such a big thing in sport, track and field because in the marathon, you get rich, you put your kids in shoes and the kids don't want to become competitive. It's not the shoes that do it. It's the people that do it.

The shoes are fashion. That's funny. I leave the chugae who broke this up to our marathon under perfect conditions. There was an article that came out that kind of got squashed where the headline was him saying it wasn't the shoes, it was my legs, but nobody appreciated that.

Now, I'm not going to argue that certain shoes may, for certain people, help a little compared to what they were wearing before, but there are other confounding factors. Placebo, Feppin one, and many things where you want to put this where if you, well, it's basically placebo. If you think these things are going to be helpful, the signals that you used to get that were telling you slow down or signals that you're now using saying speed up or say consistent or whatever it is, there are of course people who are still winning races who aren't in their shoes. The reason everyone's wearing their shoes is not necessarily because they're making people faster, but if you're neck and neck with somebody in a lot of races and then they switch shoes and for whatever reason, beat you, the first thing you're going to do the next day is go by their shoes because people are at the very least superstitious about what is going to take to beat that guy who's just next to you.

There's a friend of mine who, to your point, I have a friend who is a multi-time Olympian and world champion and race champion, boss marathon near Marathon, who was trained by Arthur Lydiard in New Zealand and Lydiard made shoes for his athletes, a lot of cars. And she says to me, we never got injured until we got to shoot contracts and we're wearing a shot. Never had a problem until then, which I was very interesting and she lives in her shoes, which is fun. She wears them all the time, she doesn't actually live in them, she's much taller than it would actually live in a pair, let alone a number.

There was one other point I wanted to make, see if I can remember it. Oh, the other thing about runners and sprinters in particular is when there is a cultural pressure or cultural support, which is, goes hand in hand, to supporting this event, marathon, sprints, whatever, then there's going to be more people doing it and you are going to just find, if you have a bigger pool of people, you're going to find those weird genetic freaks who weren't going to do it before, but now there's some cultural benefit for doing it and they're going to show up as well. So there's some advantage of just having more people doing it. To sprinting, I will say one of the things, and this could get me canceled.

So here we go. I, I joked with a friend of mine who's a world champion, four by four hundred meter runner and four American champion, four hundred meter runner, who has been a coach of mine as well as being a friend, who is a tall, really just unpleasantly good looking guy. He's just one of these guys. Actually, it's funny when he's got his game face on, when he's ready to compete, he's just scary.

I didn't talk to this guy for years because he's scared to crap out of me. Yeah. When he's done and he smiles, this guy's model gorgeous, just spectacularly good looking. Anyway, I joked to them, I said, it's not how to put this.

It's well known in the sprinting community that having good strength in your glutes and hamstrings is really important. And if you watch the way, most white people walk, they don't use their glutes. And if you walk away, most black people walk. And again, it's going to get me canceled, ignore it is they're walking in a way that's actually using their glutes.

And I exaggerated this kind of stereotypical way that black guys walk. And he just burst in hysterics. I said, do you think this is why there's only been one white guy who only one time ever ran a sub 10 second hundred meters? And actually, there's only one.

There's actually two, but the second one, it was windated. So there's only one who's ever done it without windated. And he only did it one time. And I said, do you think this is the reason why you know white guys run a sub 10?

He just burst in hysterics. And he's like, okay, we've got to be done. That's really interesting. It's glued recruitment.

Once again, we have a time to make this a huge landmass, but it's a tiny island nation, a tiny island nation in population. And they produce all the best women's sprinters. Now, of course, there's a charries are shining hope by Elaine Thompson. And then also, Shawnee Miller-Weibo, I think she was from the Bahamas.

But the thing is, is this region, the Bahamas, say kids, which I mean, yeah, it's all that whole area. Barefoot culture, it's okay to walk outside barefoot. No one's going to be staring at you, Stephen, if you're on anywhere to make a barefoot. And to that point, there is a specific correlation between foot and ankle strength and sprinting speed.

There's a, you know, the RSI test? No, I've heard it. I'm smart. I'm smart.

It's about it. Basically, you put your hands on your hips and you bounce up and down 10 times as high as you go while trying to bend your hips and your knees as little as possible. You're just bouncing with your feet and ankles. And what you measure is the, what you do is you divide the amount of time you're in the air by the amount of time you're on the ground.

And basically, anything over 2.5 is really good. Over two seven is like exceptionally good. Over three, you are a freak. I am happy to pat myself on the back and say at the age of 61, I'm like a 271.

And I'm a pretty good sprinter. So foot strength, hugely important. Research is very clear. Walking around barefoot or the research is actually in minimal shoes builds foot strength as much as doing exercise program.

And the other thing is there is a, let's call it for lack of a dramatic version of this where people who start out as dance ballet dancers in particular or gymnasts or jump ropers or anything where you're a young person, you're doing a lot of foot strengthening things which goes back to what you're making about people growing up in a barefoot culture. That helps really a lot too. I started out as a diver, became an all American gymnast. So, you know, but there's also, there is the genetic component to that because some people can build that foot strength, but they're just not fast for whatever other reasons.

It turns out my grandfather, I didn't know this doll in my mid 40s, nor did my mother ever, my grandfather was a gymnast. Oh, wow. Who knew? Who knew?

Maybe there's something in there. Don't know. So, Valerie Allman, the discus thrower. So, I'm the New York discus thrower champion.

So, I'm a discus thrower. And that's not even a masters division, but I had to be at a couple college kids. But New York, there's no growers. We're all not really thrower types.

So, it's an easy field. But we, Valerie Allman was a dancer and she would go on point in like in ballet and then she's the discus thrower champion. She throws farther than I did. She throws the men's weight probably twice as far as I did.

But, so dancing definitely in volleyball is well anything with a large workbook. But you notice that in the vault in gymnastics for women, you do have a barefoot run up to the vault. And people always say, why do gymnasts run so weird? Actually, they're the only ones in western society who can run right.

The rest of us throw all. Admittedly, they run weird. Not all of them, because many of them, yeah, do that straight arm mechanical robot thing. I don't know why.

It doesn't make a lot of sense. Actually, I never thought about it until right now. I can think of why. Because when you watch what they're doing with their arms, they're basically keeping their arm swing to a minimum which helps pick up cadence.

Because you only have a limited amount of time to run. And I knew for me, I knew what my maximum speed, which was not running the entire length of the runway. It was about 10 feet less. Because I just figured out the max speed when I hit the board that way.

But yeah, they do have mostly weird arm swing because they haven't been taught to actually run in a way where they can look normal-ish. But there's another reason as well, which is that for some of those vaults, you need to get your arms from behind you to in front of you straight, quickly. And maybe I've been to just do it that way. Because you don't see them.

That's so interesting. Yeah, because when you look on floor X where they have to run as well, many of them don't have that weird arm thing when they're running before a round off. But their last step or two for a round off do look weird because they figured out a weird technique to get them to the right way. But that's not going to be here earlier.

Gymnastics is so complicated. Gymnastics, I'll tell you about gymnastics. Now the floor when you're doing floor exercise is basically the trampoline. And I used to watch the Olympics and when I was doing this with my girlfriend and I was getting really frustrated.

And she goes, when you just jealous, I went, yeah. Because the moves that they just did, I was doing in high school, but I was doing them on a wrestling mat. And if they had done that move that way on a wrestling mat, they would have just broken both of their ankles. So I'm jealous because I never got the opportunity to do shit on a trampoline like floor where I would have been able to do some crazy stuff that no matter.

Oh, mother of all sports. I think it's so impressive. I'm a Olympic way left as well. The whole X gymnast.

I think that the emphasis on technique, we need a borrow from gymnastics into running because when you don't give me, I'm just going to say this way. There are things that you do as a gymnast to learn highly complicated movements that have never been applied to, I'm going to say sprinting in particular and I have figured out a way to do that. There's actually two and then there's a third thing that's nothing that gymnastics needs to be done. And I'm actually working with some guys on a patent I have about how to do this because many of us are running a fast or running if they have bad running form, they need to move their legs fast, which is not the case.

It's learning how to sprint and I would argue that I'm still, yeah, I still make that go away my apologies. I'm still learning how to do that. To learn how to sprint, you're lucky enough to figure it out somehow or just build it in a way you naturally move. But I believe that I could take a, let's say, mid-level sprinter and a highly competitive sprinter by using some things from gymnastics to teach them the proper form and embed that in their brain in a way that comes away.

My undergraduate research at Duke was on cognitive aspects of motor scale acquisition. I know what it takes to learn a new movement pattern. There's no opportunity to do those things in track and field activities. Interesting.

Interesting. Yeah. For me, my philosophy, how I learned my running technique, I obviously had all the drills, a skippy, skip, see, skip, all that stuff, many years, my running technique wasn't getting any better, still heel striking. For me, I found that the best thing to get an efficient running technique is the nervous system in the foot and a combination of your natural environment as well as the 200,000 nerve endings in the foot.

If you're coming down under heel too much, ouch. If you run into high up on here, ouch. And then eventually you find how to do it. If you land too far forward to your big toe, ouch.

So eventually you have to run gingerly on the outside of your foot and after a million steps, a million renditions, each one of them just hurting like nuts. And there's nothing you can do about it. You have to choose this pain or you have to choose orthopedic pain that will just happen to you. So you are, you're the perfect case for this.

My wife has a great line, she's our shoes aren't doing anything other than becoming your coach. The feedback that you're going to get, if you listen to it, will coach you into better form. Optimal form, not necessarily. I've seen people who have the idea you're supposed to land on the ball of your foot and we're about to get there.

Do crazy things like reach way out in front of them with their foot and point their toe to land on their foot. And that's horrible. I've seen people learn to run by basically doing a fast version of how Gracho Marx walks. So it's not actually running form.

So there are ways of getting the wrong feedback or not knowing how to interpret the feedback where you can still be a little out of whack. I have another pattern for that working on that. But anyway, let's move on to the thing that we tease this with because this is the perfect segue. And that is this whole question of how you're supposed to where you're supposed to land on your foot.

Let's be what we talked about running, but you brought up about walking and you have told me taking what many would consider a controversial position. A controversial position about this. So the controversy began. Okay.

In the West, we started wearing healed shoes. I know you just was just at the audience and you see the whole story. We started wearing healed shoes and narrow toe boxes from a tradition of equestrian transportation. So horses where the narrow toe box shoes goes in the stir up and the heel prevents you from slipping out of the stir up.

The two inch or one inch heel on the back of the shoe interrupted our natural walking gate where you land on the four foot and then go down from down to the midfoot. And just like a bow and arrow and then you push off. So what this happened was that this interferes with this block here and we started going for a dunk. So let me pause because the controversy is in the one or the phrase that used about it being our natural thing to land ball foot.

So where pray tell I figure if we're going to talk about it question from the 1800s I can say pray tell where pray tell did you and I'm not saying you're right or wrong. Where did you come to that conclusion that's the natural way to walk in northern Tanzania. The hodza tribe who are a modern hunter gatherer tribe who walks for business. They're not a nomadic tribe but they are persistence hunters the same way of hunting that was in born to run because it's born to run.

They are I think the last true bushman of Africa. There's video of them where they're walking along a rocky path where they are walking on their forefoot. Every one of them and that's the first piece of evidence. And I'm just going to do second one.

The second one. Look at how toddlers and kids walk because toddlers walk they need to learn how to come down on their heel a little bit. Because when toddlers and kids will actually run and walk way super kipchoga deal. Nowhere in your touch on the ground.

And you know what doctors do when the kid doesn't and the other thing will happen special needs kids we've always talked about to somehow special needs kids will be for walking why is that. Because special needs kids aren't attending school at a regular basis the way the non special needs kids are their homeschooled. And oftentimes these kids will not be forced to work for learn the house. So because of that they never get the fashion binding construction of a modern shoe and will continue to force a walk.

They say we must be something to do with a mental disability of some sort but it's not it's just because they aren't being socialized to wear a mandatory footwear. And indigenous people in northern Tanzania, the Hadsatribe, Hadsavitribe as well as kids as well as what happens on an Android. Okay so the things I'm going to say are based on ideas that I have about walking for. But I'm going to throw this out there.

And again I'm not taking a position at this. Sure. You mentioned with the Hadsatribe watching them walking on rocky surfaces. Yes.

My question is what if anything changes if they're walking on a flat smooth surface. Sure. Or if they're walking uphill or downhill. And if they're walking at different speeds.

And I don't know the answer to that. But I'll tell you but I'll not surprise you. I'm going with this. With kids I'm the first one to say that if you watch kids who grow up predominantly barefoot what they're doing when they walk and run is different than what they what other kids are doing.

The problem that I have with using kids is I'm going to take it slightly out of context. It will be not uncommon for someone to show a picture of a baby's foot or someone up to the age of maybe two in their foot where they've got a relatively narrow heel and their toes are spread like crazy wide. And they go see that's natural. Yeah, their heads are also three quarters of their body.

If you had a baby's if your head as an adult was the size proportionally that it is for a baby you would be 80% head. We can't use the morphology of three pubescent children or as an example of what we're supposed to be when we become adults. There may be and I don't know. There may be other factors that lead to how babies and toddlers and special needs kids walk.

I don't know. I haven't identified. So again, I'm not going to try and take a claim in an opposing position. But I want to highlight just a way to think about these things and you have just how to investigate the thoughts that we have to start looking for counterfactual information to see if it's valid or not.

And so good. Mary Leakey in 1978 went to northern Tanzania to the Goro Goro Crater, which is truly the cradle of humanity and found the oldest trackway. So a trackway is a set of footprints from Australopithecus Afarensis, who was the first ever human. Oh, human.

Oh, yes. She concluded that this group of early human only use their heels when walking as breaks. Otherwise, and she said, when you want to put the brakes on, you put the heels down. And it's so he talked about natural human.

This they excavated it and I think it's in the British Museum right now and you can see that these people walking in the United States, though, they have trackways in White Sands National National Park in New Mexico. And they discovered this trackway. This was the first human trackway discovered in the US or the North America and they have a full print. But then they also said this was a kid, a teenager who's holding a baby downhill and that is likely that if you don't put on the breaks, the kids going forward and holding a big, heavy weight.

And you can even see that the daughter or another daughter is the teenage girl puts the baby down to walk a couple steps and then get tired and start complaining. You have to pick the kid up and put him on the other side and start walking again. So there's this plenty of the actual trackways from before we even had any shoes which suggest a four foot walk. But the other thing is just inside my own body.

I speak to him, not in my body. Most of the people I speak to on a daily basis are not running in the lead, they'll hundred or doing anything like that. Most of the people have never run their lives, actually. And they are experiencing the exact same one of the problems as people who are just overdoing it, he'll strike running and they have never run.

So it's not about running. It's definitely a simple thing. And we didn't address this specifically. But actually you just gave me the perfect segue for my current thoughts about walking and running.

And which is when people say, where's my foot supposed to land? My answer is you're asking the wrong question because it's going to vary in some ways based on whether you're walking uphill downhill, accelerating decelerating faster slow and the surface that you're on. I said, but my answer is also fundamentally, you want to do the same thing whether you're walking or running, which is to the point you just made not over striding, not reaching out and putting your foot out in front of you putting the brakes on, getting your foot underneath your center of mass. Now, I'll say this and go with it where you will.

Here's where I'm not putting up a stake in the ground. But what I notice in my house, where the majority of our house is tile, we have carpeting in the upstairs in our bedroom and in the hallway leading to our bedroom. And downstairs in our basement, we have we have a room where there's a little bit of carpet in there too, but mostly it's a tile. I walk in one of two ways, and it depends on if I'm going faster or slower.

Or it also depends on whether I wanted to make sure I don't wake up my wife. So I will not infrequently be walking landing on the ball, like you said before, outside edge, which what people refer to as supinating my foot rolls in, still landing with my foot mostly underneath my center of mass. If I'm trying to muster and I'm still in that same situation, I will be over scribing a little bit. And sometimes I'm still landing the same way, or I will land kind of flat footed, or sometimes if you I would need a force plate to really show this.

If you're heels of ball and you can land on different parts of the ball. So if I'm landing where my heels touching around first, still outside edge first, mostly towards the front of my foot in that ball instead of the back of my foot. When I get on the carpeting, I'm much more prone to be rolling over that heel, again, mostly being on the front part of the ball. I'm much less likely to land four foot when I'm on the carpeting.

But again, the key thing from my perspective, which is the same point I make about running, is hit your feet underneath you and push the box behind me. And the thing that moves you forward, and humans have a hard time with this, is the thing that happens to be behind you. Because we're not as attentive to the thing that's moving us forward, is if you think about ice skaters, what moves them forward is pushing back, pushing their heel behind them, not letting their foot get in front of them, having the foot land underneath them, because if they're in front of them, once they took any weight off the back foot, they'd fall on their ass. Yes.

The foot would go flying up underneath them. So anyway, that's a roundabout way to say where my current thinking is about walking. So gravity is an oppressive force. Gravity is the worst.

And nobody even knows about this. When you learn to go barefoot and you actually just say fine, I have to wake up this morning, actually deal with this gravity thing, can't keep avoiding it, it's bad for me. You start to learn what gravity is the hard way. And for humans, the most efficient way to move forward is obviously just to say I can't deal with it anymore in the dead pan fall on your face.

And so that is the most efficient way. It's certainly the least amount of energy to get to get to, it's not moving you forward per se, unless you're trying to cross the finish line. But the least energy you could use, you would just be falling in some direction, most likely forward. Yeah, so if I just give up, I just fall forward on my face, but also is the most efficient way to move because it doesn't require any muscle.

It doesn't require any sort of, you know, it's just a natural occurrence. And it's very inexpensive from the amount of oxygen you need and your muscles aren't that hard. So walking and running are both simply just continuing this falling under face and catching yourself reflexively. When your back foot is here, people try to think of these muscles.

Like in weightlifting, it's a lot of muscles, a lot of you, it's a very short movement. So to move weight over your head, there's a lot of muscles, a lot of oxygen, it's a lot of burning fat calories, all that stuff. But in running and walking, it's all tendence. And the point of the muscle is the stretch, same in the throat, especially in the shockwood.

You want to actually get a stretch reflex where your body thinks your pack is about to break and will reflexively go forward like that. And so when you fall forward on your face in walking and running, all of a sudden your Achilles tend and it will load up. And then calf muscles not there to lift you up like all that in your soleus muscle. Your calf muscles are just there to say, oh my goodness, I'm about to rip in half.

Let me get this foot out of the way. And it's a stretch reflex. So that's the difference between running and walking away. The thing you're using your muscles in order to move to weight in running, you're using your muscles just as a stretch reflex.

And also throwing his own track and feel. So that's why when you land on your heel, when you're walking, you don't actually activate that stretch reflex until you're already on your forefoot. And when you do that, your calf muscle, yeah. Again, let's bring that back to over striding because I think there's another piece to this.

And that's why I'm going to tell you, I'm going to agree with you and tell you how I've been walking up hills lately. You're going to like it. Yes. So if you overstride and land on your heel, by the time your foot comes down, your plan or fascia are stretched already and unable to be responsive.

They're unable to be strong. You basically stretch them without really, well, under load, but they're not stretched in a way that is giving your body that signal that you just described of, oh, I have to respond to this. And so then in the same way that if you put too much weight on the bar and you try to lift it when you're in a weak biomechanical position, that's what you can do. Bicep off the insertion point.

The same thing that happened with your plan or fascia is what the hell you're doing with your camera. My apologies. I'm just poking it in so I don't get it. Yeah.

That was pretty entertaining though. It was like, oh, okay. I'm very roller-coastery. So in the same way that, again, you can rip your bicep off the insertion point, typically distal.

If you have too much weight and you're without getting your body the signal through that muscle to be contracting properly, your plan or fascia do the same thing if you overstride and your foot comes down essentially flat. And then arch support, all that's doing is getting your plan or fascia completely out of the way so you have a weak non-responsive thing. And now you're banking on upstream parts of your body. I can't think of the word.

I'm looking for it. It's a Friday afternoon that are now having to take the burden of what the information you didn't get from your feet and do things they're not really wired for. The plan for fascia is a genius device with the wind loss mechanism. So the wind loss mechanism, each toe here is a different set on your foot.

So you want it stiff. You're going to go all the way to your big toe. If you want it loose, you get it on the outside of your pinky toe. So the most flexible part of your foot is the pinky toe.

And then as you get stiffer and are pulling back the bone arrow by rolling to your big toe, it's stiffening the plantar fascia. The plantar fascia needs to be loose. And just like a piano with a piano, the tighter or the tighter that string is when you tune it, the higher pitch that becomes, the same thing happens with your planar fascia. So when you are landing on the outside of the ball of your foot, this is the best place.

This is the lowest note. This is so flexible here. And this is the best way to absorb the impact shot from the ground. And the second you'll touch the ground, it's like you're letting off the tension from the bone.

And this is the second type of heel strike. People don't talk about the heel strike when you land on the ball of your foot and then your heel comes smashing down. That's a heel strike too. So what is you just want to have a line from the ball of your foot and you really need to get a big chest because when you're falling forward, you want to fall like this.

And you want to line from the ball of your foot up to your hips up to here and you literally want to fall on your face and then catch yourself with the other foot. And if your heel doesn't touch the ground, this will create a ball. My foot is like weird now from barefoot running. My foot, your foot is probably weird as well.

But we have this backwards bending foot like this and this creates a ball. And what it does is it essentially allows you to simulate a circle. The biggest thing that it does, the winless mechanism, what it does is it lines the bones in your foot into an arch that is the strongest structure we've ever come up with. And that's the biggest thing that I would contend, and I have some ideas about this and I'm not totally so long because I haven't done research.

But for example, we have a bunch of cyclists. We've sponsored a team called the HINCAPI team. We're now sponsoring the Novo Nordisk team. Did they think of you guys?

I was on the CRC engineering development team. Of course, I was on the CRC development team. I was on the CRC. I used to work in the systems.

Oh, okay. So we had one of the HINCAPI riders had the Pre-O, which happens in the back of his jersey. They finished their training run, a bunch of these riders. They're hanging out at a coffee shop in North Boulder, which by the way, I always like to say, if you want to make a million dollars fast, just show up with a crane and steal the bike rack at that coffee shop on a Sunday.

I know. It's crazy. But anyway, the guy puts on his Pre-O because he was getting out of his cleats and then rode home just in our shoes and noticed he was putting out more watts in our shoes than when he was clipped in. I think it's because when you're wearing cycling shoes, you basically turn your foot into a stupid lever.

And the little bit of extra force you're getting from your foot is not necessarily the important thing, but the signal that you're getting when you use your foot that goes upstream into the posterior end interior chain is the thing that is going to be making a difference. You're giving your body, I'll say, you're going to get a kick out of this. Sprinters in particular, they say, you're swing leg. The leg that's in the air, you need to door supply.

You need to pull your toe up to your knee and you're going to keep the door supply as you land. If you look, there's not one sprinter in the entire history of the fucking world that keeps door supply through the point when they're coming down to contact the ground. Never. They're not pointing their toes, but they're not pulling it up towards their knee where it's above 90 degrees.

It's not a thing. So I think there's some relationship between that and what happens cycling where there's the right amount of planar flexion or the right combination of how you want to measure it, where you're engaging things that are sending signals to the other muscles you're using, get ready, about time to fire. That doesn't happen when your foot is a dumb lever in a shoe that doesn't let you move. So yeah, the stiff sole, the carbon plates on the, the sole cycling shoes are terrible.

I was thinking about this two days ago. I said to myself, it has to be. So I said to myself, nobody knows what we're doing with our footwear. Even in a weightlifting, they have these massive two, three and shields and put where things can help us squat better.

But it's just a whole way. Yes. So the whole thing with Ali shoes with shoes with big heel for people who don't know, they're basically a wooden plank with a wooden heel underneath them. So you're simulating the ground, but changing the angle and someone who's an ollie lifter.

And since you are, I'm curious what your thoughts are about this. Those shoes were developed. I'm told for ollie lifters, predominantly people, mostly for dealing with the snatch, even more than clean press is that clean and jerk. It needs to be pressed is because if you're really, if you really have good form, you're using your shoulders to lock your shoulders out.

You're not using, you're basically aligning the bones properly. And if you do well, your shoulders are a little hyper extended. Your hands are a little behind your shoulders, a little behind your head. Yeah, exactly.

And there's when you're especially in snatch, where at that point, because the weight is a little behind you, if you didn't have that little heel lift to tip you forward, you'd be just falling backward. And what's happened is people just assumed, oh, and he does a squat shoes, which is complete bullshit unless you're feeling back in length. It's obviously because Americans want to join Olympic lifting. It takes a lifetime to become a little bit with their, they don't have the ankle mobility sponsors.

Like, let's get these people into the sport. And I think it's a version of that guy just wore that shoe and won. I need that shoe for everything. Yeah, because it's crazy because you're a trunk angle in the snatch.

If you do so, this is the trunk angle with heel shoes where these tiny muscles on the top of your shoulder, this is now supporting the bar. When you get and go down to level, you actually have to move forward like that and get these massive rhomboid trap muscles supporting the bar. And even so, there's a weightlesser named Toshiki Yamamoto, team Japan weight lifter who showed up to a international competition and a weightlifting. They all out national warfare, like serious stuff.

And he shows up to international competition when CrossFit shoes, which were zero drop. And people are like, what is going on like that? Anyone? And it's a more herd mentality.

But this herd mentality is so bad for people's low back. And I think that in some ways, I wish we could start a stampede for minimalist footwear. Like, where's the herd mentality? I'll tell you something funny.

I'll tell you how we're getting there. We're not dealing with a lot of professional. Oh, crap. We just lost area.

And I think it's because it's phone battery died. So I'm going to pause for a sec and hopefully he'll come back. Okay, thanks for the magic of technology back. Where the hell were we?

So I was asking how we can get zero shoes and minimalist footwear to have the next stampede of people going to switch. So what I was about to say is that very interestingly and appropriately, there are more and more professional athletes getting kept to the idea of the importance of foot strength. And we have a bunch of pro athletes that we've been working with in various sports who are wearing our stuff first just casually to walk around building foot strength based on the idea of the research showing that walking in minimal foot strength, when you're screening and they're in a gym for a reason that we talked about. And in fact, it reminds me we have a power left or we are to powerlifting event.

And she came over to our booth and was trying our shoes and they called her name for the bench. And she's like, I gotta go. And she runs over there, comes back a minute later saying, I just said a personal best. And she's, and I felt like I was gripping the ground and more connected to the ground than ever before.

And of course, people who aren't power lifters typically don't know that even the bench starts with their feet. So, yes. Yeah. So we have all these pro athletes casually training.

There are a couple of people who in their war knops either on the court or field are wearing our shoes and then what are they swimming at? Is that true? It's a different story, but them as well. USA archery because the guys there, they say, and women, they say it's like they feel like they're really more rooted when they're wearing our shoes, which they are.

Yes. And but pro level sports people who are really getting into this. And we are, in fact, I just scheduled a meeting with a guy who's a very big football player who said in a conversation we had that wearing our shoes got rid of a whole bunch of issues that he had and it seemed to be giving him more years in his career. And he's already older than most of the guys that he's playing against.

So I think I hope that's one of the two things that's going on in 2024. I can't even talk about the first one. Unfortunately, we signed the paperwork in a couple weeks that will help the kind of top down version of that where they're going to be. People with high status saying these things change my life.

You got to wear these things. But what's going to the key thing that is going to make this work is alluded to before is the people in these smaller communities. There's actually research about this. It's very cool.

There's a book called change by guy named Damon Centola. And he says, in a small community, when something gets adopted, it's when 25% of the people adopt it. It's a magic number. And so some of the top down stuff will then impact the smaller communities.

And then, of course, people are in more than one small community. And like we said before, if they feel like they're part of a digital community, they're not going to be able to do that. They feel like they're part of a different community where they're not being ostracized for doing this unusual thing. Then they just receive that community or sometimes bring things into that community.

So all of that stuff, the kind of grassroots bottom up in the top down stuff, mix and match in a way that I think there's going to be a significant acceleration in 2024 and early 25. Do you think that you could get a runner, a professional runner in the Pro Field at a major marathon? Oh, a marathon for this. At a marathon.

It's an interesting question. The challenge, not surprisingly, is that what the big companies do is once they find someone in high school or college, that looks like they got good potential is they start sponsoring them early. And now granted, unless you are nationally ranked, going to go to trials, etc. You're not getting decent money typically.

Yeah. But the challenge with Pro Runners is they've been so used to the thing they're doing that as a former, I'm still competitive athlete. When I was like super, super serious, the idea of changing anything is terrifying. And right.

And I say this to pro athletes all the time. Don't switch mid season. Don't switch just because if you want to explore this, here's the way to do it. Start by walking, go to the gym, do the warmups and then see how you feel if it makes sense.

So I don't know. Now, sprinters on the other hand, different story. So the deal with sprinters, I've been developing a new sprinting shoe. I can't even call it a spike because it doesn't have spikes.