Welcome to the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want the truth about having a healthy, happy, strong body. Remember, your body was meant to move. Now here's your host, Stephen Sashin. If there was just science proving that running barefoot or in truly minimalist footwear was good for you, then everybody would switch, right?
Okay, we're going to take a look at that. In today's episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with your feet first because those things are your foundation. We're going to debunk the mythology, the propaganda, often the outright lies that people tell you about what it takes to run, to walk, to hike, to dance, to play, to lift, to do yoga, whatever it is, enjoyably, effectively, efficiently by letting your body do what is natural. We call it the Movement Movement because A, it's obviously about movement and B, it's because we're creating a movement.
We need people to be basically the groundswell, the grassroots that helps spread this message, that natural movement is the obvious, better, healthy choice. Frankly, the way natural food is currently seen and you are the ones who helped do that. So first of all, thank you. This is technically the beginning of season three for the Movement Movement podcast and if you've been listening to or viewing or however you're interacting with this for a while, I want to thank you.
I got to tell you really quick. I just want to whim someone suggested, hey, why don't you take all these things you ranted out all day long and do it as a podcast. And I have a whole bunch of friends and more and more friends coming on board to talk about what the research they're doing and I'm going to talk about that research and just a little while and not just research the things they're doing in their part help spread the idea of natural movement. So if you like what you're listening to or seeing, please share it.
So leave a review or click subscribe or if you're on YouTube, you can hit the little bell so that you hear about upcoming episodes. You know what to do. Just share this wherever you're enjoying this podcast and let people know. Okay, let's dive in.
I'm going to start with a story. I was at a trade show last week and I was talking to a number of people who were in the foot wear industry and one of them says just out of nowhere, well, you know, this whole minimalist thing is just complete crap. I went, oh, really? Why is that?
He's well, you know, it hurts people. I said, where's your evidence for that? He's well, I mean, everyone knows that. I mean, it was nearly destroyed footwear for retail.
I said, whoa, slow down. First of all, do you know that there are a number of labs where they are treating people who are injured athletes or at any level from Olympians down to weekend warriors and the treatment they give people is to get them in footwear like zero shoes, natural movement footwear. Well, but that doesn't matter. Okay, wait.
So back up, you said more people get injured. Did you know the research shows that there's actually no higher injury rate for barefoot runners than shot runners? And he said, well, that's not true. I said, wait, I'm just giving you the data, man.
I said, did you know that the research shows that when you're in higher, thicker shoes, you put more force in the ground than you do when you're wearing just minimalist shoes or running barefoot? Well, I mean, you know, people need art support. So whoa, now you're changing the timing. So anyway, I didn't even get into this one.
I said, did you know there's actually no research showing that the modern motion control running shoe is good for you in any way? Well, that's not true. I said, dude, all I'm doing is giving you the data. I'm just going to talk about research.
Did you know that if you wore a truly minimalist shoe, just for as little as eight weeks, you get as much foot strengthening as you do if you do an exercise program? Did you know that elderly women who put on minimal shoes, their knee osteoarthritis was what's the word reverse or eliminated? And he just didn't want to hear any of these things. Now, and actually here's another one.
There's a bit of science that came out recently. I've been ranting about this lately from Nike. Nike sponsored a study. They call it an independent study that they sponsored, which in and of itself is kind of fascinating.
Nike sponsored a study on a new shoe they have. I talked about the reactant and he'd run and they said that that shoe reduces injury rates by over 50%. And if you look at the research or you look at, I just saw the abstract. I didn't see the entire research paper.
But according to the abstract that the researcher gave me, it's true that that shoe was really reduced injury rates by 50%. But that's not the important part. The important part is what they did is A, they compared people in that shoe to people in Nike's best selling motion controlled running shoe. And yes, the reactant and finity run had a 50 with the people running in it had a 50% lower injury rate than the other shoe.
This is during a 12 week half marathon training program and people in the other shoe, over 30% of them got injured in 12 weeks, actually in less than 12 weeks. Because the only way that they could have done the study or qualified as injured is having something like three or more missed sessions in a row. So basically it had to be no more than 10, maybe 11 weeks tops, roughly 10 weeks. So in less than 10 weeks approximately, over 30% of the people got injured in the best selling motion controlled running shoe.
And in the reactant finity, about 15% got injured. How is this good? This is the kind of thing I think you should be, everyone should be arrested. They should, at the very least, they should stop making every other shoe they make.
If in fact, it reduces injuries from 30% in about 12 weeks down to a whopping or an acceptable, I don't think, I think whopping is better than acceptable, 15%. This did not face him in the least. This did not convince him that maybe there's something awry, maybe there's something we need to look at. So I'm not saying that the studies themselves are crap.
I'm saying that the studies are useless. They're meaningless. They will have no value. They will not convince anybody.
There could be a study that comes out that says running in minimalist shoes or running barefoot is going to cure all your injuries, make your mortgage rates go down, let your kids get into college and give you the luscious head of hair. There you go. The luscious head of hair. You've always looked for it.
It'll cure erectile dysfunction. I mean, you name it. It's going to be the solution for everything you've ever thought of. And I guarantee it will make zero difference whatsoever.
Why? There are two reasons that I want to talk about. And then I'm going to talk, maybe I'm just going to hint. I'm not sure yet about what to do instead.
So the first reason why it won't make a difference is that whenever that research comes out, I guarantee it will get this much tiny, tiny, tiny bit of press. And the reason is simple. Actually, there's three reasons that I thought it for what will matter. The reason it'll get a tiny bit of press is really simple.
There are no billion dollar companies who have the ear of the media who will promote it. They just won't get attention. When Nike comes out, I don't know why I'm harping on Nike, but when Nike comes out every two years with news that Olympic athletes are wearing their shoes, despite the fact that those athletes are being paid in total millions and millions of dollars to wear their shoes at the Olympics, it's news that people are wearing this new Nike product. The only reason it's news is because everything Nike says is a big company is instantly news.
For the whole minimalist world, everything that people say about minimalism is not news because there aren't some big companies or big organizations behind that where all they need to do is make a couple of phone calls to their media contacts and it is spread everywhere with the right spin that we would want as well. In fact, here's a quick version of that. Christine Pollard, her research showed that the big, thick maximalist shoes that people are coming out with all over the place, even some of the companies that were doing minimalist before are now going maximalist. There's no reduction in tibial loading forces.
Basically, you're hitting the ground just as hard in those with all that extra cushioning, sometimes even harder than you would in a regular shoe. Got no play whatsoever for all practical purposes because it's against what Nike and all these other companies have said. So, suddenly, the reporters are hearing something antithetical to what they believe, what they've been writing about, and so they basically just give it a short shrift, which brings me to, oh man, the second point about why it's not going to be, I had three, I thought I had a third, it's not going to get any press, people aren't going to, oh man, I lost one. All right, anyway, I should write this stuff down, but that's not the way my brain works.
So the second reason, in addition to the fact that we just don't have the ear of the media in a way that's going to present the information in some fashion that's valuable, is that this is just not the way human beings work. Human beings don't respond to data. I mean, they'll use it to back up their feelings, their deeply held beliefs. I don't like the word feelings because it's really a thought, but you get the idea.
It's like, I feel like it's true. That's really a thought that has a feeling component with it. You have the thought first and the feeling happens. And so, people have these ideas, these beliefs, and beliefs are fundamentally difficult to change.
This is an evolutionary thing. We are wired to accumulate beliefs about what we need to do to get what we want in the world, and then to hold on to them because it takes energy to lock one into your brain, and it takes way more energy to get a new one. And the reason for that, again, evolutionarily, it's not energy efficient to come up with a new belief. If every time when we're out in the savannah and you see the grass rustling, you have to make a brand new decision about whether there's food making that thing rustle or something that wants us to be food making that thing rustle, we would have all been dead ages ago.
So what we're designed to do is it's called a heuristic. We get an idea about the world and we latch onto that because it simplifies the thinking process. There was a guy, I wish I remember who this was, at one house in high school. One of the things that PBS was doing to raise money to had a lecture from some guy, he started by saying, I don't know if he started, but at some point he said, what's the point of thinking?
Why do we do it? The reason for thinking is to stop thinking. Thinking is a process of generating beliefs and ideas about the world so that when something comes into our funnel of awareness, if you will, we don't have to think anymore. We just process it right away and respond accordingly.
The problem, not surprisingly, is that often those ideas that we get, those heuristics that we generate are simply wrong, but because it's so energy efficient for that information to go into the funnel and come out the other end with some kind of behavior, great. And if it doesn't kill us, we're okay with that. Actually, even if it does kill us, we're kind of okay with that because sometimes there are survivors, there's going to be some people who get killed by the belief and some people who survive, even though they're holding a false belief and then the survivors propagate. In other words, we are the offspring of a bunch of stupid people.
That's the bottom line. So again, point number one, if the research comes out, it's not going to be meaningful, point number two, even if it is, it's not going to get to the play and point number two, even if it's meaningful and does get to play, it's not going to affect many, many people because, again, we're just not wired to adopt new beliefs. And the beliefs that we're talking about when it comes to natural movement and footwear, they're now like 50 years old. So Irene Davis from Harvard said to me, when we were talking about minimalist footwear and the research is, you know, 50 years ago, this conversation wasn't happening.
You couldn't have this conversation. And the reason is that 50 plus years ago in the late 60s, there were no motion control padded elevated heel running shoes. Everything was truly, was basically a minimalist shoe, not necessarily a perfectly quote barefoot shoe didn't have necessarily the right shape, et cetera. But the idea was thin, flexible, that's how shoes were made.
So there was no argument about this. The modern motion control running shoe is a new invention. And 50 years is over two generations. And what that means is this, in the first generation, the companies making the product need to convince you that it's real.
By the second generation, the people who've now been convinced are just telling everyone automatically. So the companies don't need to do that. Which is why if you look at the history of footwear advertising, by and large, you see a trend from convincing you that this stuff is amazing to don't you want to be like that guy who's wearing this shoe? And once you're advertising is all don't you want to be like that guy, you know there's no there there behind it.
That's just all branding. That's just all identity marketing, which is the last bastion for people who have no evidence behind what they're doing. There's actually one other thing. I don't know if this is exactly what I was thinking of the third point that I forgot, but there's one other thing about research that's challenging.
And that is most people don't even know how to read a research paper, even see a research paper. So there's an amazing thing. I'm trying to remember the exact situation where I saw this. Okay, I remember what it is, but I'm not going to mention the specifics because they would get me sued.
But here's the gist of it. There's a company that has an exercise program and they talk about how it's beneficial for a few very specific issues that are big deal health issues for elderly people in particular. And they quote research on their website. Well, most people clearly have never actually looked at the research.
I did. And what happens when you look at the research is you see that there was actually two big research papers regarding this one piece of research said absolutely nothing about what this company was claiming. The other bit of research said something very specific about what the company was claiming. That is it was completely not true.
So they just quoted the research and that was enough for people to think that it was real despite the fact that the actual research didn't prove anything of the sort. I know a guy, he was a paid researcher for a very well known health and fitness celebrity or influencer. I'm not sure what the right word is for him. And again, not going to mention his name because of the threat of a lawsuit.
People who have a whole lot of money I discovered they have no problem spending their money to sue people just to get over feeling upset. I'm not the mood to deal with that. But anyway, here's the deal. Young guy hired his researcher by this big deal fitness dude who said here's what I believe about fitness and can you go find me the research that backs this up.
So right away things are a little tainted. He's not looking for the actual information. He's looking for information just to back up what he's saying. The researcher who I know came back and said, yeah, there is no.
Can't find any. In fact, all the research that I found shows that what you're saying is patently false and said researcher said friend of mine was then summarily fired. So and actually I take it back. He was fired.
Wait, hold on. Brain damage. I got the story totally wrong. He wasn't fired.
He quit. But before he quit, what really inspired him to quit is this after he said there is no research backing up what you said. In fact, the research shows the opposite the celebrity in questions. That's okay.
Just put it on the website link to it on the website because no one's going to read it. So now we have a whole collection of issues about why research is problematic when it comes to the whole barefoot slash natural movement thing. Now the magic question is what to do about it. How can you be helpful if we're doing this movement movement?
What can you say to help move the movement movement? Well, I hate to do this, but I'm going to. We're going to talk about that on the next episode of the movement movement podcast. So by the way, if you have any questions or you have any recommendations or anyone you think should be on the show or anything you want to share, drop me an email.
Just send it to movemov at join the movement movement.com. In fact, just go to join the movement movement.com to find previous episodes to find out all the places that you can find this content and again, to leave comments, to like, to share, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's kind of everything I've got other than stay tuned for the next episode. We're going to talk about how to talk about natural movement in a way that isn't going to piss off your friends.
And so join me for that. Until then, thanks so much for being here and live life. Be first. You've been listening to the movement movement podcast with host Stephen Sashan.
Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com.