Episode 212: Are Super Shoes REALLY Super?

Okay, the big question, our super shoes really super. Let's find out on today's episode of the movement, the podcast where people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, you know, those things at the end of your legs. We break down the propaganda and the mythology and sometimes the outright lies. You've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or to yoga or cross it or you know what you're going to put on your feet, which is going to be today's topic, obviously.

I'm Stephen Sachin, co-founder of Zero Shoes and we call this the movement, movement podcast was we that includes you. I'll tell you about that in a second. I'll be creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do, not getting in the way of doing something that you can actually do without whatever gets in the way. And here's how you can participate.

Really simple. Leave us a review somewhere. Give us a thumbs up. Hit the bell icon on YouTube.

Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes and other places you can engage with us on social media and engage with us on social media. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So let's have some fun. Jay to share.

Tell people who you want and why you're here. I'm a guy in a cape trying to become more super with super shoes. No, you're much more than a guy in a cape. No, Steve.

Thanks for having me. I'm a VISTA researcher and part of the faculty at the PT program at Oregon State University and founder of Mobo. It's what's improved to building balance your feet. I do a lot of validation animation testing for a number of different brands.

And I think the reason we're talking today is to try and dig deeper and a little bit about what's on this whole myth. I think people get focused on the hype and they need to bring back to reality a little bit. I love you so much. So let me do that quick endorsement.

Your Mobo, Mobo Board, great product for building foot strength and balance and all the things that go along with that. So is it Mobo Board.com? Yeah, check that out when you have a moment. That's the earliest promo I've ever done for a product on the Have-A-Money 100s podcast I've done.

Okay, so I have a lot of opinions about this whole super shoe thing. You have been asked to throw in yours in many situations lately. You want to do the high level overview of let's start with what people are calling a super shoe, what claims they are making about them, and then the fun that will happen after we decide to dive into all of that. Yeah, for sure.

So I think the biggest thing to understand is that when you think about cushioning in your footwear that you've had for years, decades, right, those shoes basically when you walk and run, your body weight compresses that cushioning and then it will sort of return back to where it was. It doesn't do so very fast and doesn't do so very much. And when you look at these new category super shoes, we have to use a different vocabulary. In fact, the word cushioning is even there.

It's actually better thought about as compliance, right? So imagine jumping on a mushy pad, right, like a foam pad, the pad just kind of gives and you land soft, you land soft, you land, it feels cushy, but you don't like bounce back. And now imagine jumping on a diving board or a trampoline, right? When you distort that diving board, you bend it down or you drop a trampoline and bend the trampoline down, it actually springs you back up again.

And that's the key to think. Well, I'm going to wait. I got to pause on that a little because as a former All-American gymnast and prior to that former nationally ranked diver, the diving board is amplifying what you are doing with your legs. But if it weren't for your legs, none of that shit would happen.

And what makes it work, I mean, let's think diving board in particular, what makes it work is that you literally tuned the diving board, you changed the fulcrum of the diving board to get the maximum interaction between you and the board. If you just literally went to the end of the board, jumped on it and didn't use your legs after that, there would be no compliance. I mean, you basically, the board would just like make your legs pop up to your face and you'd throw it at your nose and nothing good would happen. So I want to make it clear because the implication, not intentionally, from describing what you said is that these things are, in fact, acting like a spring or acting like a lever, which I would argue is not the case since, okay, you were shaking your head in and shaking your head no as an agreement with that comment.

Yes, let's raise the elevator. So people say, what's the fastest shoe? People race, okay, let's make that clear. The issue though is when you, and I actually use that knowledge about to the diving board, those of you who are honestly with this, if you go, but you're not throwing them in your pool around town, some of the competition pools will always competition pools have a diving board that has a big, usually like a dial, right?

Next to it. And you can move that dial forward or backward to sort of match the load of energy you're going to invest in a diving board and have a turn with you. And one of the really important notes about that analogy that Steve and I just made is that the shoes only work when they're tuned to you. And I want to make that really clear.

Dude, dude, I can't tell you how many times I have said that exact phrase on previous episodes, the moment the first big shoe came out, I started saying all foams tune to a weight and speed. And if you're not that weight and speed, you are screwed. 100% 100% and so for those of you who want particulars on this, right? So unless you're in, and it's a little bit of a range here because it depends on how fast you're running depends on the your type of running, so in general, okay, these shoes are tuned for people in the 110 about 145 pound range, okay, who are running really fast.

Okay. So I'm not saying that if you're those people that's going to work for you, one of my good friends was in the original like you 4% study, and he is one of those people. He's 145 pounds and he's like a world caliber runner and he had no improvement in the super shoes. So it's not just weight, it's not just speed, it's a number of things which are kind of a little complex discuss that have you a stride dynamics, but how you load that spring, the important thing to talk about super shoes is it's not cushioning, right?

So maximal cushioning shoes, again, it's like compressed and then they're taking eternity sort of return, they don't really rebound. What the crop of super shoes is doing, as he said, you do have to have tension in your legs for sure. But the shoe does actually distort and then the shoe does spring you back up again. And I think it's really important to stand that if the spring is tuned to you, you can have a some result.

If the spring is outside your range, you're not going to quite have that result. And so the reality is most people are watching videos of kip choke running and want to run like him and these issues. And again, that she was tuned specifically to him, not just somebody, his weight, he was tuned to him. And so they alter your stride, right?

And that's important to understand that it takes you out of your normal movement pattern and I make that really clear because I'm a preface and just say this bluntly, I've been around since these things, well, even before they're invented, but I've been around these shoes first came to market and I had two athletes who were given the shoe because the company said, Oh, we have this new shoe, it's going to make you faster and every athlete in the world wants an advantage. And both those athletes got hurt to the point where they miss Olympic trials and miss the Olympics. And I preface this again by saying those are two both previous Olympians who were pretty much, it was their race to lose. So I come from this as trying to make sure you can keep showing up every single day.

And I want to be clear, this shoe technology does have a role, but it also has a very big downside if you're not very careful about how you adapt them. I want to throw in my hat and that ring. When I first saw a handful of Olympians that were on the track with me who switched to these shoes, this was Jesus, you know, 12 years ago, the first one or 11 years ago. And I said to them, I'm watching how they're running and I'm watching how they're gate changed.

And they were all over striding, landing their foot too far in front of their body, landing on the heel. And I said to these, and these were Olympians. I said, you got two years, so your knees are shot. And they went, no, I'm putting in more miles than ever.

These are great. I went two years later. It was two of these guys, two years later they became cyclists. And so if you can, though, kind of where to begin.

There's something. Well, that real quick. So if you're going to do it, it's actually true. Right.

So there's a research paper that came out that that looked like a group of people running in official footwear versus super shoes and found that actually does switch your cadence, right? So let's remember, Rock, all research in the past, you know, 10 years ago, it's coming out showing if you can actually shorten stride, move your contact point closer to your body, your foot's right, closer to your body. You can have less joint stresses, basically the knees, but a bunch of locations, right? And so this shoe, technology does the opposite.

It actually cues runners to contact further in front of them. What does that do? Well, it gives more time to load the spring and have it rebound. That's how the technology works, right?

That's just to give it. But what it does to you, it changes the rest of us a lot. Okay. And I want to be clear, imagine if you went and ran every day and you said this is what I'm used to.

And I said, let's go play basketball. And next day you're like, whoa, I'm super. So I've never moved that way before. That's what Super shoes are doing to your gate.

It's totally different. That's interesting because, you know, so we have a mutual friend, Jeffrey Gray from Helux and Jeffrey and I sort of, mostly him, I will confess, came up with a theory about why people are claiming to be running faster, regardless of whether they're in that one 10 to 145 range, regardless of how fast they're running. And it was, well, there's two, there are a couple components. I'll give you the ones that he did that I'll add mine.

His was, the shoes are light enough, at least the new ones are. The original Hocus, for example, they weren't heavy, but they've gotten super, super light. So it's not really altering your cadence because of the weight at the end of your limbs. And because they're so high, you're kind of running on stilts.

So if your cadence is the same and you have that extra height, you could arguably be getting an extra inch or so out of your stride length and speed is just stride length times cadence. So that was his thing about why people might be running faster. Mine was, that may be true. And let's not forget two things, one or a couple things.

One, massive placebo factor with almost anything that you're doing in athletics. Two, if you're in the top, I'm making this up, top five in your event and someone shows up in some new shoe and they beat you, what do you think you're going to do tomorrow? You're going to go buy that shoe. You're going shopping.

And so, you know, the fact that everyone adopted something and the fact that people have been getting faster in certain events anyway, the idea that the shoes are making them faster seems a little suspect at most. And then the last part to that is it may be also from our acquaintances, not a friend of my son, Madam, yet from Tim Nokes, who's got this idea of the central governor theory, this part of your brain that tries to keep you limited from hurting yourself. So you don't hurt yourself. And when you put on some product that you're told is going to make you faster.

And by the way, as you and I both know and we can dive into this, maybe the whole idea about 4% was complete bullshit from the beginning, but you have the idea it's going to make you faster. When you're getting those normal signals that you get from your brain telling your body, whoa, whoa, slow down, you're doing too much. You're going to reinterpossibly reinterpret that. So I'm going for a big psychological component.

And last but not least, saying, you know, there's still people who are setting personal best and beating people in super shoes. So it can't be just the shoe. And sorry, last but not least is my favorite part. The marketing is fascinating that they're being marketed for everybody.

My favorite part of this, oh, wait, that thought just flew right out of my head. That's really annoying. Oh, there it is. There was an ad from a company that I won't name by name.

Let's just say it rhymes with Nike. I mean, really rhymes very well with Nike. They said the shoe gives you the feeling of repelling you forward. And I put some of these shoes on and it gave me the feeling of something because as my heel was coming off the ground, to your point, the foam was expanding faster than my heel was moving off the ground.

So it tapped my heel. But since my heel was already off the ground and the shoe was already off the ground, it's not doing anything. But it gave me a feeling that something was happening. And if you get that feeling, that might make you inspired to keep moving differently, moving more, et cetera.

So anyway, that's my little rant in the middle of this. Yeah, I mean, for sure, there's, I mean, there, anybody's ever gone on a racing spike, right? It's like, I laugh like in, you know, I ran into high school and you know, you train all week and your trainers, right? And then you race, they come along on your bed, you pull this box of your spikes out and you open it like this angel glow comes out and you're going to be like, oh, it's go time.

Like you have a different mental state, right? You're going to race mode. And so definitely there's a nice like factor for sure. And you know, it would be clear too, like you run different in a racing flat.

You run different in a spike, right? So like, well, I'm going to interrupt on that one. So that was in Bill Sands lab where he would have you come in, he was a former head of biomechanics with US Olympic Committee, had a lab out in Western Colorado. And he would have you, he would analyze your running in like every shoe you've ever run in.

And what we saw is for most athletes, every shoe you put on changed your gate. And for all of those people, they didn't notice, but there was mostly middle distance runners. It was just a hundred of mylers in particular and sprinters. So pretty much anything from a sprint to maybe a mile.

You could pretty much put bricks on their feet and nothing changed. It was just amazing. I mean, they would, you know, they just had that gate locked in because that's especially the mylers and marathoners, if they're doing shorter distances because they just have that pattern so ingrained, nothing got in the way of that. It was fascinating to watch.

Yeah, you're more important in the shoe and your technique, your form, all the parts you build since day one, right? That's the most important thing. Fucking me back up to give a bigger step on this. Like you, you every single time you do anything, you're putting a load to your body, right?

And so the more you can load your parts in a beneficial way, the more you build strong bones, strong tennis, strong muscles, strong. And like, and that's important, right? And so when, you know, people are looking for the easy way. How do I opt out?

How do I find in advantage? How do I get something easier and let's be clear here, when you put a super shoe or I'll tell you, and it's like telling you, I'm getting research, even a maximal shoe, which is not a super shoe, but they have high stack heights and have lots of rocker in the forefoot and rear foot. You are literally, and we've done research on multiple papers about this, you are offsetting the load at the foot and offset load at the ankle. Okay.

So what you're doing is you're actually letting you roll through as you take a step versus having to absorb and propel yourself. And so if you said, Hey, can I move a little bit easier in these highly rocker shoes? The answer is yes, you can. Okay.

We know this to be true. But guess what? You are offloading your body. And when you offload your body, guess what happens to your body?

It becomes weaker. Period. Let that sink in please because it's really important. You know, you want to train comprehensively and there's nothing wrong with having a race day shoe.

I mean, I'm not sure it's because your race day is fine, but just understand that things are changing where you're in different footwear and you're giving your body different stresses. And so what I tell my athletes is I need you prepared every single day, right? And that means we're doing things not just in the office, he's in the winter in the gym. You're doing stuff year round forever, right?

As long as you have both to move your body, you need to take care of it. Like, again, let that sink in too. But you know, you take care of yourself and I want to make sure you're ready for whatever it is you want to do. And so if you're training away and just sort of shifting loads around, that lends itself to injury and then give you a concrete example here.

Okay. Let's say you've been somebody who has been whatever she's been in. All of a sudden you have a raging case of plant-fast shopping. Okay.

Your foot hurts and you've been told don't walk barefoot. You know, you need to be in a shoe, super supportive shoe. And so you may go to the store and they may say, Oh, we've got these maximal shoes here. They let you kind of roll, right?

And so what happens is your foot and ankle don't have to bend as far and therefore there's no strain yanking in the landing that plantar fascia. And you may say, I feel great in this maximal shoe walking around. I don't have any pain. Awesome.

I'm glad you feel a little better acutely, but long term that is not a helpful environment, any way, shape and form to improve the tensile strength of that tissue and improve the control inside your foot so that you don't wind up here to begin with. Right? So it's like, if you were hurt, what do we do? What do we do?

We give people crutches. Do we say great parent crutches. I'll say you when you're dead? No.

Like it's a temporary thing which might have a purpose, but we need to get you office crutches to how to support and stabilize your body. And that's irrespective of footwear, right? You need to show up ready. So, you know, just when you look at what you're doing and you probably, if you're listening to me, you probably think, oh, probably need some different type of shoes and plenty of smell of time and some of them will wear, right?

To make sure I am ready. Yeah, that's the whole point. Well, it's funny. Like as a sprinter, everyone says, you know, you have to get out of your spikes as quickly as you can when you're done racing because otherwise you're going to scrub your Achilles.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, your Achilles is only potentially vulnerable because you haven't been in a flat or your spikes all along. There's no, now there are reasons to get out of your spikes. You're so damn pointing and squeezing whatever they screw you up in other ways. But the idea that I can see this with runners in my neighborhood where whether they're in a super shoe or a maximum shoe or anything other than a truly minimalist or barefoot shoe, these are a lot of good runners.

And first of all, I love that you brought the whole rocking idea because none of these people rock from heel to toe. They're all landing midfoot or on the forefoot. And even the heel of that big, thick shoe is not coming anywhere close to the ground. So they're basically training their Achilles to only stretch a certain amount.

They're telling their brain, this is as far as I can go. And then they put on something minimalist and they always say, I hurt my Achilles like, no, no, you just hadn't gotten given your brain the info to let you reminded it that it's safe to do that. And you're fighting with your brain effectively. And for anyone who knows, Feldenkrais work for his bodywork methodology, it's all about reminding your brain what your body can actually do.

Instead of the limitation, you have taught your brain that you have. So and even with the whole rocker thing, I love when they talk about the shoe company is talking about making that transition from heel to toe and back to your mentioned kip chow gay, you watch the first hour and 30 minutes of that sub to our marathon and then he's he'll never come close to the ground. And then he's just trying to get to the end and all hell breaks loose. But the other thing about kip chow gay, he had a couple articles that came out and got squashed pretty quickly where the headline was something like, it wasn't the shoes, it was my legs.

That article disappeared surprisingly fast. And back to the 4% thing for the fun of saying this, that all came from a lab right down the street from me in Colorado from Roger Crombs lab where he was seeing what he said was a improvement in VO2 max of 4% for everyone who was wearing these shoes, which was not actually accurate. There was people that got kicked out of that. But Nike then turned that into 4% improvement and meaning 4% faster.

And Roger in a second article said, yeah, I'm not saying it's faster. I'm just saying it's 4% improvement in VO2 max because if it's just VO2 max, we'd line people up, we'd get their VO2 max, we'd take that awards. So I've been seeing more and more of what we've just said in the mainstream press, in the Washington Post, in the New York Times, in running magazines, but sales are still going through the roof like there's no tomorrow. What do you see as what's happening in the industry and what are you projecting given that more and more people are starting to go, hmm, this is not as good as I thought.

And oh, by the way, there's, I'm just waiting for the research about the number of ankle sprains, wrist breaks and clavicle breaks. Yeah. I mean, you know, we chase polarity, right? Nobody looks at common sense.

They look at headlines and shiny things. And so right now, super shoes and shiny things that people are looking for those. I mean, I hope at some point in time we'll have a return to common sense in the fact that as an athlete, you know, and somebody who wants to take care of their body and do things you love to do, you take care of yourself. You know, it's funny to me, we had, you know, quote conventional footwear for a long time.

And then people say, oh, the barefoot movement happened. Like, who the hell's up with the hell's a barefoot movement? We all have feet, right? Like, and you know, there's still scab is come on and say, oh, the barefoot movement failed, right?

And like, look at the wall of any running retailer today versus 15 years ago, it's categorically different. It's not even remotely the same. So the barefoot movement didn't fail. Shoes have gotten more, you know, update less in general, right?

And then we have maximum maximum. And again, you tune your body to be, as you said, stiff in your legs, right? And when you put this big marshmallow on your foot, right, you're changing the timing of how the whole process takes place. And those big mushy cushions on your foot can't respond to the fast contact times running fast.

And so we are going to be running fast. We're going to be running fast marathon. We're going to be running fast marathon. We're running fast mile, right?

Running fast 800, right? Fast anything, really. I put one of those shoes on my feet. I took three steps starting to sprint and then I stopped because I felt like I was in a foot of sand.

Yeah, totally. Because that shoe is just the wrong environment, right? You need to be on thin firm and light, you're going to go fast, right? And I'm going to stick to this lever.

And, interesting, there's a study I found this years ago, I can't relate to reference, but it was interesting. The study basically showed that, again, you have to forgive me. I'm a bi-mechanical dork, but we look at some called modeling, right? We actually can model how stiff your foot is at various aspects of the gate.

And you know, for a long time, shoe companies say, we have a quote, stability to stabilize your foot. No shoe will ever even approach the inherent intrinsic stability and stiffness of a human foot. Right. Your foot muscles are putting out hundreds of pounds each, right, to hold that system stable and under control every single stride.

And that's their job. They're awesome. or anything underneath it, you can't feel what you're supposed to do. So your body's confused and you can't generate force as fast.

And so people are saying, what's the one thing you're chasing, right? You're chasing a sink called a rate of force development. How fast can I apply force down to the ground to propel me forward? And when you put soft mushy junk underneath, you inhibit your rate of force development.

And so it speaks to the fact that, again, shoes do change your game period, right? And so you have to understand that you said, I'm giving you a very long way to answer for what I think is coming. But I hope we look at, you know, what's the goal, right? Is the goal to, you know, make my foot work and I don't mean that a bad way, because I want my foot to work well, right?

Then guess what? You want to be in something super thin for my light. OK, if you're looking to offset load to the foot, any cushion, any rocker, any heel bevel offsets load to the foot. Now, again, can you walk easier that way?

Yes, you can. Can you run either way? Yes, you can. But what's law says, if you take away stress, you get weaker and we know that when you make things weaker, they don't get better.

OK, nothing is better with rest. And so then we'll get super shoes. We have a different category now, right? OK, now we have springs, right?

And running shoe companies can't say springs because I double F, it makes it illegal. But there's spring, be clear. It's a, the comedy, it's not the foam. It's not the plate.

It's both together, right? They're turning away to displace and rebound. Well, I'm going to pause there, but please don't lose the train of thought. My contention and what I've seen, you know, it's like none of the shoe companies are making any claims about the carbon fiber part because from what I've seen from the manufacturing side and talking to people on my side of the business, everyone's saying, oh, the carbon fiber is there.

Because if you just had that much of that foam without something in the middle, it would sheer almost instantly. So it's structural not doing, you know, not doing something functional or the structural part is significantly more than the functional part. It's a little bit of both that is true that two soft of foam won't hold together. But I have tested some shoes that don't have plates, they have some more things in them that still work.

But let me put it this way. When super shoes came out and they want to figure out someone made these legal my back up even more in a second. So I swam right as a kid. And so Speedo came out with the speed suit and they said they marketed it as it's slipper than the drag coefficient of your skin.

And it was in fact. And so the sanctuary body came down and said, you know what, we don't want to make this we want to make this about swimming, not about smooth making suits. So anything in the drag coefficient, see, you know, greater than this level or less this level of analog, right? So they put a level on that what you can do cycling for the hour record, right?

There's people going to Belgium, which is kind of bank track and they ride as fast. They can't see how far they can go an hour. And for a long time we had just normal robots and then airbars came out and just wheels and changes in position. So the government body came out and said, Hey, what the sport to be about the rider and not the bike.

So we have limits on geometry as far as I can do things. So there's a preference here that we have restraints to keep things sort of about the athlete and not about the equipment. When it comes to super shoes, basically saying, because now you've got this, this different state where how do you control us? Do you make it about the phone?

Do you make it about the spring? Do you make this about how do we quantify this and give people boundaries? Right. And so it got tough and nobody wants to cycle innovations.

But so the government body came through and said, okay, we're giving you 40 millimeters of stack height. You can whatever you want with 40 millimeters, you'd go be creative, right? And that's still going to be legal. Now, this is really interesting.

Few months ago, another company came out with a shoe, which is a stack height of 44 millimeters. And that is illegal. But here's the thing. They're claiming, Oh, even though we're legal, we're faster.

And yes, you are faster because I gave you more room to compress and rebound. So I just, if you're, if you're bored, I made a little video on YouTube, you can, if you Google a master class on super shoes, my last name will come up, but I use this a little visual to show it happens. It's me jumping on the ground up and down. Okay.

So I'm jumping on the ground. Um, and if I'm doing that, I'm using what? My body. Okay.

I was barefoot jumping the ground. Then all the muscle intends my legs are doing all the work. Then I jumped on a trampoline. I mean, you jump on trampoline, that trampoline gives and rebounds and springs me back up again.

And you can see really easily, I jump way higher, right? With the same amount of effort, even less effort, right? Jumping and trampoline. Anybody can do this.

It's actually more effort because you have to do more work with your legs and hips. Because it's different. Still, I mean, like, I mean, well, it's definitely, yeah, because jumping rope, I can do that for way longer than I can jump on a trampoline because when I'm jumping rope, everything's much more stiff. I'm using things better when I want to tramp my legs get tired fast.

You watch, you watch just for the fun of it, competitive jump rovers. And sometimes they're just told to stop. You want, there's no need to keep going. You watch them pet of trampoline is they're getting lower and lower and lower with every jump.

And they're done in 30 seconds. So yeah, it certainly definitely takes effort. But yeah, you're going to point it real quick. Yeah.

Sorry. Okay. Um, so when you're jumping on trampoline, right, that trampoline material is distorting and it's rebalting, right? So yes, you're still working, but the trampoline is doing the work.

The work is forced through a distance, right? It is compressing through a distance and is rebounding back up again. So then what I did was I took some firewood. There was sitting right there, I stuck it underneath the trampoline and I'm jumping on.

And so now that trampoline can't give as far, right? It can't really move about half the distance. It was deforming because again, work is forced through a distance. And you see very clearly, I don't jump as high.

So we allow something else to move you. If I shrink the distance, I make it less effective. So when you say what's coming, there's a reality here. If I allow for more translation, we send our mass, you're going to springboard back up again.

Like period, right? Okay. So if you're not out there, we need to look at how we can take technology and still keep the human in mind because again, when you offload the body, dangerous things start to happen. And here's one thing that's really important too.

If you're my trampoline example, if you happen to jump perfectly up and down, then your body moves perfectly up and down. But we don't do that, right? We drift a little bit sideways forward back. You come in a little bit of an angle.

And if you come in a little bit of an angle, what's the trampoline do? It springs you back off at the angle again. So now you've got an increase, not just in vertical speed and four speed, but you've got more instability in your system. Who wants to run with your friend pushing you right and left as you run behind you?

That's like, no. Okay. And that's what's happened when you come in these super shoes, you're only costing to them. If you've got a little imbalance, super shoes will increase your amounts.

We'll magnify it. And so now you've got a certain person who's used to running a certain way. And you said, let me put the super shoe on. And I'm going to run in a certain new way now.

And now I've got tissues being loaded more throughout a given range of motion. Every single stride gets what happened. Biosars to go, I'm not prepared for this. We're done.

Okay. So very long way to way of saying, I hope we can get some semblance of common sense coming in. We say we've got footwear that helps the footwork that's supposed to and we've got footwear that has a competitive purpose. Right.

So we're just trying to figure out how do we really match these shoes? Are you going to people, right? Like, you know, when you go to those, you go to the skate ski, you walk in the shop and they basically have you stay on a scale that weight shaming you. They're just seeing how heavy do you weigh, right?

And how stiff is skied, you need a camber and decamber underfoot. Those of you don't skayskis are for the reference, but simple. It's weight categorized because it's not much elasticity in sk skiing. Sorry, my computer is thinking.

But when we look at running, there's more to it than just body weight, right? And so we have to look at those of you who are curious to look at body weight. Yes, we look at stride speed, look at stride, contact style dynamics, even the tight, you know, it's called the contractive proteins here in muscles, which is a genetic thing. Even that makes a difference of how these forces go through into your actual body part.

So there's a lot of things that are really hard to quantify right now. Again, this technology is kind of its early stages. You know, as we figure out how to classify these more, we'll probably be able to do a better job. But right now it is the Wild West and yeah, it is fascinating to me.

Just sort of seeing like, you know, we last month in each other at the trade show called the Running Event, it's all for running shoe stores, mostly almost like, anyway, mostly running shoe stores, some others. And everybody had some giant quote super shoe and you can replace the logos between the shoe brands and you could never tell the difference primarily. And the biggest thing that I saw that blew my mind was the companies that are doing, I don't know what they call them, but I call them single you shoes and the idea is you can wear these for a race and then they're done. And oh, by the way, they cost about four or $500.

I mean, that just blew my mind. So we shall see. I mean, you know, here's a question for you. How then given what we just said, well, do you can't even think of the right verb here?

How do you think about, it's an easy verb, our friend, Dr. Phil Maffetone, who still holds on to the idea that the first person who's going to run a legit sub to our marathon will do it on a course similar to what Kipchogated and basically just, you know, smooth and not a whole lot of turns, but we'll do it in bare feet. And his reasons, their number of his reasons, I'm done. Half a million are the reasons, but thoughts.

Well, I'm not going to his quote, but I can tell you that that we know that feet actually do a very good job on their own. Between the foot and the ground, they don't work as well, period. So the idea of having someone run to barefoot is totally within the realms of physiology. I'm not even surprised by that statement.

He's fundamentally wrote a whole book called 159 or one colon 59. So one of our 10 minutes. And it's in many ways, not really based on, but may as well have been based on Ron Hill, who won the 10 K in Mexico barefoot. And when someone said, you know, why'd you run barefoot?

His answer was they were the lightest shoes I could find. And that's a big part of Phil's idea is you got nothing getting in the way. You're going to be more responsive. You'll be stronger, et cetera.

It's so, you know, and people say, well, why don't you just find some athlete and sponsor them and do that? Yeah. We don't have the kinds of millions of dollars these people are getting paid to do this. And more importantly, it would be a couple of years of training for somebody that used to doing that kind of distance and handle that correctly, which raises, you know, the other obvious point, it blows my mind that to this day, people will watch somebody win some race in some shoe and people, you know, who are not a 105 pound Kenyan running roughly over two hours for 26 miles.

They will then go buy that same shoe if they are 350 pounds who can barely complete a 5k and I'm not trying to body or distance shame anybody just trying to draw a discrepancy between the person wearing that shoe and then what happens in the marketplace, which just blows my mind. You see, years ago, I was at a track workout with some athletes who was three Olympians and it was kind of an open track session, right? And there was community folks there doing their own track workouts. And it's one of the things which I, it's like, you know, certain things stick with you, right?

And exactly to just finish a workout, right? And they just, you know, blew splits out the water and people just how you're rubber necking is watching, doing their own workout, right? And after the workout, they were sitting there, you know, just doing some recovery stuff in the middle of the field and bunch of people come buying like, what shoes are you running in? What do you do for this and that?

And they just kept happening with all these stupid equipment questions. And I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be stupid. But like, it was just like, and Mattie sat there, right? Just listened to it and tried it on a nice face, right?

And then when the group walked away, one of them just said, if those people had any idea how much hard training we have to do to show up day in day out and do these things, they quit running. And it goes to go to the fact that this stuff takes work. And yes, the people you see are in the new shiny, fancy stuff because they're, they're selling the product, right? So it's reality.

But you don't understand, it takes a lot of hard work, right? And we live in a world where people are like, what's the three exercises? What's the one thing to do? If it was that simple, then we'd all be Olympians, right?

We'd all be single records. And it's not that simple. It's actually quite hard. And, you know, on that note, it's interesting to me that, you know, I'm old, right?

So if I go back 20 years ago, and you said, who does core work? People are like, what the hell is core work, right? These days, everybody's core work up until five years ago, he said, who does hip work? What the hell is hip work recently?

Okay, hip work. So yeah, I should, we'll do my rotational hip control, right? So I have to start to come more and vote, and you talk about, okay, well, guess what? Your spine's a body part.

Your hip's a body part. Guess what? Your foot, regular body part two. And quoting your shoe and sock on doesn't make that irrelevant.

Okay. And so you have to, I don't have to. Look, really, no stone in turn to it, right? Like you've got a goal of doing whatever it is you want to do.

That's your goal. I just want to help anybody to get there, right? And so what I'm going to ask every single person, listen to this, is I want you to look backwards at whatever your goal is, make whatever your goal is. Maybe I want to walk on a hike, pain free.

Maybe I want to run a marathon this year. I don't care it is, it's your goal. That's not enough. It never is, right?

And so you start somewhere, build some habits for sure. But if you really want to make commitment to yourself and make them a commitment, put the time in because you will see results consistently always wins, right? At the other day, the one time you screwed up and had a cookie is not going to hurt you. But all those days you didn't show up and have some fruits and veggies and take care of your body.

That's the problem with nutrition, right? Same thing if your body, if you miss one day, so what, right? But like the years and decades of work that you build up and taking care of your body and building stability control, that's not really matters. And I just, I put that there just to say, again, I'm the PT, right?

I'm the guy who you call when you're broken. And I don't want you broken. I want my phone to stay quiet. Not paying me.

Sorry. But you know, and that comes in taking care of your body. Yeah. It's funny to say that yesterday I got an email from Joel Smith that was talking about this in a different way.

It's like, you know, basically you want to get your whole body to be able to handle whatever you're doing. And there's even if you're doing something that's the same thing running, it's just moving forward, you're like, saying, let's run the trail. And but that doesn't mean there's not these little things that you need to be strong enough to handle. And in this email that he sent, it's like, Hey, look at, let's look at the I'm reading this.

Look at the general physical preparation methods of the Polish weightlifting team from the 1980s. And what I can tell you is they're doing better gymnastics than most, you know, high school gymnasts. They're doing all this stuff to just get super, super strong, super flexible, super, you know, just really become good all around athletes. Now that said, gives me a flashback the first time I walked into a cross-way gym, they're trying to get me a sign out there.

We're going to make you a better athlete. I want to be a better athlete. I just want to get that much faster in the 100 meters. Just didn't know how to deal with that.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like I had a friend who went to undergrad in Austria, right? And she was in the KCLD program there.

And the KCLD program to get into the KCLD program, you had to meet their standards list. Their standards list, I think there's probably 1% of the population you asked to meet it. You had to like, you know, run a certain, you know, a distance at a certain time, do a set up pull-ups, push-ups, you know, swing up a certain mind distance, dragging this weight behind you in the pool, you know, like do all these great, you get to do like tumbling with part of the entrance to the KCLD. It was like, you had to be a specimen, an injury warrior we're getting, right?

Like, and it just, again, they wanted you to say, okay, look, if you're looking to study this field, we want you to be excellent at these things. So you're built good behaviors, good body runners, we want to teach you to learn their feeling, right? And so the more you do things, the more you body learn skill movement, the more you can develop a better movement ability and to do all the things you want to do, right? It's obviously a extreme example, but I just go back to that, like, man, they walk the walk, right?

Yeah, it's a thing that I've said, I wish that to graduate high school, you had to be able to do a round off backhand spring. It was just something just to get people to learn how to move in ways that otherwise they wouldn't. That changes the way you think about the world. I mean, every gymnast I know talks about how much they like being upside down.

No one else has that conversation. And it literally does things to you that are, you know, can be very, very helpful. But yeah, that's a whole other conversation. I'm trying to think of anything else, anything we're missing in the wonderful world of Super shoes.

I just, again, like, they're tools, right? They're tools, they do change things. They might help you run faster. They might not, but they're going to change your gate regardless.

And if you're going to do any time you change anything for related, you need to make sure you adapt, right? And so, you know, people say, it takes a year, it doesn't take a year for your tissues to adapt, but it takes several weeks to months, depending on the different body part. And you want to make sure you do it slowly. Well, I'm going to say it depends a little bit.

I mean, the shoe is going to force a gate change that you would otherwise not necessarily do on your own. This is an interesting bit of timing. I'm getting together on tomorrow night, Friday night when I'm recording this, and then Saturday with Nick Romanoff from Pose Method. And we've had interesting conversations about, you know, the optimal form, et cetera.

But it makes me think of another conversation with our friend, Ben O'Nig. And Beno, his whole thing is don't arbitrarily change your form because that's the thing that's going to get you injured. And the shoes are semi arbitrarily changing your form. Now, I've arguments with Beno about this whole idea because there's ways of changing your form.

I mean, you know, it's like you have to arbitrarily change your form if you're going to learn to do a round off back and spring double backflip. That's not a normal thing. You have to learn to change your form if you want to be a better sprinter and you're just not one of these genetically gifted people who has perfect form from day one, which is pretty much, you know, one or not even one percent of the population. So you have to learn things properly.

You have to learn, be able to learn new movement patterns, which brings up another point. My undergraduate research was all about how you learn new movement patterns. And it's not by making an instantaneous acute change. It's by slowly and in slow motion, learning how to do it till your brain feels comfortable and then you get better, faster, et cetera.

So this is just violating all the principles of neurological learning. 100%. You know, I've always said for years, and I actually given talk this morning about students about this, I was basically saying, look, anytime you see anybody do anything, anything like get from a chair, what you're seeing is their best compensation. You're saying today with a given range of motion strength and flexibility, you and so you got that's how you get from a chair.

That's how you walk across the room. That's how you do a back hand spring, right? And so if you want to change form, if you force a change, you typically want to do two things. One, you screw up neuromotor control, as you said, right?

You don't have a muscle memory dial then. And two, you overload the body because your body doesn't have a requisite head up and expose to that amount of strength and strain for one period of time. And let me actually give you a really good example of this. So I'm going to give a plug here because I can do that.

My book running rewired in the second edition. I just want to- Hold on. Hold on. First of all, this is going to be the first podcast on the for last time we talked were people aren't going to watch it listen to it in double speed because you and I are we just get into a race.

So pitch a book again, but say it's slow enough that people can figure out what the fuck you said. I wrote a book called running rewired came out about five years ago. The second edition just went to the printer earlier last week. It'll be out in March.

But I have a chapter in there, a lot of new content, but I have a new chapter in there. We talk about what happens in masters runners, right? And master's athletes. And this is interesting to talk about the idea behind movement versus how things change and how things are overloaded.

A lot of people will say that, oh, we see changes in masters runners. We see average results in masters runners show things shifting as direction, right? Oh, and people age among metabolism slows down. Okay, I'm going to tell you one metabolism does not slow down as your age.

You decrease your lean body mass, which affects metabolism. And guess what happens when you decrease your lean body mass? You can't generate enough force production down the ground. And when you do that, you still want to go for a more run.

You can do a more mile run. But because you can't apply my force down on the ground, guess what happens? Your stride compensates. Okay.

And so the problem is not the fact that as you age, you are in peril. The problem is you're not doing enough work to take care of those body parts we talked about to make sure you show up ready. And so going back to the idea behind compensation of force changes, all these things, right? If you actually do strength the power work, you can put down just as much force down on the ground as you did when you were younger.

Okay. Now you might not be able to sprint, you know, what you put it for you, but you put it 20. But you can do a whole heck of a lot better. So, you know, it's interesting to me, there's a lot of research coming out showing, oh, master's runners do this, not more susceptible injuries.

What are you doing that's out of running? Because this is a line of my book. If you asked any biomechanist, any physical therapist how to improve specific characteristics of bone muscle and tendon, we would not say running. I'm not saying it's bad for you, but it's not the most optimal stimulus to improve those body parts.

To improve each body part requires targeted intervention. Those cells which make your muscles bones tend as ligaments regenerate, okay, are all different in how they respond to stimulus. And so you need to think comprehensively. So going back to your point about like when you force a cue or force a certain strike conversation, you don't know how to handle that.

If you show up with a better body, you can do more awesome things. I love that speaking as a master's sprinter and watching things get slower, slightly slower every year. It's like my goal, my now goal is just I want to hit all American times every five years. That's it.

And I'll tell you one thing about master's sprinters getting slower over time. There's a race that we have at the end of the season every year up in Fort Collins, Colorado, master's race, and the last event, maybe second to last event, sometimes we'll do, you know, goofy realize just for the fun of it. But last or second to last event is an age graded 100 meters. So basically, there's a thing about hitting all American time, where if you look at the chart for all American times, you start seeing up until about 40, 45, they stay pretty consistent, then they start slowing down, and then they get really slow over what you get over 60 and they get really slow over what you get over 75.

So if you reverse the time into distance, what it turns into is a way of taking a bunch of sprinters who are different ages and having them run a different amount of distance, different distance for 100 meters. So at 61, I think I run like, I don't remember 76 meters, something like that. The young guys are running at 400, the 80 year olds are running like 40 meters. And what's so great about this and what's so amazing and fascinating is that that race is always a photo finish, not for who came in first and first and second.

It's all eight positions. You can't tell what's what and it all happens within the last step, everybody coalesces. So you see someone who's thinking they're going to win and they put their arms up and they're like, whoa, what the, and there's everybody right next to them. And the old guys are going, I was freaking out because I was getting chased and the young guys are going, I was freaking out because I had to chase you guys.

And it is so much fun that they make you pay to be in this race. And what's even more fun is if you win, you get half of the pot, if you get second, you get 30% of you get 30% and I instituted a policy that whoever wins has to buy pie for everybody else. So yeah, it's a blast, but it is fascinating that it reminds me when Jack Lelane was 90 something and they were doing a new story about him and Jack Lelane, if you're young enough, you'll remember very big deal fitness guy and he also co-invented the universal gym, which should be pretty much can't find those anywhere. Anyway, they're showing him bench pressing on the universal gym and he's like, putting out all the force that he can.

And if you look closely, you can see it was like 20 pounds that he was lifting. And so, you know, aging is a real thing and there's things that we can do like you were saying to do the best you can with what's going to happen with what you got. Totally take care of yourself. Yeah, seems like a good place to call it a day.

So let's call it a day. First of all, thank you guys for being here. Everyone who's watching or listening, reminder go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the places you can find us and how you can engage with us on social media. By the way, there's nothing you need to do to join.

You can subscribe to hear about new episodes, but there's no secret handshake. There's no money involved. We don't make everyone get up and do a dance in the morning. Although that'd be really fun.

And if you have any questions, comments, requests, people who you think I should have on the show, I'm still waiting to get somebody on here who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome. I'm also trying to make that phrase more popular. And you can drop me an email. Just send me an email, move, m-o-v-e and join them.

movementmovement.com. But most importantly, go out, have fun, and live life-feet first.