Episode 256: Movement Lessons From the Dead

If you want to walk or run or do anything on your feet better, maybe the most important thing you need to know, you're going to learn from a dead body. More about that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, you know, those things that are at the end of your legs. And we're also breaking down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to run, walk, play, hike, do yoga, cross it, whatever you like to do and to do that, enjoy it effectively and efficiently. And can I say enjoy it?

It's a trick question. You should know that by now I always say that because if you're not enjoying it, you're not going to keep doing it. And you're going to find something you enjoy, you're going to find something you like and do it an enjoyable way. And we're going to talk about that.

I am Stephen Sashan, co-founder and chief barefoot officer here at Zero Shoes. And we call this the movement, movement podcast because we, that means you and me, we are creating a movement about natural movement, having your body do what it's made to do and not getting in the way by using things that people sell you because they tell you they're going to be better, but actually don't do that at all. The way you are part of this is really simple. Send it over to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com where you'll find previous episodes, the ways you can find us on social media.

And most importantly, the ways you can, well, find the podcast in other places than the one you've found this on this time. Actually, the most important thing is just this, leave a review, give us a thumbs up, give us a five-star rating, all those things that you know that spread the word. That is the movement part of the natural movement thing. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe.

That's all I'm saying. So why don't we get started at Grove Higgins? Why don't you tell people who you are and what you're doing here? Well, my name is Dr.

Grove Higgins. I'm a chiropractor and rehabilitationist and near Colorado Springs Monument area just north of there. I've been working in physical medicine since 1988 when I was 14, had the ability to go and volunteer in a hospital and found the love of my life, working with human beings and making them move better, feel better, feel less pain, reach potential that they didn't know that they had, especially coming back from some of the catastrophic things that I first got a chance to work with. But then I've since that time, I've gotten the chance to do a lot of research and a lot of work in the field of medicine, developing biomechanical models and such like that.

Where I'm currently most interested in is in the area of tissue regeneration and helping doctors basically make patients better from the inside out structure, not just making the move better, but actually making better structure. But it all starts at the ground, like you say. Well, we're going to talk about the inside out thing in a couple of different ways. One that is just personal.

So it's really just about me. But let's start with my intro. So because we were talking about this before and it was super, super fun. What do people need to know?

What can they learn from a cadaver that might make them go? Oh, wait. Yeah. What?

So I had the wonderful opportunity as I was going through school to work in a biomechanics lab. And one of the many researchers I worked with and he's primarily an anatomist, David, Dr. David Greiner. He was really interested in how the foot works, right?

So this whole idea of pronation, supination and all those types of things that, especially from a barefoot versus structured foot standpoint, you know, we are all debating about and such like that. And he wanted to define the terms better. So we were measuring the specific angles and movements of joints in the foot. And so we were talking.

Yeah. If anyone's just listening to this podcast, I encourage you to watch the video because Groves is holding up a great skeletal model and it's always fun to see bones that you don't see because they're on the inside of you. Yeah. Well, and because of that, you know, the middle of our arch is there's something amazing happening there and he wanted to define that.

So, you know, as you look down at your arch, if you have a high arch or even a flat arch, doesn't really matter that arch is moving and is doing something magical and he wanted to define it. So we took 50 lower legs. So from the knee down. And so again, hold on pause right there.

Where do you order 50 lower legs? You go on Amazon and find that one. Well, back then Amazon was at the Amazon was just selling books then. So yeah, you can do that, but you can order up body parts.

And so we had 50 of those now granted most of these individuals were older individuals that died of old age nursing home, that type of thing. And so these are individuals who had a typical American foot, most of them with very flat arches when they came in, we stripped them of all of the skin, all of the fat, all the muscle. And but as we were going down, and I know this sounds kind of gross, but as we're going down and I have the joy of doing this, I would cut the tippy-outless posterior tendon, which goes down behind the angle, under the foot and attaches under the arch. It makes this beautiful spider web under the arch and it helps to compress the arch.

And as soon as you cut that, if that arch was flat, you would watch it raise up. It was the most amazing thing to watch that happen. And that's kind of it. Yeah, I want to break that down.

So again, do me a favor, describe where that tendon is going. And if it's if cutting it makes the arch raise, it's doing something to flatten said arch. There's something else that otherwise is acting in opposition to that that would allow it to raise. So let's walk through the anatomy on that a little slower.

Right. It's very interesting. Right. Right.

Right. So with every joint that's moving, there's two sides, just like you already said, there's muscles on one side, muscles on the other side to move that, to move that body part. So if you're making a, if you're doing a biceps curl, right, and you're bending your elbow, the biceps doing the big lifting motion, but the tricep is also balancing that out. So that way your elbow joint doesn't just explode, right?

Well, that's happening in the foot, except there's 32 joints going at one time in the foot and the angle. And so there's a lot of things that are in balance, just like the bicep tricep idea, right? So yes, by the time of course these people get to our lab or the parts that get to our lab, those muscles are no longer active. They're frozen in that moment of time that person pass away, right?

So as we're going through and cutting these different muscles, not all of them made any difference, but that Tibi alopostere tendon that goes down from the backside of your tibia, so the long thick bone of the lower leg down underneath that angle bone on the medial side, the inside of your ankle goes down underneath and goes to the bottom side of your foot. And as it goes there, it spreads out and makes this, the spiderweb of tendons that attaches to multiple places on the bottom of the foot in order to compress that arch, right? So let's pause there for a second. So what's it doing in a healthy person that requires compressing that arch?

Yeah, so if it's doing its job, think of it kind of like a suspension bridge, right? A suspension bridge isn't actually held up the way that it's created. It's actually creating tension in the middle of the bridge and pushing it to its origins. So from one side to the canyon to the other side of the canyon, and that's what creates stability of the structure and allows it to span it, but then allows things to go over the top of it without it collapsing, right?

So your bottom of your foot is like that, but in somewhat reverse. And so it compresses the bottom of the foot and it takes those bones, and as it's doing that, it's compressing them this way and lifting that arch, right? So a healthy, healthy, to be able to steer with everything else. It's not just one muscle of course, but in this case, if it's doing its job, it's compressing that arch and making that arch stand up.

And this is one reason why, especially working with elite athletes, I see flat feet all the time, but that doesn't matter. It matters if that arch is doing its job when it's moving, not while it's standing there. And an elite athlete has got this amazing nervous system that is queued up for performance. And so when it's standing there doing nothing, what does it do?

It gets lazy. And so most great runners have flat feet. And who cares, right? Because when they're running, their arches are beautiful.

They're doing these amazing, you know, their feet look like hands when they're doing it, right? So anyway, so we get to this, we got all these legs cutting these, and I'm watching these arches pop up as soon as you cut that tibia, I'll spook steer, you're attendant. And got me thinking, of course, it took years for me to figure out what I observed, but that arch was trained to be in that position. To the detriment of the person that owned it, most likely.

And so how would it be trained? Well, this is where research that I did a couple of years before that as a lowly tech in the lab. One of my jobs was to read 500 papers on pediatric foot development for one of the researchers in the lab. And in that, I kept running across several papers that referenced these studies, particularly out of Asia, discussing vestibular function and foot development in children.

So I'm going to set this up. You're born and what's your foot? Your foot is fat and flat, right? What that allows the child to do as they're starting to find their feet is to put more surface area on the ground and be able to sense gravity through a flat foot that has maximum surface on the ground.

So as they are developing this now vertical sense of balance and such, now the vestibular system as it develops allows the body to now start to pick up the arch, which now gives the child a mechanical advantage to launch himself and to move fast. He doesn't need all of that stability from a flat foot anymore. He wants to be able to be unstable so he can move quickly away from danger towards food, whatever, right? Play the games, all that type of stuff.

So as we, as these children got older, right? Yes, their foot would fall, but when would it fall? When their vestibular system would start to spin down as they got older, their foot would start to flatten out in order to find the ground again, to give the failing vestibular system as the person got older, to sense gravity and have better balance. Well, let's pause there.

So that's very, very cool. I love, so I love the whole idea of the connection between your foot and your brain. And especially something that I talk about all the time ago, you know, you have 20,000 or more nerve endings in the bottom of your foot and I ask people, why would you need that? They go, oh, I guess you can feel things.

Yeah, why would you need to feel things? Oh, I guess so, you know how to move. Yeah, what's telling you how to move? Oh, I guess my brain is.

Yeah, okay. So there's that. So your point about the vestibular system starting to down-regulate, if you will, what's causing that to happen? Well, as we get older, the hair cells on the inside of the vestibular system, that sense the swatching of the fluid inside your ear, the gyroscope in your ear, essentially.

As you get older, and especially if you're getting less metabolically healthy and such, those hair cells begin to fail and they get brittle. And so then as that becomes less and less competent, your foot finds the ground in order to make you more competent, again, to connect those nerve endings to the ground. And so that way, gravity and you have a better relationship because you don't need, as you get older, you have friends and family that are going to get your food and defend you from danger. So survival is less necessary.

You just need to be able to get out of the chair, go with the family and stuff like that. So here's something that should interest you because I know you have a Tai Chi background. So what do the older folks do? They do things like Tai Chi and in Asia, it is not uncommon to go to parks and to find cobblestone mandalas in the parks.

And why? Because it's a plate way for the older adults to come in, take off their shoes and they walk them a dollar. Why? Because it keeps their feet moving and sensitive and such like that.

So the rate of fall in Asian countries is much less. And so then broken hips, mortality and such like that is much less in Asian countries than it is in the United States. What's the difference? In the United States, we put them in orthotics and we put them in stiffer shoes to support their arch which wants to find the ground.

And instead, we ruin them and the result of this and this might be, this sounds terrible, might be medical malpractice is that we're setting them up for injury, failure, death. You know, this is something that I've said, there's a lot of things I've said, is I kind of wish that shoes killed people. Because if they did, then we'd have like a, you know, Philip Moore's case on our hands where we would see that the shoe companies know that we're putting big, thick, stiff shoes on people's feet elderly in particular, but anybody really is making it harder and harder for you to function properly. And you know, can result in what happened to my dad, trip fall, die.

But you know, instead they just take a bunch of money out of your wallet and make your life more difficult and people call it normal. And watching elderly people shuffle along and I said, you know, they're shuffling because their brains are not stupid. They, since they can barely feel and they can barely move their feet, their brain is saying shuffle so that you're basically staying essentially balanced the whole time. 100%.

You're never getting off balanced to walk normally or run. And it's completely upside down. And you may know this, there's research that came out of Duke University showing a correlation at high correlation between walking speed and mortality. At a certain point, the slower you walk, I wish I knew the threshold, but if you're walking below this particular speed, your chance of dying over the next five years is extremely high.

And by that point, you're walking at that speed because your feet and brain have not been functioning directly and your chance of dying is most likely from trip fall time. Yeah. And survival is what it's all about. The brain's only interested in getting away from tigers to the refrigerator.

And it wants to do that the best that it can, but it doesn't care about performance. So if the information coming into the system is poor because we're either blocking it or we've broken it, yeah, movement becomes a less and less graceful event and unfortunately it sets us up for bad health issues down the way. I mean, what I think that amazes me is we will see like indigenous tribes where people are still living in their 70s and 80s. And those people are still fully functional.

I mean, totally fine. And no one ever, the way people seem to approach that is like, well, that's them. We can't do it. I mean, we're different.

That's them. I don't know why people don't think, especially in a culture like ours where everyone thinks anything is possible by and large. If I can imagine that I can become that, I can imagine being rich, then sure I can become rich or whatever the thing is. But when it comes to certain things around physical activity and physical health, people don't do that.

It's like, oh, I can't run anymore because my knees hurt. Well, what about those guys who are heavier than you who are able to run without a problem in these other places? I mean, why can't you do that? Well, I can't do that.

It's a different thing. Well, why can't we learn what they're doing and do the same thing? Maybe that maybe what's happening for you is because you did something different from those people and if you're doing what this people are doing, you can do it too. It's a weird, I'm not a very articulate.

Do you know where I'm going with this? Yeah, most definitely. We bought into the thought virus that's been given to us, right? And a lot of it's because, unfortunately, as Westerners, and especially in America, we're so myopic, we look at what's right in front of us.

And this is even in science. We're not looking broadly like in those Native American tribes that before us or into other parts of the country, other Native populations and watching and learning from them and then saying, why don't we move or behave like them instead? We're trying to move like us. Yeah.

Why don't we give it a whirl? Yeah. The Tai Chi thing is interesting and people, it's so funny. In America, when people see that, they don't necessarily mock it, but they kind of mock it.

And missing that idea that the biggest thing they're working on is feeling the ground and letting their brain respond to that in all these different positions. Now, granted, I think part of the challenge there is Tai Chi is promoted to younger people as a martial art of sorts. It is a martial art for those people who actually know how to receive it that way and do it that way. But mostly it's like, oh, that's just something old people do.

It's like, no, no, no, no. When I was doing Tai Chi, one of my teacher used to go to karate schools, like big, you know, hard karate schools. And he'd say, okay, I'm going to try something. I want to tap you on the head and you just stop me.

I mean, you don't even have to stop me. Just like, if you touch my hand or my arm on the way to tapping you on the head, you win. But if I can tap you on the head, I win. And he would sit there and say, I'm going to stand on one leg and have my hands by my side.

That's where I'm going to start. You're going to have your hands right up by your face. I'm going to tap you on the head. Okay, ready?

Go. And he would just like tap them on the head over and over and over and they couldn't stop him. And I said, so how do you describe what you're doing? It goes as easy.

It's literally not possible for you to perceive the time that it takes for me to move my hand from my side to your head. It takes less than a quarter of a second. And the information going from your eye to your brain and back down to your arm takes longer than that. So what people normally were responding to is some subtle other motion that I'm making before I started moving my hand that I'd be telegraphing.

I just don't telegraph anymore. And that came from the fighting style of Tai Chi. Right. And that's an excellent, I mean, again, the time when you've already said about the feet and the brain connection, there's a lot going on between those two points too.

Movement is complex. We're taking in, we're primarily sighted beings. So we take in a lot of information from our eyes that we're not even aware of. Our eyes, our brain sees that pebble in the road ahead of us.

But if we've trained the system to ignore the pebble in the road because our feet are guarded from it 100% of the time and we never feel it, we learn to ignore it. And then we go on to treadmills, which are totally artificial and they cover the, you know, there's a cuddling in front. And so we shorten our steps and that doesn't translate to good movement in the real world either. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how many great athletes that primarily train indoors because it's convenient and easy and such like that, that they break themselves because their biomechanics have been trained by the environment and unfortunately an artificial environment and it breaks down over time.

We were built to be in a natural environment, taking in all of the cues and sensory information from the ground up from the outside in and then address it properly and walk over uneven surfaces with sharp little pebbles and everything and be perfectly fine with it. This is my favorite thing when people say to me, well, we didn't evolve to, you know, run on roads for 26 miles. No, what we evolved to run on are way more difficult. That's true.

Way harder. And frankly, we also didn't evolve through double backflips, but if you want, I can go do one. So there's lots of things that we evolved to do certain things that allows us to do other things. We didn't evolve to fly fighter jets, for example.

So you know, you've got that whole evolution thing upside down. But my favorite is I said, if you went to the place where we evolved and ran, even in regular shoes, you and your shoes would be trashed because those surfaces are rough and people learned how to do that without a problem. You know, it reminds me, there's a handle of things that I wish I had done before. I, or when I just started this whole barefoot journey, if you will, mostly I wish I had pictures of my footprint when I would get out of a pool or a hot tub or I wish there was a way of measuring the speed of my reflex arc.

I wish there was a way of measuring the flexibility of my foot and the strength of my foot. And I'm sure there's probably others as well. But the reflex thing and the flexibility is the one that I think about the most because the house that we had a bunch of bigger than gravel, you know, like small rocks that were just kind of along the side of the driveway. And I couldn't walk on them at all.

But within, I don't know, some number of months later, I could walk on them and it was a little sensitive. And I noticed maybe a year in, I'd walk on them without a problem. And it wasn't as I was numb. It was because I was responsive.

My foot was flexing around things and my gated changed. So if I stepped on something that was going to be definitely unpleasant, I hadn't fully waited on that foot yet. And so I was able to step off of it without, you know, before it was too late. And I had measurements of those things.

Right. 100%. So I did a little experiment last night because I was thinking about you and I went and I got a six mile loop. Wait, when you were thinking about me, what was I wearing?

You were barefoot perfectly. So same as I am right now, actually. Right. There we go.

And so I want to do this little experiment thinking about today. And I do this rarely. I mean, like once a year, but I've got this beautiful six mile loop and it's all urban hiking and so it's sidewalks and black top and everything like that. But there's nothing protecting it from having stuff going on it and such.

So I did it last night. Purely barefoot. And as always, you know, I start out and my foot is afraid of everything that it steps on initially. I feel everything right.

And eventually though, with my miles three to four, somewhere in there, my foot said, I'm okay, right? And now it became it became comfortable and I wasn't, I was sensing, but wasn't reacting to everything that I was stepping on and my speed, my pace, just naturally increased, right? So my performance improved as my foot remembered what to do. Yeah.

We just, late and I were just in Europe for a little while. And both when we were in Germany and in Denmark, we were in a place where there's a lot of cobblestones. And next to the cobblestones was often some flat sidewalk, which they had done for wheeled things that just make life a little easier for people. But we were both commenting.

It's like, you know, we enjoyed working on the cobblestones the most. And when you kind of get used to it, just that being able to use the cobblestones as part of your locomotion, your toes kind of grab the thing at the right place and moves in the right way. And you're getting just that feedback that, you know, feels really good. But to your point, it takes a little while for your brain to go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's good.

Yeah. It's scary. But that's okay. There's a saying freedom is scary, right?

It's in multiple levels, but getting out there and moving and doing new movement and new sensory information is a little scary, but you give yourself a chance to adapt and it becomes freeing. There's another, there's kind of a myth in the barefoot world or what people perceive as the barefoot world that as you're going barefoot, what's actually happening is you're building calluses and your foot is getting more, you know, whatever the word is, basically you're not feeling as much because the skin is getting thicker and blah, blah, blah. What's your take on that? Yeah, no.

Could you be a little more specific? Yeah, I'll be a little more specific. So when I first got into practice into the chiropractic field, so this is 2005 now, Colorado Springs, we get a lot of transplants from South Africa because they're really good at program management and such like that. So we have a lot of transplants here.

But one of the things that I noticed is that they were coming to me for foot and lower leg problems. They were coming for other things, but it's either bare feet and they're bare feet do not look like American feet. They look, they're wider, they're thicker. The toes are not just slayed out, but the pad is wider and such like that.

And so I asked one of them, I'm like, I just, I've noticed this trend working with all you South Africans that you've got these hand feet, these feet that are looking more articulated than the typical American foot. Why do you think that is? The individual said, you know, that's a really interesting question. It's probably because when we go to school, you know, we go to school in patent leather uniforms and patent leather shoes, but then when we go out to play recess, we take off our shoes, we play soccer barefoot, right?

So their foot development is different, but they still maintain that thickness and that morphology that they did that they had then. And then you look at other like videos, you can go on YouTube and find this all out of place, find people who climb trees and their feet again have more articulation to it. They can grab the side of the tree and such like that. Their feet are very subtle.

They're not leathery. And when you look at the bottom of their feet, they're like hands that have been working, but they're not thick and protected. I think that we've potentially mythologized that that foot shape and that morphology, I think that they're partially right. This is my suspicion.

I mean, I could be completely making this up. But my, I suspect that there's a genetic component as well or an evolutionary component. Let's just leave it a genetic that'll be easier that if you just go back, you know, a number of generations, you're going to see similar things. So they're coming out of the gate already with a different foot shape to begin with.

And I don't know how much of that changes over time based on what they're doing with their feet. I mean, what you're doing with your feet is all other things watching, videos of people who either were born with or lost both of their arms, born without or lost both of their arms, and what they learned to do with their feet. Everyone goes, oh my God, it's amazing. It's like, no, it's what any of us could do if we were using our feet.

If we had to do, I mean, it's not that it's special. It's we all we also have a tendency to mythologize people who have suffered something that we can't imagine that then are having a fine life, having a daffod to not having whatever that thing is. And we go, oh my God, that's incredible. It's like, no, no, if you ask them, they go, no, it's what you would do too.

This is, you know, you're right. Learn to do this. You learn to draw, you learn to, you know, draw. Yeah.

The moving system is so adaptable to the environment, but it has to be used. Yeah. If you don't use it, you don't develop it. And if you've developed it and you stop using it, you lose it, right?

And unfortunately, it comes to a point where it becomes more and more permanent and it's less changeable. Not that it's not worth trying to change. Yeah, you know, it's kind of like old people lifting weights. They're going to get stronger, but they're not going to turn into professional bodybuilders if they haven't been doing that for a while, which I kind of feel like that now at 63.

It's like, I've been lifting a lot of, definitely getting stronger. I've gotten a little bigger, but you know, I have no illusions about where that's going. Right. Right.

Yep. Just don't stop moving then. I've been working out more consistently in the last year and a half in my life, even when I was, well, it's a little different thing when I was a competitive athlete, but it's been really, really satisfying because this is not a pitch for my workout per se, but pitch for finding the thing that fits your psychology and your life. So this is a very intense, very short workout.

That's the hardest thing I've ever done, which is why I like it. I like it. It's super intense and super hard and super short and produces effects. So you know, that's part of my do something you enjoy and every time I do this workout is excruciating and my wife says, still having a good time on the best.

So what else we want to talk about on the, you know, I can think about this one other study actually from Christine Pollard at OSU where she believed as everyone did that the cushioning and she was going to more cushioning would have to be better. And so when she did her research, what she was studying was the force going into your knee when you're running and she was very stunned to find out that even a small amount of cushioning increased the forces that were going into your knee to be a loading forces and added cushioning to not make it any better and at a certain point, and sometimes it's been rather late or made at worse similar to what we've been talking about because the brain was saying, I can't feel anything. So I've had to land harder to try to get some kind of feedback. Yep.

And it didn't work. Yeah. So I've had a secret that I use in clinical practice based off from that study from way back when part of that mechanism of how that arch flexes and moves is that it drives that tibia to rotate. So it isn't just that the rotibia goes forward and backwards.

It's actually doing the subtle little rotation medially, so into the middle towards the towards your knees, right? As you bend the knee, it has to rotate in order to unlock the femur from the tibia. Right. So we know this, but as you bend it, that the between the talus and the navicular here, it takes that linear force coming in through the forefoot and turns it into rotational force.

And then that rotational force gets transmitted up the tibia, right? If the tibia does not rotate, where does all that force go? It goes up into a misaligned articulation between the tibia and the femur and you're destroying it with every single cell. Well, you know, it's interesting to say that.

I'm going to talk. Well, first of all, again, if people didn't watch that, so tibia again, the thicker of the two bones in your lower leg and then the talus and the navicular, just think of it as the first two bones that your tibia will bump into in your foot, right? Good. Yeah.

You know, strong, easy way to think about that. It's really interesting to me for the following reason. So 30 something years ago, I was still doing gymnastics. I was doing 33 years old, something like that.

And I landed and twisted at the same time and heard the following noise come out of my knee. And as I lay on the ground, I went, ah, that was the end of my gymnastics career. And so I had just mangled the meniscus in my knee joint and they removed about 30% of it. Hasn't been a problem until the last, I don't know, four or five months.

I don't do time very well. Let's call it four or five months. And because after I got an x-ray to find out, basically I'm bone on bone just on that lateral side, just on the outside of my knee. Now the interesting reason I'm bringing this up is what you just said.

So because of that structural problem in my knee, what's happening is that rotational thing in the tibia that you're describing is not happening well. And so I'm getting, there's some tightness on all the muscles and tendons on the lateral side of my lower leg, which are interestingly putting stress on the medial side, the inner side of all the attachments right around my heel, right around, I don't need to get into that. Right, yeah. If I weren't who I am, if I didn't know you and all the people that I've met over the last 16 years, I'd say, oh my God, it's plantar fasciitis.

It's like, nope, it's just all these muscles. It's so interesting to me that the tightness of the stuff on the muscle on the outside are causing pulling and tightening of the other things on the inside. And the proof of this, I mean I did it to myself the other day was I just massaged the crap out of everything on the outside. And I used all the various tools that I had to really loosen that stuff up.

And the next day I was feeling like 95% better. And the interesting solution I'm crossing my fingers about, I mean, I'm trying to get some how I can ask them just in that joint to get a little bit of protection to get a little space in there. And this is something I wanted to bring up with you. And I'm doing that instead of getting a knee replacement, because have you heard about the guys in Sweden who figured out how to make new cartilage for your knee?

Yeah. Coming from your nose? Yeah. So I reached out, so for people who don't know, and I'm assuming it's most of you, people listening or watching, people took cartilage from your septum, the thing that divides your nose into left and right, which has a lot of stem cells in it.

They put it in a matrix and let it grow for a couple of weeks. Basically they kind of coerced it to grow in the form they want. And they basically made a new bit of cartilage for your knee, which they say can't grow. Even though when I had my knee surgery done, I saw a whole lot of growth, it was just going everywhere.

So I didn't know how to put it back the other correctly. But there was growth happening just not in a good way. Anyway, they put this new cartilage coming from your nose and your knee. And they found that it created an immediate benefit.

It got even better over the two years they've been doing this. I reached out to see if I could become part of the next study. Unfortunately, they're studying patellar, or meesser arthritis, which I do not have. So I'm not getting any replacement, I'm hoping by the time I can't treat things with whatever else I'm doing, that technique will be improved.

Yeah, so that's a great segue into talking about rebuilding structure. That's where we were going. We're starting to tell you how many people we see where they have no history of trauma. And so it's all repetitive motion.

It's bad movement leading to wear and tear. Imagine you're driving your car, you check the curb with one wheel, it's towed in. And now all four wheels are wearing out because there's this aberrant force going on and your gas mileage is terrible as well. And you can put new rubber on the tires, but it doesn't change the alignment.

And so you just keep putting more money into the car, more money into the car. Where all you needed to do is have the one wheel realigned and now everything works better. So in your case, you have this injury, it created an instant damage to a structure, but it also probably created some instability. And then over the years, because you've been fit, you kept it well enough that it was able to keep going down the road, again, with the wheel towed in.

But it's minimizing the damage. But over time, that instability has caught up. So now the tensegrity, if you've heard that word before, is now off, right? So the idea between tensegrity is that if all things balanced and I'll use the analogy of a tense, if you want to put up a tense, it has members on the inside that are pushing out and you have the skin, which is containing it inside and then you have guy wires that are holding it and it can stand up to wind and snow and all sorts of stuff.

But you take off one of those guy wires and the whole structure starts to lean one way, right? And that's us after an injury, like what you have there, one of the guy wires was cut or stretched, right? And so the rehab is important because our body can compensate for a while, but then the tissue that structure starts to break down, like your meniscus got worse and then it affected the cartilage and such like that. What do you do about that?

As a chiropractor, I can help you with the alignment, but I can't put structure back into you, right? I wish. Yeah. That's where regenerative medicine and regenerative techniques like shockwave therapy and such like that becomes a game changer in orthopedics.

Yeah. So talk more about those. And yes, this is one of those things where, of course, living in or near Boulder, when I describe what's going on, everyone has an answer for what I should be doing. You know, if I just take some homeopathic, whatever, or if I see some shamanistic heel or I'm going, I don't know, this is a building where a couple of the bricks are gone.

Yeah. I mean, you know, this is not a big deal. I had 30 years of being totally fine, even after a seriously traumatic injury. Yeah.

And in fact, what saved me ironically was getting out of regular shoes because I was having, because I actually, I totally forgot about this. I actually had a lot of knee issues up until I got out of regular shoes. Yeah. And so my last, you know, 16, 17 years were saved by or extended by being predominantly barefooter and things like their issues.

So I didn't even think about that till just now. But anyway, talk about their talk about regenerative things. Shockwave, I find very interesting. I want you to talk about that, but I'm going to preface this by saying the first time I had it, and it was not because I was going for a treatment.

It's because I was at an event where the guys who sell that service were, you know, trying to sell their thing, I said, what's, you know, do it to me? I want to feel it. And it was the weirdest thing I've ever felt because you're getting sensations in parts of your body where you've never gotten a sensation because it's inside your body and weird sensations. So, you know, so anyway, talk about it.

Yeah. So I got into regenerative medicine because I had patients again that have deficient structure that I could not fix. Yeah. No matter how good my hands are, my hands are really good.

Right. So I wanted my patients to be better. And the last thing that I want, unless it's necessary is to have them cut on. And so I had this one patient who literally his head was not attached to the top of his spine.

And he would tilt his head to the side. We have the digital motion x-ray, his skull would slide sideways and just brainstem and cause him to have seizure-like activities. And he was being diagnosed with seizure disorder when really what it was, is that the ligaments that hold the whole thing together are there anymore. It was in a head-on collision with a concrete barrier, the barrier one.

There we go. He should have died. But anyway, long story short, that was my first foray into it because the only option that he had was putting screws into his skull to hold the whole thing together. And there's one person in the world that did that at that time.

Instead, he went to the Centennial Shultz Clinic up there in Broomfield. Yeah. And got VRP and stem cell work done to those ligaments and regrew them. I'm going to pause there on something.

So I have a friend who is, you know, prolotherapy? Yeah. Okay. I assume that you would.

So for people who don't, prolotherapy, they take a needle syringe and they stick the needle into your ligaments or tendons and inject something to basically select. A little better. Yeah. He had it a little time.

He had it a little bit more on just to make the cells like really open to whatever. Anyway. So my friend Tom Raven is the guy who taught pro but almost everybody. And he's a former radiologist.

It felt like I had x-ray vision. I watched him do things to people like with needles that were foot long to try to get to the right spot with someone who was, you know, relatively overweight or no very overweight. And it's like, how did you do that? Now, granted one time he was working on my knee after I had my surgery.

He's working after I had the meniscus partially moved and he sticks the needle and lying face down on the table and he sticks the needle trying to get to something like in the front of my knee, but I have to get there from the back and he nicks my tibial nerve and I pop off the table. I put the foot off the table in midair and it was like an electric shock just popped me off the table and I'm in midair thinking, I couldn't do this if I tried to physically and I land and there's a long pause and Tom goes, yes, try not to do that. But again, the basic idea, a little sugar water, selectively injured the tennis because you know, you get injured, your body's going to do the best that it can for a few days to get you back up and moving but not back to where you were before you got injured necessarily. That little injury is going to selectively, you know, generate sort of things to build more tissue.

Anyway, the PRP version is the same idea except that A, they're typically people doing it under the platelets with ultrasound to know where to put the needle, Tom could just like do it and B, the often they're doing it by spinning platelets out of your blood and injecting that as well with the idea that will accelerate the healing process. I mean, the healing happens because platelets show up anyway, they're thinking it's better if you just do the if you had the platelets to begin with. But the biggest thing is by doing all those different things using ultrasound, spinning out the platelets, they could do this in bill insurance companies. So when I asked Tom about PRP, he goes, it's prolo therapy with a bunch of hand waving.

So I'm not saying don't do it. And I've used both and you know, there's a place for both. In fact, one doctor that I utilize the most, he uses all three, right? He uses rolo, he uses PRP.

He selects the weapon to kill the target, do what needs to be done and such like that. But the cool part was is that as I'm going through this, one of my other patients, he was really in need of something and asked about Shockwave. So I reached out to the Shockwave community that's out there and it was still just growing at the time. And the company came out, said, here's one of the gave me some training, gave me a unit to use for a month.

And let's see what you think. I treated over a hundred people in that month. And I was able to do things with that device that I could never do with my hands. And since then, of course, I've learned a little bit more.

So the lessons learned from PRP. Let's start with explain what Shockwave is or what it does, how it works a little bit. So it's using sound waves. So there's ultrasound, which heats things up and that can be helpful in its own form of fashion.

And then there's Shockwave, which is taking sound waves, putting them into the body, creating an area of high pressure. So the sound waves come together. If you ever stood in front of a big concert, a bass speaker and you feel those waves of sound coming into your body and you can feel it vibrating your organs, right? Well, imagine that, but down at a micro level and have an inside the body.

Well, that stimulation stimulates the cells that we're targeting and promotes them to do a couple of things. One, their metabolism increases. So if you sit there and rub your skin, you're going to get red right there because the metabolism is going to increase, more blood's going to come to the area, things like that. So blood comes to the area.

That's number one. Number two, you're stimulating them. And like that growth hormone, the testosterone that your friend put into the injection for you, those cells start to express that because they are experiencing what they think is injured. So all of a sudden, you have all of these growth factors being expressed from the cells that are in need locally.

And so you're getting better blood flow, better blood vessel formation to areas that don't normally get good blood flow like ligaments. And you're getting all these growth hormones, so you're getting tissue formation and regrowing tissue. So it's prolotherapy, PRP, and stem cell, but without the injection. And I can do it here.

Yeah, it's really cool. I can't describe the feeling, but imagine, imagine someone really, really tiny punching you really, really hard inside your body. There are ways to go about it. I utilize a technique called focal shockwave.

So I can attenuate it down to zero pain and use it to create analgesia. So basically hide the pain. No, that's interesting. Well, I mean, I mean, I like the intense things.

But I mean, but the thing that's so weird about it, again, it's like you're getting this thing, maybe 10 millimeter centimeter inside your body. And so you don't really have a whole lot of sensory input from that. So it's just a bizarro feeling. It's like a tiny little lightning bolt that just hits the spot.

And when you find, it's kind of like if you find one of those spots in your body that's just a little sore and you kind of rub on it and you're getting something there, it's like that, but like fast and intense. So when you get the right spot, it's that little bit of like a little lightning kind of pun intended shock and it doesn't hurt. Yeah. Because it also has to think it's like, oh, that was just a spot.

That was the one. Yeah. Yeah. It's super interesting.

So one of the cool studies that was done, and I bring this one out, and so many of these regenerative medicine doctors that I teach about this now don't even know about some of these studies that are out there because there's thousands of them now, but they took a wrap model. They haven't done this in humans where they go in and they surgically tear the meniscus just like you did. Right. And then with one application of shockwave and comparing it to, of course, control, which doesn't have any into it, one application of shockwave at two weeks, you can start to see the surgical tear start to close up on the one that's been treated.

And by four weeks and six weeks, it's healing. But on the non-treated one, you start to see it degrade and degenerate. Wow. Right.

So I think it's a great application in a wrap model, granted it's a wrap, but it still is very analogous to what you see in the human being. And I fixed hundreds of meniscus tears with just shockwave and no need and with documented MRI evidence of it too with no need for surgery. Interesting. Well, I haven't had an MRI on this one.

Otherwise I'd show it to you and see what you think of me again. When I, well, they removed a giant radial chunk of it. And like I said, I mean, I was really fun when they were going to give me the surgery. I said, they said, we're going to put you under.

I said, can I just get an evidence or an instead so I can watch. I'm like, what? That would be me. That would be me.

Yeah. It was great. Can you pull that instrument out? Because I'm watching on the screen and it looks huge and it was this tiny little thing.

It was really, it was very, very cool. But I mean, by this point, I don't know what's there at all. It's not like, you know, just like right after I did it where it was a pretty good tear, not even a complete section, but a pretty good tear, probably something then. Like I said, well, I didn't get surgery for a while because I didn't have insurance for a while.

And when I finally got insurance, I went and saw the orthopod and he kind of moves my knee around and goes, so what do you think? So we think surgery tomorrow? Oh, geez. That bad.

He goes, yeah. So, you know, and here we are 30 years later. I guess I'm fluid in that joint. So it's not so bone on bone.

In fact, I went to my PT just to, because I was feeling this like twangy thing that I thought was one of the tendons around my leg and, or in my, like, and my PT who's delightful. I said, see, when I make this move, there's a snapping sound. It's going from the tendons. She goes, oh, sweetheart.

No, that's coming from the bones rubbing on each other. Yeah. Yeah. And that's not a nice feeling or sound.

Yeah. It's, it's uniquely unpleasant. It's kind of like just cracking your fingers except much more disconcerting. It sounds like walking on old creaky boards and yeah.

It's, yeah, the grindy part is unpleasant. It's a snappy part, I can tolerate the grindy part is unpleasant. Yeah. No.

Just viscerally. So anyway, back to regenerative medicine. So, you know, this whole idea, I mean, I think this is really fascinating. This whole idea that a lot of these methods are basically selectively re-injuring.

Yeah, they're selectively re-intraing, creating a stimulus. And again, going back to the analogy of the foot and the brain, right? The body needs input into the system in order to do what it needs to do. Yeah.

So if it's not getting that, if we protect the body too much, right? So like that, like the, like your injury there and we don't return it back to proper movement patterns, then it continues to degenerate. And that's typically what we do. We brace it, we protect it, and then inevitably inviting degeneration in.

And we really just need to return things back. And in a lot of cases, if we did that immediately from an ankle sprain to a lot of different injuries, then we wouldn't need to do interventions that cost a lot of money that are very invasive and such like that. But instead, we take a medical approach and unfortunately invite more problems into the situation a lot of times. Sometimes, yeah.

I mean, I'm also, well, I'm also trying to avoid it at all costs. The fact that I, my spine's all out of whack from a gymnastics thing. Well, there's an argument about gymnastics for general. So if I said to say, whenever I show my, the central picture of my spine to people who know nothing about bodies and they go, oh God.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun one. Yeah.

But your body's figured out how to make it work and make high quality life. Yeah. I'm not, I mean, I'm, yes, it's a simple thing. It's not a point where I can't live the way it is.

It's just every now and then annoying. Sure. And well, here I'll do this one again. So basically I've got this for people who want to look it up.

So it's an L5 S1 spinal ocelesis with a parce effect. In short for people who to give that to people in English, my sacrum and then the first spinal vertebrae above it are misaligned. The spinal vertebrae is shifted forward about 50% of the distance from where it should be. But the parce defect is the fun part, which is basically the muscles that would otherwise hold that in place aren't there.

There's nothing holding it in place. And the reason I bring this one up is it was a fun one when after seeing an MRI wonder, I'll just say to me, anyone who recommends doing core exercises, just walk away because there's nothing holding anything in place. Yeah. My wife has the same thing and she just got back from 12 miles a day in Rome with no pain after doing prolotherapy and PRP a month before and has no pain.

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to do anything else. I want to do it like every 18 months or so, I end up getting a little epidural because like my feet are cramping or some weird things happening, some bizarro sciatic thing. But that's it.

I mean, otherwise again, I was having a lot of problems until I got out of regular shoes. Right. Yep. Yep.

See you all the time. Yep. You're right. Right.

And what if we missed anything from everywhere we want to go? You know, I think really what it comes down to is, you know, people, if they're listening to this podcast are interested in helping themselves one, but they're getting it from people who are experiencing you and your industry from all of the research that you've done and the people that you've got, the thousands of people that you've talked to in this field. And then so learn from that, but then assemble a team of people and professionals that can help you. And the thing that you really want to look for are people who want you to be at the best that you can be without them.

I'm going to caveat to that or an addendum that which is find people are hip to what we're talking about. Find people who, I mean, I'll never forget the first, not conference, there was a panel discussion about barefoot running. Before I'd even started the company actually when I was just making sandals for people. And it was a bunch of physical therapists and doctors and whatnot.

It was a held in a physical therapy clinic in Boulder. And they're all saying things like, you know, if you want to run barefoot, it's going to take you five to 10 years to adjust to be able to do that. And what the fuck are these people talking about? And finally, I mean, I asked the question, I said, how many of you have ever run for at least a mile in bare feet on a road?

And I was the only hand that went up. And I'm not even going to run or run. I'm a sprinter. I'm going, you know, you guys don't know what you're talking about.

You're making up stories based on no information whatsoever. And the stories that you're making up are completely contradictory to the experiences of hundreds of people that I know. And so when people talk to me that they have, you know, some issue where I'm going to recommend that they see a medical professional like, oh, find someone who's hip to this whole idea because there are people who we all do it. You know, very little about something and someone asks about it.

We make up a story to justify the way we believe it. And I see this. My God, I met a medical doctor who was, it was going to be weird. He was going to go have surgery for plantar fasciitis.

And I said, why is that? I don't think you have plantar fasciitis. He was, what are you talking about? I said, well, can you just like raise yourself up on your toes?

He said, yeah, and he did it. I said, well, does that hurt? He said, no, I said, yeah, do you don't have plantar fasciitis? I said, can you while you're on your toes just kind of, you know, bounce from left or least.

So just like running in place a little on your toes. I said, I don't know. I said, you're going to plantar fasciitis. I said, can you while you're doing that left and right thing is bouncing back and forth, lean forward and just let your body go where it goes.

And he just runs down the block and back. I said, and he probably goes, no. I said, dude, you don't need surgery. Anyway, anyway.

Yeah. I mean, you tell the story about the special forces guy with plantar fasciitis. Yeah, all of his buddies, right. And the pain is very imprecise.

It doesn't tell you anything specific most of the time, right? And the best example I can give you is a paper cut. You get a paper cut and the whole world exists right there at that moment, right? That's all you can think about.

But eventually your brain goes, oh, that wasn't so bad. And it just turns off, right? Zenimently. But you can be walking around having cut your elbow and your wife looks at you and goes, hey, Steve, what you did, your elbow?

And you're like, I don't know. Why did that hurt? Right? So pain is just a output of the brain.

It's our job to then figure out as a good practitioner to find out what is the pain really pointing to and solve that problem for the person or is it just fear? It's kind of like me starting out yesterday, walking on my six miles after three to four miles. My brain is like, hey, your feet are not in danger. You're fine.

And so then that went away. You know, here's my favorite version of that. Who say I tried to bear for thing, but I got a kille's to the night. I said, no, no, here's what happened.

You've been wearing a high-heeled shoe, high-level running shoe, and your brain has been trained to only let your kille's stretch a certain amount. And what you then did is you switched immediately to a minimal shoe, a flat shoe, and you didn't give your brain time to learn that it's cool to let your kille's stretch to the fullest extent that it can stretch. And people, what they say is I've been wearing high-heeled shoes, my kille's a short no. The tissue has not shortened.

If we cut you open, let's go back to the catabras from the beginning. We can stretch your kille's as far as it needs to be stretched because it's not going to be any input from your brain. You're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's learned that's enough. Oops, did I lose you somehow?

Oh, man. I just, oh, wow. I somehow just lost row of hopefully he will be back in just a moment, fingers crossed. And even more hopefully, I'm going to have to tell someone that at the one hour mark roughly, you've got to bring him back.

I'm going to pause the recording. We got interrupted by a technical hit. So I was saying, you've basically trained your brain to tell you that's as much as you can do. And there's whole methodologies, I'm the one called Feldenkrais method.

It's all about retraining your brain very quickly. But the simplest thing is it's like, when I got back in the spring, people said, well, you know, when you're spikes, you've got to kill each other. And I just like to know, you're training in a big thick shoe with a big heel, then you're switching immediately to your spike that you're not used to. This is the problem that you're talking about.

And people don't, I mean, it sounds weird to even say that so much of what we think is a physical limitation is just our brain trying to protect us from things that are totally cool. Yeah. Yeah, most definitely. And training is how you fix that with a lot of those problems, proper training.

Yeah, exactly. Anyway, Grove, as always, this is a total pleasure. If people want to get in touch with you or hear more about what you're up to and what you're thinking and doing, how would they do that? Yeah, definitely.

On the interwebs, go to neuroathletechiro.com. You can also reach me directly through Dr. Higgins at neuroathleteclinic.com. And we have a YouTube channel as well on Facebook.

And I try to put out some educational material, usually little tips and tricks on how to get the most out of life, things that nobody else is teaching. Because there's a lot of information out there. And I want to be able to contribute to that. But I don't want to just make content just to make content.

Yeah. I appreciate that. Well, again, thank you everyone watching slash listening. Thank you as well.

Quick reminders before we call it a day. Go over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There's nothing to do to join. You don't need to paint anything.

There's no secret handshake. We don't want to do anything. We don't do a magic dance every morning at 7am. All right.

Yeah, we do that. But I won't tell you about it now. And you'll find previous episodes of which there are quite a few places to find us on social media. And of course, other places to find the podcast.

If you're looking for somewhere else. And if you have any requests or recommendations people you think I should talk to or anything else you want to cover or if you just want to tell me what you're thinking, you can drop me an email, move, M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovementmovement.com. It would be great if you could find someone who thinks I have a case of cranial reorientation syndrome. I would love to talk to one of those people.

That would be a lot of fun. Usually they resist. I talked to a few and said, come on, why don't we do this live? Oh, no, no, no.

Anyway, most importantly, though, whatever you do between now and the next time we see each other, not really. You know where I'm going. Between now and whatever's next. Go out.

Have fun and live life. Feet first.