I often talk about how feet are the most important thing, but I also talk about how glutes are the most important thing. Maybe to train your glutes, you need to train your feet and train your glutes. What's the connection? We're going to find out more about that on today's episode of the movement movement podcast, the podcast where people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy strong body starting feet first and where we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and see if I can say that.
Sometimes the outright lies that people have told you about what it takes to run or walk or work out or do yoga or cross-fit or ride bikes or anything you can think of and do it enjoy efficiently, effectively. And did I mention enjoyably? I know I did because that's the most important part. If you're not having fun, do something different until you are.
I'm Stephen Sachin, co-host, not co-host, of the movement movement podcast co-founder of zeroshoes.com. I got those things conflated. And we call this the movement movement because we're creating a movement that involves you and I'll say more about that in a second. About natural movement.
We're trying to make natural movement the obvious, better, healthy choice the way people currently think of natural food. And that's the movement and the movement about you is spreading the word. It's only happens because people discover the fun and benefits of natural movement and tell their two friends and they tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on. So if you want to be part of the movement part of the movement movement, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
You'll find all the previous episodes, you'll places where you can engage with our content on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook, etc. You'll see where you can like and share and review and give us a thumbs up or hit the bell on YouTube. All those things you know how to do. I don't need to tell you.
Just as it is if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let's jump in with my guest for today. Now I'm going to start before you say anything by seeing how much I can butcher your name in Chinese. Ready?
Go ahead. Okay. Let me see if you can see it. Very close.
So close. How would someone who can actually speak Chinese say it? Okay. Interesting.
Okay. Thank you. I love the correction. My Mandarin is limited to like five words, which gets me in trouble when I'm in China because if I say anything, then people assume that I speak Chinese and it's bad news after that.
Yeah. Gotcha. So coach Chung, I mean, you know, I discovered what you're, I don't remember how I found you, but I was so, so intrigued because for all the people who talk about foot strengthening and we talk about it quite a bit, you have a very different approach. There's something that are, you know, there's a nice Venn diagram and there's an overlap, but there's definitely things where your approach has a whole different foundation and some of the things that you're actually doing are a whole different game.
You want to give people just the readers digest version of what you're doing. Yeah, sure. So a lot of people, I think I want to mention something most people probably aware of first. So for example, when people have cellulites, that's because the fascia tissue underneath, it's not in the right organization.
This has a direct influence to how the skin, how the body functions. People have tried acupuncture or any type of massage before. They will tell you, oh, it feels good afterwards, right? So these type of techniques that people have tried and experienced before has a certain type of influence on the fascia system.
So just to, I'm going to back up a little bit and paint a number over this. The fundamental thing that's interesting to me about what you're doing is you're focusing on the fascia rather than musculature per se. I mean, that fascia is obviously related to muscle and musculature, but you're focused on fascia. Can you tell people, I mean, like what is fascia and how, what you're doing is the difference between attending to fascia versus just attending to muscles?
Sure. So back in, I guess, when we have all these scientific studies on the human body, what the scientists used to do is they went into a second body study, or study the muscle. They removed the fascia, which is the yellowish, whitish content. So that's the rounds and permeates throughout all the organs, all the tissues itself.
And they thought this is something not important. But recently research just revealed the exact opposite because they have done studies through ultrasound studies on how fascia influences muscle contraction for generation. And now we have more understanding of how fascia, how acupuncture controls the superficial fascia, and in return, it has a benefit to the holistic fascia chain. And now we have people, for example, Mike Myers, we have people in Germany, Dr.
Shai talking more about fascia health. So fascia is really this connected tissue that permeates within your body. It's everywhere in your body. There's no place that does not have fascia.
So to understand it, in other ways, it's like that dark matter or dark energy permeates the universe. But we don't know what it does, but it's just there. So fascia, it's sort of like that. And so talk about how, what the difference is between doing fascia training and just doing say, you know, muscle strength training.
When you do muscular strength training, you're working on the muscle fiber in the concentric way much more. So you are inducing muscle for hypertrophy and you can be in blood flow. You want to create this micro tear to the muscle and get it bigger. So you can generate more force, more contract force.
Fashua training, on the other hand, we're working on creating a more holistic body. We're working on to create more responsive fascia web strength. This is what we're working on. And because fascia integrates muscle.
So there's three layers of fascia that permeate and intertwines your muscle tissue. In your superficial layer of muscle moves and contracts, in order for you to interface with your interior muscle, it has to go for fascia. So by understanding this, if you're training your fascia and making it really compliant and making it really responsive, you can actually generate a lot of force over time. And this can be measured.
Interesting. All right. So I want to jump into that some more and of course talk about where this came from, how you found this and develop this. But first because it is the movement podcast, let's do something moving.
What can you share with people who are listening or watching either diagnose something about the condition of their fascia or feel something that's actually something exercising where they can experience what we're starting to talk about? Because our fascia starts from our feet, we all know about the plantar fascia. And I'm guessing a lot of people have suffered some type of pain in their plantar fascia in their life once or twice. So this plantar fascia needs to be stimulated just like anything else, right?
If you don't stimulate a healthy organ, it becomes dysfunctional atrophy. The simple exercise people were a simple assessment people can do is just by standing straight and in a heel off position, meaning that they try to get under the foot and toes. If they feel their body starts to crumble and wobbly and they have absolutely no control and then the ankles start to shake. That tells me their fascia connection is weak.
And in this position, a lot of people who are quite dominant, meaning their muscle is neurologically dominant. Whatever they're doing, they're just using their quad. They don't feel any glutes. Their glutes is also soft.
But in a personal ways, good fascia connection, their glutes is hard and activated in the heel opposition and they're extremely stable. And this is what we see in Division I athletes, Division I athlete and professional athlete. All these guys functionally very sound. They don't have to necessarily have big muscle, but they're connected to sprints extremely high.
So someone's going to stand on both feet and just L.A. They're heels a little bit. First of all, how high on their toes do you want them for this test and how long do they need to be able to stand stably with that before they get any shaking to determine that they've got some strength, some special integrity? Sure.
They can stand about more than 45 degrees, more than 45 degrees. So like around 45 to 55 degrees, heel off the ground. And if they are only feeling their calves being text the most and they feel wide being text the most and they're very feel unnatural and wobbly, they need to basically that tells me that they need this type of training. They need training in their fascia.
Because what that tells me is that their glutes is not working. And we know now that glutes of muscle in the glutes, more than 75% inserts into fascia. So there's a lot of fascia content in the glutes that need to be working in order for the person to actually use it in movement. I'm always amazed.
The number of runners that I've met. The number of runners that I've met who have no butts, they don't engage in their glutes at all. And I've done the track. This is going to sound like I'm some sort of perf.
But when we've done exercise, glute exercises and they can't seem to do that, I'll stick my finger in their glute and go just try to contract that, make that harder. And they often can't do it. And then I do the opposite. I go, put your hand on my ass.
I always do that too. I always do that too. I just think I'm like, look, feel it. This is what happens.
This is what's supposed to happen in your body. And people feel that they were like, okay, this is very different from mine. Well, it's an interesting thing when I talk about walking properly. One of the first ways that I describe this, I said, just keep one foot on the ground, lift the other foot a little bit, and then contract the glute of the foot that's on the ground, which because your glutes are hip extensors, that should make your foot go back.
That'll make you move forward. And then just use your other foot to not fall on your face. A lot of people could not figure that out because they couldn't contract the glute first, which is what I was thinking when I was doing it. So then I tried another cue, which was, okay, think about being a figure skater, or being an ice skater, like a speed skater, and drive your heel back.
And that one, they could often do. And it started to give them the hint about using their glutes. But I think that a lot of what's gotten people's glutes turned off is just a style of walking, especially with big thick padded elevated heel shoes, where you just kind of kick your foot out in front of you, land, and then try to essentially, you know, pogo stick off it or hop over it, rather than using your glutes and handstrings as hip extensors as prime movers. And it's fascinating to see how people, like, I mean, they've just lost the ability to do that at all, to walk like normal humans.
Absolutely. I mean, having a very thick bottom of the shoe will change your mechanics forever. And this is on a subconscious level. Like, you don't realize what it does is, first of all, it relaxes your plantar fascia.
And shield that stimulation from the bare ground. That's number one. That's just coming from a neurological, appropriate perspective point of view. Right.
Secondly, what it does is that because that added, even if you just add one inch, your body have to adapt to that one inch. So to adapt that, your foot actually have to relax even more to dorsiflex higher than necessary. You watch people who are walking around, for example, in slippers, where it was very zero bottom shoes. They do not dorsiflex.
They walk naturally. But with people who are wearing those high heels, very thick soles, they will have to dorsiflex to accommodate that type of mechanical interference. So over time, they lost the fascia tension in their foot. And also, they have this wrong neurological pattern in their ankle.
So now you have a double whammy there. And then because of lack of fascia tension, their glutes start to degenerate because everything's connected. Well, it's interesting. You said that I was on the track last weekend.
And there was someone else. I mean, I watch people run all the time. And most of the time, I just shake my head a lot. But this person in particular, I'm looking to see what his shin angle was when he was landing, where his body was, what was landing in relation to his body.
Everything fundamentally looked OK. But to your point, just as his foot was about to land, he dorsiflex, which for people who don't know is raising your toes towards your knee, just pulled his toes way up in a way that was completely unnecessary. Had he not done that, he would have been landing in a great stance, nice and strong, using his body correctly. But to your point, I hadn't really thought of it.
It's just like a habit that he's developed of lifting his toes. And again, completely unconscious. It was a really interesting thing. So I'm going to, again, kind of backing up or going around a little bit, talk to me about how you came to this.
Where did you start to find this out, figure this out, put it together? So I wasn't born in the US. I was born in Beijing, China. And when I was young, I studied the martial arts.
And one of the things that we did was the training for martial arts, it's poor stance or called ma-poo. Basically, you will get into a slimy squat stance and hold it there for a long period of time. And this is also known as the asymmetric fashion tensioning, supposedly. And I did a lot of this.
And when I came to the States, I started to play basketball. And I started to play basketball with a lot. It's required by law. I mean, you had to.
Yeah. So I'm a very active person and I'm very competitive also. And I noticed that I was losing more than I'm winning. So I know there's something missing.
Also, at that time, I was into a lot of the, I was also brainwashing to all these shoe heaps, like, all this to the Jordan's, whatever Nike came up with. So I wear those because I saw all the basketball stars wear them. Somehow he has some connection. So I wear them.
Well, yeah, you want to be like those guys. I mean, come on, Black Eyed. What the hell? Yeah, exactly.
So but what happened afterwards was I developed a knee pain. And of course, like anyone else at the time, I just went to the doctor. I went to see what's going on. And they said, oh, you quad is weak.
You're surrounding muscle around the knees week. You do this and that, give me some exercises, right? And also, you know, also like at that time, I was young, I was like around 20. And there's a lot of fitness program out there on strength training, vertical jump, I'm running.
There's a lot. So I followed their programs. I was lifting weights. I was in the gym 24.
I mean, whenever I have three times, I was in the gym lifting. I was trying to, because I'm not lazy person, I like to work to just better myself. But then I realized over time, I was relying on the muscle for all my movement. And it became very different.
It's very different because I actually take myself and see myself move and land. It's very muscle bound. It's not, it doesn't look correct. There, at the same time, I met a very good friend, well, my best friend to this day.
And his name is Peter. And I mentioned this a lot because he really made me see what is going on in the feet because he grew up in the mountains when he was young. And he always run barefoot. He always run barefoot.
And he clearly remembers that he's a memory. And this guy, he's, I would say he was on the light build side. He's not muscular, anything. And we used to work out and he definitely lifted much, lifted much less than I did.
So I'm like, so he doesn't have the muscle strength. Yeah, he's extremely athletic and he doesn't have any knee pain. What is going on here? Then one day we were just watching a basketball game.
I still remember that was the game. I think it was a one of the championship games and we were at his house. And you know how in the Chinese culture, we don't wear the shoe inside the house. Right.
So both of us were barefoot. So we were just, you know, having a good time. And I realized that his foot has blisters on top of toes and his toes are curled. And there's and has a lot of these black rotundans visible is very different from my very different.
So I asked him, you know, how did you get this? What's happening? He's like, I don't know. It's just natural.
So then I asked him to just do some movement for me and jump and land and move around. And I see it's completely different than how I use my foot. So from there, also what were you noticing? Well, first of all, uncle stiffness, it's it's it's tremendous.
And he had also when he was off his heels, he was extremely stable, extremely and he's goozled hard. Oh, at that time, my goozled was soft. So what so so I wanted to find out more about this. And, you know, I actually at that time, I asked a lot of these gurus, fitness groups and I asked them.
So I got the basic problem is that why is it when I lift weights, I cannot use glutes. If I lift weights, I cannot use glutes. That means when I run or move, I'm not going to be using glutes. They had no at that time, they don't really have a good answer for this.
And they told me, you got to do more like isolation, glutes, isolation exercises and stuff like that, which I did. But I found it to be not helpful because once I get out of that isolation stance, the effect where off, you can't use your glutes again, because I'm actually standing to come to execute these movements versus lying down doing the hip thrust. So then I did more research, much more research. I also studied Tai Chi.
And while the Tai Chi principle is is called silk reeling strength. And this sprint after I understand what it is, it's really it's really what what describes the fascist princess. So reeling strength. So really interesting.
It's interesting metaphor. And there's correlate. I mean, physical, if you look at the silk web, you look at the fashion. Wow, there's just everything just matches.
So you that way I can understand all this is whether this webbing. Also one thing that I mentioned before is that the principle Tai Chi is one part moves all part moves. Meaning it's not anything that you're doing your body, any movement, you're executing your body. It should not be a segmented.
It should be using your entire integrity model in your body, which is your fashion. So with this knowledge, I look into their foundation of training of Tai Chi. My foundation of training of Tai Chi is really the trend Trump, which means that you stand in isometric. But what they often I think 90% of the the masters, they don't talk about this or maybe even more.
Maybe 98% can talk about this. They say they require the person to grip their foot. It's a very generic term, often missing translation and often don't get talked about enough. So I did exercise.
I didn't get the benefit I was looking for, but I did not miss about that part. So I spent a long time over 10 years trying to figure out and I found out what exactly I now I break it down to six steps. To show people how exactly you can activate your foot the correct way. And guess what this happens when you actually activate your feet the right way, your foot starts to generate a neurological effect and your foot start to morph.
Physologically, you can see your foot, for example, you measure it three weeks, take a picture in four weeks, take a picture again in some other timeline. You can see your foot gradually change its look. Then I went to a neurologist to measure my book EMG reading. And the neurologist said that he never seen something like this before.
It was off the charts just standing there. I'm not doing anything. I'm just simply putting my mind to my feet. Interesting.
Wait, so you're putting your mind to your feet and not trying to flex, if you will, your glutes. I'm not trying to squeeze my glutes as well. I'm only squeezing my foot. I'm only controlling the punter fashion and it has a direct influence to my glutes and it was off the charts because we also compare the EMG of me doing the hip thrust.
The same knowing is very different. I lasted much longer. Interesting. So, OK, there's a lot to unpack here.
So this whole concept of gripping the foot now FYI, so I did Tai Chi for a number of years. And one of the things that was unusual about the group that I was practicing with, the teacher was a guy who started, when I met him, he'd been doing Tai Chi for 22 years. He was 27. His dad was a world champion judo player and somehow got Eric into Tai Chi.
And Eric, he kind of like you, he really wanted to find me as well, find the truth underneath some of these things. So if Tai Chi was a fundamental fighting art, which is the way it was, he wanted to see what Tai Chi was like as a fighting art, not as a real martial art, not as something that old people do to relax. And so that was the way we treated it, is that this was a real fighting art. And so we spent a lot of time doing ice magic, standing on one leg.
And I don't know that we were doing what we were doing, we were doing what we were doing, but we were certainly paying a lot of attention to the foot and where you were feeling the contact with the foot and what you were doing with your foot. It was we did a lot of crazy things in that class. I'm actually going to kick out of this. The way I started doing Tai Chi with Eric was we actually met doing Aikido.
And then someone made a comment that Eric did Tai Chi and went over to his house. He was living with like, there was like five guys living in this house in Brooklyn. And someone said, have you ever had Eric push you? I said, no, don't know what you're talking about.
So Eric says, all right, well, I want you to stand, you know, I'll describe this for people. Just stand one foot in front of the other, bend your knees, put one of your arms in front of your body, parallel to the ground, you know, bend your arms. So there's like a 90 degree angle between your upper arm and your forearm, just in front of your body and just relax. And he gently puts his hands on my forearm and he's kind of moving it around gently.
And it was really quiet in the room. Their living room had no furniture. And I look over my shoulder kind of wondering where everyone was. And they were all standing about 10 feet behind me holding a mattress vertically.
I turned back to Eric and I'm about to say, what's with the mattress? And he just looks at me and goes bye bye. And what it felt like was that he just tapped my forearm and then I flew and hit the mattress 10 feet behind me. And once I got off the ground and went, OK, I got to learn how to do this.
So it was a very different approach to Tai Chi, but again, I don't think we paid as much attention. We certainly didn't pay as much attention to the foot the way you did. And I'm curious if you could say more about this whole idea of gripping the foot. Because obviously that's a piece of what we're talking about.
Yeah. So so the foot on the bottom of the foot, that's the planter fashion. So a lot of people who grew up barefoot who are actually to today's elite athletes, they, for example, when are Daniel from Brazil, who retired as well, perhaps one of the best soccer players in the world today. When they were young and that he had no money, they played barefoot.
And when your body learns how to play barefoot, you're not going to have movement, behaviors that will hurt your foot or heel strike. Right. You are going to spend majority time on your ball of the foot. And the stimulation from the harsh environment creates neurological stimulation.
When the foot applied to adapt to that, it has to adapt it in a factor tension. Anyway, that means providing more tension in your tissue, more tension in your foot. And if you are raised up in this type of neurologically stimulating environment with movement integrated, you are a very good mover. A majority of people today will live in the urban society and we grew up with the shoe.
So how do we actually create this type of phenomena? It's actually so there's there's people who there is the barefoot group that who's to adapt to the harsh environment and try to create some type of neurological stimulation by going barefoot. But if they are already grown, meaning like if neurologically they're grown, if they want to tap into more of their connection, they actually have to put a lot of intentional effort into tensing their feet, into tensing their factual connection to make it happen. And before I thought, you know, let me just do my barefoot exercises and try to create some of the stimulation.
Yes, it does help a lot. But after I studied the work of Huber and Bezel, their neurological experiment on the cat, the visual cortex, understand that there is a developmental, developmental progression of the of the neurological connection. So at certain time, if you don't have enough neurological stimulation doing the developmental stages, this means when we were younger, that part of the neurologic connection is forever weakened. And it will take a much bigger effort to reverse that.
And this is this is why I think in another way answers the question, why some barefoot runners, they still get injured. Well, I mean, I've seen a bunch of barefoot runners who have had to want to put this, they figured out a way to run, let me try that differently. They figured out a way to be barefoot and accomplish what they're trying to accomplish, say, run a half marathon or run a marathon. But when you look at them from the outside, they aren't necessarily running.
So for example, and here's a weird version of this. Dr. Irene Davis at Harvard has a force plate treadmill. And she didn't experiment giving people some biofeedback where there's a screen in front of the treadmill with a line on it showing some amount of force.
And she said, you know, I want you to run and just keep the amount of force that you generate below that line. And I said, I can predict what happened for a lot of people. She was, what's that? I said, they ran or they were able to get the force below that line by doing something that looked like a really fast, kind of weird walking, like Groucho.
Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
I said, because so they figured out how to move across the ground barefoot, but they're certainly not doing something called running. And similarly, when people talk to me about what exercises do I do before I run barefoot, I go, there's nothing you can do. I mean, there's things you can do that you're going to talk about, I'm sure, actually. But the difference between any exercise you're going to do and running barefoot, it's night and day because you're just way more force, way more often, you know, it's not the same.
I mean, there's certainly things that you want to do to get stronger. That's helpful. But the thing that's going to really make a difference is running barefoot. And it never occurred to me until just now that I mean, I don't know.
Certainly I may have missed that developmental cycle for using my feet properly, but I was, I spent a lot of time running around as a kid, a lot of time barefoot. I was an all American gymnast and doing floor and vaulting. So I spent a lot of time doing all your barefoot. Exactly.
And before gymnastics, I was a diver, which is also barefoot training in many ways. So a good history of that in advance, which anyway, that was a tangent from something. I don't remember where we were going on that. Oh, just the neurological thing of just, you know, whether you got it and what it takes to then train afterwards.
So now to that to your point, though, it's funny that when we started zero shoes, I got introduced to some people who make sandals that are super thick with really big arches. And I couldn't figure out why. And they said, well, it's because, you know, once you're over the age of 40, you can't develop arch strength. And I remember thinking that's an interesting position to take.
I started running barefoot when I was 45. And from doing that, I developed arches in my feet. So clearly I had developed arch strength. So that was clearly nonsense what they were saying.
And we know that 90 year olds, when they do a weightlifting program, can get stronger. So clearly it seemed like it's the body of that. Yeah, exactly. Body's going to dab.
But it definitely does take and it's different for different people because there's just some critical differences about how well you would have to activity. But I love having to put like doing the combination of attending to the movement or the activity you want to do, say running as an example, but then doing the supplemental work that it takes to really make that better and knowing this is a long process. I don't want to make it sound onerous or annoying, but just it's a lifelong process of improvement. You can always be doing more to get a little better and people, I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world.
I don't really live here, but it's amazing how people just want a quick instant fix. And when somebody say, hey, here's our magic shoe that's going to do that. And it's a big padded shoe with motion control in our sport, which does the opposite. People are, you know, have been high-tech shoe, low-tech foot.
That's a good line. But we've been so conditioned to look for an external instant answer that many people aren't comfortable just doing the ongoing, I don't want to use the word work because that just makes it sound like it's a pain in the butt, but just the ongoing process of helping your body work. It's fascinating. I think that it's a really interesting part.
And there's two aspects of that that occur to me. One is during COVID, I've been doing more exercise than I have outside of COVID, not because I had more time or whatever, but because I was just getting kind of bored, I think. And I found that running zero shoes has been very tiring. And so I can't do big workouts.
So I had to find things that I could do in like 15 to 20 minutes because that's like all the time I've got at the end of the day or the beginning of the day. And so that's been really, really helpful. And what's been fascinating is watching something that I knew from when I was a kid is that the benefits really kick in a little bit after you feel like you need to quit because you're not seeing the benefits. It's like it takes you have to get over that hump and then you start to see it.
Like when I was a gymnast, my best friend and I, we were lifting weights one summer. The first month was just kind of felt like we were just getting used to how to lift the weights. The second month we were seeing improvement, but it was the third month where we got much bigger and much stronger. Now here I am 40 years later.
I don't know what's going to help quickly. My body's going to change and adapt. But some of the stuff that I've been doing, I mean, my wife said this morning, she says, what do you have enough to? Is it just because you've been playing these kettlebells, which is something I've been doing lately?
I said, no, I think it's just a consistency that of just doing things that I've been doing in the last eight months that's been making a difference. And part of it was just getting over that urge that kicks in usually around the three or four week mark of going, I'm going to try something different now, getting kind of bored. And then that's then getting past that then it becomes a habit and that consistency is the most important part or one of the most important parts. So do you want to talk about you talk about the six exercises or six stages?
You want to chat about that? So the foot, right? So the first part is your toes. So remember the assessment you've done, right?
I've taken a look at your feet as well and your feet does show a lot of fashion and science where if I look at someone else, I post someone else's street and say, let me look at your feet, they probably don't have that. You want to describe what some of those are for my feet? So the first thing is that you look at how the flexor tendons on top of your toes, how they are pronounced, if they do show at all. Some people, they just won't have any.
They don't show. And this has to do with the superficial fashion. If your superficial facial fashion has enough fashion, web strength, these tendons are more likely to show than not. And also another very important clue is your anterior to be able to tend it, which is the very thick tendon in the front.
And this tendon is extremely important. Many people don't know. And I also see many trainers talk about this tendon in the opposite way. They tell people do not fire this tendon when you exercise because it's going to make you more tired and stuff like that.
So for people, I mean, if they want to try and see if they have what their interior to be, tendon is this is the thing, well, I can think of a bunch of ways of doing it. If you want to have someone do a little self diagnostic to find where that is and see how pronounced it may be, how would you do that for them? So it's right in front of their between their between their shin and their foot and it's right in front of their ankle. There's a very big, thick tendon.
You cannot miss it. People who when they stand when they stand, yes, exactly. That's the one when people have problem activating their glutes and their their glutes are soft and they can't really engage in any way whatsoever. This tendon usually is not existent.
So when they stand there, this tendon does not get activated at all. Who activists this tendon you need to actually use what what I call the hyper because you have to engage your feet. You have to be activating your toes. You have to be activating all these intrinsic muscles in your feet down below.
So this creates tension for your tendon. It's like, you know, you can be a master violinist. You can have all the skill in the world, but you get this violin that the string has no tension. Whenever you're playing the tune is all the tune, you cannot work in such environment.
So the body is saying you can have the best mind in athletics. You can have you can be a best mover. But if your body physiologically does not give you that who you cannot perform, so the foot and the barefoot shoe together will make you that that master violinist that you want to become because a lot of times we don't pay attention to our feet. So toes, into your tendon, what else?
And your arc. So they all have to be activated synchronously in order for your anterior tendon to be pronounced and activated. At this time, then you can you can do your movement. Your ankle should be actually locked in its in this form in this position, which is a pretty much in any degree angle.
This is why like people look at you, and you say, wow, this, you know, this wonderful running form is so beautiful. They just raise their knees and then they like they like propel themselves. It's so elegant, effortless. Now, if you look at the heel striker, it's really sore on the eye.
You look at them, they're struggling, your heel striking, and then they're like, oh, my knee is hurting. And also the people who are first transitioning from those horrendous shoes that they had and then to to barefoot running or minimum shoes, they still because there's so many so many years on neurological habit built into that, right? Like what you said, they're not running. They're like fast working.
They're running in dorsiflexion. So that's what's happening because they don't know how to run because they never had that that correct neurological teaching. Their foot was never taught properly. I'll tell you the thing about seeing people run beautifully, if any for anyone who hasn't had the chance to watch live an Olympic level sprinter, it's it's almost indescribable.
I mean, I'm a really good sprinter. I'm a master's all American. I'm one of the fastest guys in my age. I believe you.
You are very high level. I'm not saying I'm saying but watching me is so different than watching someone who is, you know, 25 year old guy or woman who's like, you know, top of their game. There's a guy, gosh, I blank on his name and I always do. It'll pop in my head.
I got to train with a couple of years ago. He and his wife, his wife is Mandy White and his name is he's a 400 meter, 200 meter, 400 meter runner and it's killing me anyway. Watching him when he was training his ground contact time was so short. It looked like he almost didn't hit the ground.
It looked like, you know, like maybe his foot was approaching the ground and then he stepped on an IED and then he was getting so much movement out of that, so much propulsion out of that. I mean, again, it looked like he stepped on a bomb and it blew him forward. It was it was amazing. And similarly, I've watched, I was happened to be in Berlin when you say the world record.
It was him and Tyson Gay and Safa Powell and watching them run, it just doesn't look human. I mean, these are the best in the world and it looks like a hold. It looks there's a weird kind of combination of effortless and effortful, but I mean, it's just inconceivable. You say, well, I was at the 70 meter mark about five rows off the track and that's when he hits his full speed.
So this guy's running by me at about 29 miles an hour. And when you see somebody running of their own volition at 20, you know, fast enough to get a speeding ticket in my neighborhood. Your brain does, your brain goes, what? Because it's just it's like nothing you've ever seen before.
It's amazing. Exactly. So a lot of athlete that I work with that who are trying out for professional teams, we have to get their 40 yard dash time from, for example, 4.7 down to 4.3 and 4.4. Yeah.
We when we do this type of training to the foot, what we're trying to do is create a partial tension in the ankle. So imagine if you have any type of slack in your joints, when you when your foot, just like when you said when your foot impacts the ground, if there's any give, any other joints, that force is going to leak out. That energy is going to leak out right away. But to your joint is not meant to handle force, but fascia, it's what's supposed to be keeping them together and acting in unison.
So by doing, you know, a fashion attention in training, you can make this holistic change stronger. This is how we can get athlete from running 4.7 to 4.4. Love it. It's a good transition point.
Can you talk more about what the facial training looks like? And by the way, for people who are listening, you've got a whole program about this. It's not going to be a surprise. We'll tell you about that towards the end.
But can you give people just a taste of what that what that looks like so they get a sense of it? Sure. So first, we have to understand what fascia is response to. We know fascia is important, but how do we actually make it respond to what we want?
So first, I look at the acupuncture. Ocupuncture has the reason why people poke a needle in you. They're not telling you or you have some type of magical spot in your body. They're poking you to activate that magical spot.
It's not bad. I've got to stop right there. I so love that you just said that because because it's one of my favorite things when people talk about acupuncture and it's like you go to five different acupuncturists for the same thing and they'll poke needles in five different spots. And so to hear someone say, no, there's a there there, but not for the reason that you've been told, that's my favorite thing for someone to hear.
So what are doing? Please continue. Sure. So what recently people found out that this is this is the work of Dr.
Helen Lajevin from the Harvard Medical School. So she had a curiosity on on on on on on on on as well. So using the ultrasound study, what he saw she saw was that when the needle penetrates your skin, he actually what happens, your fascia tried to feed it as there is a wound. So your fascia react to it by grabbing the little tiny little.
So in third lines and circles around the needle. So when the practitioner actually use a little needle and twist, what it does, you create a spiral and that spiral pose you entire fascia with it. And by studying on the mice, it's not just on the point, it's in part body. So what that creates is a holistic effect to your fascia sliding, because also what we learned today through office on study in people is that people who have chronic lower back pain, they're fascia and muscle sliding is much less than the healthy people who have no chronic back pain.
So by doing acupuncture, by putting that needle there and manipulate it by moving the fascia physically, it creates healing and fascia says, let's see here's another thing, the emphatic system follows the fact system for those people who don't know about the emphatic system, the fact system is really like a sewer system, the body. Anytime you have an injury, the emphatic system has to take care of getting rid of all the dead tissues, the dead proteins or accumulation of proteins in any type of injury site. By having your fascia, the fascia system moving, you encourage the fascia, you encourage an emphatic system to help you get rid of these risks. Interesting.
Okay. So so my training, so here's the type of my training. We're not suggesting that acupuncture is part of the training, but that's a good lead in. So my training does the exact same thing, but it does it from inside.
So without somebody poking you with a needle and manipulating your super layer fascia, when you introduce fashion tensioning for your feet, for example, you're creating an anchor for your fascia, because what happens is that when the fascia, fashion responds to asymmetric tension, that's when the fascia gets used. If you are moving away, it's your concentric centric, that actually utilizes much less fashion. Okay. But the asymmetric state utilizes your fascia the most.
So this is why we develop the message of training the foot so that you are creating an anchor for your fascia. Now you have an anchor in your fascia. Basically, let's say you have a rubber band. Now you'll hold on to one side of a band, then the other side, whatever you're doing, you have to go from the anchor to that point.
Now you're stretching all your fascia for your movement. As of before, if this part has no anchor, it's loose, whatever you're doing, you're using the muscle, it's segmented. So the fascia will be used much less and it doesn't create that type of moment effect. Interesting.
So can you give people an example of like, I want to go for one of the more unusual fascia training exercises that you would teach? I know what my favorite is, but I want to see which one you think you would pick. It might be surprising for people to discover is useful. To be surprising, I would probably say, well, the simplest is probably people don't get is the Hyper-Cop.
And I see a lot of trainers on social media trying to copy my work. So they say, look, if you do this way, it creates a fashion attention, but they're doing it wrong. I'm like, people think, okay, is this just a regular jump? You're just hopping.
You're just doing resume jumps. You know, what's the really what's different? There is a tons of difference in the Hyper-Cop and the regular regular hop. You know, regular hop, what I said before, and here's a TV, it's not activated.
Okay. So the person who has no expression of the anterior tibut tendon, when they hop, every stop they do is a muscle driven, meaning their fascia is actually not doing the work and their heel will drop and the ankle will give. So every step they're hopping, they're giving. This is how regular people hop.
Now you go to the Hyper-Cop. Now you have to use fascia tension. Now you have to have the lot of tension in your fascia. You secure your ankle.
Your ankle is not moving. Now when you hop this way, it creates a holistic fascia chain and this whole chain is moving. And what it's also doing is if you have anterior knee pain, that's because there's nengo fascia tissue there, what I think what we'll do is actually pose, he pulls the fascia because we're doing this exercise, he pulls the fascia and stretch it and this stretch it, raise healing. Interesting.
I tell you, my favorite was actually the sort of your version of the depth jump, so which for people who don't know depth jump, you're going to stand on a box of some height and just step off of it and then catch yourself just land basically. And the way that this was typically taught by the people who brought a lot of plyometric training to America from Russia is that they land flat footed. They want you to basically sometimes land even on your heel. And the idea is just sort of catch yourself.
It's the eccentric part of any sort of squat motion. So you're just slowing yourself down when you land, but your version of landing on the toes, basically on the ball of foot and engaging the arch and keeping that ankle stable, holding game and different. Yeah, I love that one. I wonder, I can imagine that for many people, if they're new to this, they can try that and they won't be able to keep their heel off the ground.
They're here. They cannot. Yeah. But I mean, that's a really, that's one of the reasons I really love that exercise is that it's an almost instant barometer for how well you're doing just because you can feel instantly how stable your ankle joint is when you land.
But let me tell you a very fascinating aspect of that exercise. If you asked someone who is, I'll say, before seven years old, who never had too long of this bad neurological programming from the big shoe companies, you asked them to ask a little kid to jump and land. They can do it naturally. They can do it.
So what does that mean? We are basically damaging ourselves over time. You are supposed to be a ball and you cannot do something that you did when you were a child. And all kids are fast and movers.
They don't have muscle. Oh, you know, at the beginning of COVID, they close all the public schools around here. And so none of the tracks were open. So we couldn't find any way to train.
There was this one sort of it's called a charter school is semi private school. That was way east of town and where the majority of the population in that neighborhood was Hispanic. That's relevant because when you when you when we went to that track, there was a whole bunch of people there and they were all playing soccer, many of them barefoot. And then the kids, especially the little kids were running around the track and they were doing they did two things.
They had one thing they did was they ran with perfect form. I mean, just impeccable form. They were midfoot for for landers. They were running their body.
They had just right amount of body lean. But the other thing they did was my favorite was they were laughing when they ran. They were smiling when they ran. They were doing it because it was what they did to play.
And when they were tired, they would stop, not for very long and then start again. So it was like just enough to reset and the way they went. And it was just so much fun to watch. And usually it was like a pack of four or five of them holding hands doing this and just like running around the track for fun with again, perfect form.
It looked like they were spending no energy to do it. It was it was it was delightful. And then there was the older kids who did not look like that. Yeah, I mean, I think this is why your work is very important to the next generation because if we keep letting all these shoe companies, the big shoe companies, have our kids wear these big, big clothes and just wear them neurologically incorrectly, we are basically destroying ourselves.
We are spending more money on Medicare for quantity pain than anything else. We need more minimum shoes for kids, really, because the four pages don't have those. No, and to be candid, it's a little tricky because manufacturing shoes for kids, the manufacturing costs about the same amount as manufacturing for adults because it's in the labor, not the materials. And and so it's tricky.
Most companies who sell shoes for kids don't make money doing it or make very little money because or or they're selling, you know, super expensive shoes for kids. Making good shoes for kids is challenging from a business perspective. Something we're looking to be doing more of. And I give you a suggestion.
Yeah, please. I think, for example, the first thing is people's awareness of how important the foot is to their neurological health, right? And also their fashion health. But I think if you can create a subscription model, so you're not just you're not just selling one pair of shoes, you're selling a entire generation, a kid's entire generation from age six to age 18.
Yeah, subscribe to this this model of development. Then you can make money. Possibly. It's it's a bit challenging from the business perspective and something that we're looking to be doing more of and expand because obviously I agree with you.
And in fact, Irene Davis at Harvard has a great line. She's if we just get kids wearing shoes like yours in 20 years, we won't be treating adults for the billions of dollars or problems that they currently present with. And I agree. And that would be a very different world before, you know, I want to wrap it up in a bit, but I want to bring one thing up that just popped in my head for the 10th time.
Can you say something about flat feet and high arches because there's and I'll preface this by saying that people, especially in America, have a lot of opinions about those two things that are not based on reality. So can you chat about that? Right. Yeah, I think I know a lot about this.
And I think maybe some of the people that had different opinions about, you know, if the high arts are better or low arts are better or flat or is if it's a defective or not, really it has to do a lot of these archives has to do with genetics. You can have high art functional, you can have low art functional, you can have almost no art functional. The key here is how much connection you have to have an upswing. A lot of the NBA athletes today, they are African descendant and they have almost no art and yet they're performing the highest at the highest level.
So chasing just the archive physically from the outside, again, it's a superficial type of desire. It's not going to get you anywhere. So having, let's say, an insult, parading some type of art that only helps temporarily, it also creates a bad neurological habit and that does not create a special connection from the feet to the glutes. So the really the key here is to develop that healthy special connection from the feet to the glutes.
Then you will love your body much more. You don't blame your parents while you have this foot. I see a lot of people that do that, they hate their body because they blame their parents. You're full of this line on your pain.
But that's not true because your parents never wear those type of bad shoes that you have when you're a child. Yep. Well, I'm not surprised to hear that the way you presented that is almost exactly the way that I say it. It's not a percent genetic and art child is not the issue.
Strength and flexibility are the important things. Some people who have very high arches, they just need to get a little mobilization going because they've gotten into this pattern where things are hypertonic but not being functional. And so, yeah, you went exactly where I imagine you were. Although we did not prepare this in advance and I didn't expect that.
If people want to discover more about what you're doing, I highly recommend that they do. I mean, there's, you know, I was putting together a list of people who are developing programs that are really valuable for foot and ankle strength and training and there's only about a half a dozen that I've seen that are in any way worth paying attention to. Your support is one of them, which is why we're having this conversation. So how do people find you and what you're doing and get involved and discover more for themselves?
My website, secret of athleticism where you can Google my name, which one see hyper arc hyper arc. I was training. Well, so let's back up. So secret of athleticism.
Did I get it right? I forgot. Yes, that's the website. OK, so that's one.
And then Chuan-C, so it's C-H-O-N-G-X-I-E that they can look you up that way. You've got a lot of stuff on YouTube. A lot. Yes, there's a lot to play with there and anything else that you want people to know in terms of just finding out more.
Just keep on looking at looking for our work in the UFC because right now we're two-time world champion and we're going to continue doing so. Oh, that's a good one. I like it. Well, thank you so, so much.
Again, I wish I had any idea how I first bumped into you and I feel horrible that it has been as long as I've been doing this that it's taken till now. But so be it. Here we are. And I can encourage people enough to just go check out your work.
So thank you. Thank you. And for everybody else, thank you as a reminder, go to www.jointhemovementmovementmovement.com. If you can't remember the links for this, we'll put them in the show notes.
We'll find them there. And as always, if you want to find out previous episodes, etc, etc. and how to find all of our content in different places, that's at jointhemovementmovement.com. If you have a request or a question or a suggestion, drop me an email, move at jointhemovementmovement.com.
And as always, like I say, if you want to be part of the tribe, please do subscribe. And most importantly, go out, have fun and live life feet first.