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. You may have heard of minimalist shoes or barefoot shoes.
Do you want them? Which ones do you get? Which are good? Which are bad?
Which aren't even what they say they are? That's what we're going to find out in today's podcast. Welcome to the Movement Movement Movement. The podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a healthy, happy, strong body.
In the Movement Movement podcast, we're going to be cutting through the mythology, the confusion, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that people tell you that keep you from enjoying doing what bodies like to do, which is move. Want, run, swim, hike, play, lift, whatever your body likes to do, we're here to have you do that. I always like to say let's start the Movement Movement with some moving so do something, anything. Whatever you want to do, whatever you can for moving is break out of patterns that you've already had.
So if you're sitting right now, do something that you not really do, maybe shimmy, maybe just move your shoulders back and forth and lean back and forth when you do that. Thank you for 10 years in Greece. I don't know where I just came up with that. I literally don't think I've ever done that by life.
We'll try just the other way around, just go back this way. We're like 10th something really tense and then let it go or stand up and spin around a couple of times. I'll do that here in my chair and then take a couple of deep breaths. Just do anything to let your body kind of break out of whatever it's been doing because when your body is stiff, your mind can be stiff.
When your mind gets stiff, it can also make your body stiff. So we're here to help you become more flexible with your body and your mind. We call it the Movement Movement because we are trying to make natural movement the obvious better healthy choice the same way that natural food currently is. We're just going to spend a lot of time talking about footwear and shoes and feet because feet are your foundation and frankly when it comes to natural movement, it's where the most confusion seems to lie.
We'll get to that in just a second. But first, if this whole idea of natural movement resonates with you, then subscribe. Like, friend, share, whatever it is that you're doing depending on the platform that you're engaging with us on right now and come to our website, join themmovementmovement.com and that'll point you to all the different places, all the different social channels where you can participate with us. If you have any suggestions or questions, send them to move.
I'm OVE at jointhemovementmovementmovement.com. I'm Stephen Sashan. I'm CEO and co-founder of Zero Shoes, along with my wife, Laina. I'm not here to try and sell you Zero Shoes.
Although if you want to try and out, we're happy to have you do that because Zero Shoes are all about natural movement and you can find us at Zero Shoes. So I look like my teacher, exerosues.com. Okay. So back in 2009, 2010, this whole idea of minimalist footwear took off.
It was a book called Born to Run by Chris McDougal. They kept very popular and made the whole idea of barefoot running, started to get some traction and it made the shoe companies lose their minds. They were afraid that overnight people were going to stop buying shoes and just start running around barefoot, frankly, the way human beings have been doing for thousands of years or maybe with just, you know, some really thin little bit of protection. Suffice it, say, the shoe companies were worried that you were going to suddenly realize that, you know, maybe spending $150 on a pair of shoes that wore out after three months wasn't necessary.
And so the first thing they did was starting to tell people, oh, you don't want to run barefoot, you don't want to try any of that because if you do that, all hell is going to break loose and you're going to get bed bugs and you're going to step on nails and you're trying to think of things that would happen. You'll never be able to get organic carrots again. Just it was insane what they were doing to try to keep you from doing what, look, as kids, what many of us love to do all summer long is take off our shoes and run around barefoot. I don't know why it wasn't a problem then.
It suddenly is now, but they were losing their minds. By the end of 2010, though, everything started to change. And suddenly, this whole idea of barefoot shoes and minimalist shoes took off because the big companies started to sell them. Now, here's the kicker.
There's a couple. Kidder number one, the shoes that they were making, they were making the claim that you get the same benefit from wearing the shoes that you would get from being barefoot. Despite the fact that there was no barefoot runner on the planet that I knew of, who would ever say that to you. Look, again, I'm the CEO of a company that makes minimalist quote barefoot shoes.
I wouldn't say that. Barefoot is different than wearing anything and I'm a big barefooter. I spend maybe 89% of my time barefoot and I recommend that you do as much as you can. Not saying that you walk around in a Costco barefoot.
I will say, if you've never walked into a grocery store barefoot and hung out by the produce section where the mystery is going off, it's kind of like being an adult jumping through sprinklers, it's awesome. And if kids look at you and know money, what's that name doing? Then you know you're on the right track because people freak out when people around the round fun. So I highly recommend it.
On a hot summer day, they have the floors and the produce section and the frozen section of the grocery store. It couldn't be better. But be that as a man. So late 2010, these companies were coming out with things they call minimalist or barefoot shoes and claiming that they gave you the same benefit as barefoot, which is simply not the case.
In fact, let's just jump into this whole idea about the phrase barefoot shoe because I know a lot of people get really upset about this and they go, well, you're either barefoot or your own shoes. You can't be a barefoot shoe. And that is true. I don't know why I did that strange voice because that's not what all of those people sound like.
I don't know what they sound like. So that's where the whole barefoot shoe idea came from. Minimal shoes, it was really turned that they coined as a way of not saying barefoot, but being as close to that as they could. And what a minimalist shoe really is that more than anything else was just a regular shoe with lighter materials, slightly less cushioning.
But that's about it. If you look at most minimalist shoes, they look just like I know this is going to sound crazy. Shoes. And they again claimed that the minimalist shoes gave the same benefits as a barefoot shoe.
Now let me show you the difference. I actually don't have a regular quote, regular minimal shoe here. I'm going to show you the difference between, I can describe the difference between a what you might find from one of the major shoe companies and what you would find from a company like Irish with zero shoes or to prove that I'm not just trying to sell zero shoes, one of our contenders, you go barefoot, that's an example. And this will give you the principles.
So again, the idea for a true minimalist, true barefoot shoe is something that much of it be as natural as possible. So one thing you'll see, a nice wide toe box. So if you look at a regular shoe, the shape of the toe box is usually pointy. That's not the shape of your foot unless you've been shoving your foot into pointy shoes for years and years and years.
So you want to look for something that's got a nice wide toe box. Now, is it going to be wide enough for every human being? No, unfortunately, there's a broad spectrum of widths for human feet and someone really narrow and someone really wide. So when you're in the business of making things, you've got to kind of pick your battles and figure out exactly what you can't do, especially a company like ours.
We don't have an infinite amount of cash. We're bootstrapped. We don't have venture capital money behind us. So we can't make, there's certainly never one thing that fix everybody and we're not yet in a place where we can make different things to fit everybody.
But again, on principle, nice wide toe box. Second thing, we don't elevate the heel. So that's probably zero drop. Drop is the tight difference between the heel and the ball and the foot.
So a zero drop means that we're not elevating the heel which messes with your posture. And again, I'm not trying to say this, talk about just us and sell us. I want you to understand this so that when you go out and you see companies advertising minimalist repair for shoes, you can identify whether or not they are. And I'm going to kind of give you a spoiler.
The reason for knowing this is because the research shows that most minimalist shoes are actually worse for you than regular shoes. I will tell you why in just a moment. First, let's go back to what makes a truly minimal shoe. So we don't elevate the heel.
There's also no toastering. Toastering, the most shoes you'll see toes like this, especially athletic shoes. And the reason for that is the sole is stiff. And so because you can't actually use your toes naturally, they build in this sort of elevated toe thing.
So that as you rock forward, it rocks you onto your toes because otherwise you'd be slamming your foot in the ground. You don't need that if your foot can actually bend and flex. And which brings us to the next point, flexibility. If the shoe can't do something like this, that's not good.
If it can't do something like this, that's not good. If it can't do something like this, that's not good. If it's not good, then the other way. That's not good.
You want a shoe that's as flexible as possible because your foot is really flexible as well. The next thing you want is low to the ground. So you'll see most shoes, there's a layer of rubber and then there's a bunch of foam. The higher you get, the worse your balance is.
So we make things load the ground for balance and agility. Think about still, higher the still gets, the harder it is for your balance. It's really no different than the shoes. And there's one other problem that happens when you have a shoe with a bunch of foam that gets higher off the ground is I don't want to get into the physics.
But what that does, typically there's going to be a flared heel. So the heel's going to be bigger and it's going to come out further to the side where your actual heel is. And what that does is when you land, and not just on the heel or on the whole shoe actually, what that does is that when you land on your foot naturally, your foot comes in contact with the ground and then it naturally comes in contact on the outside edge of the ground and then we'll come in contact with your entire foot on the ground. And I don't know why that's what I'm saying.
But if you have a flared sole, the sole is hitting the ground, some amount of distance further out and down from where your foot would naturally hit. And this creates what's been physically known as a moment arm. Basically it puts torque on your foot. It makes your foot hyper-pronate or hyper-subinate or depending on how you land.
What it does is it changes the way you naturally land and makes things move out of alignment way too quickly or out of alignment and it moves too quickly. So that's a problem as well. Let's see, let's see, light weight is something you will find in almost all minimal shoes whether they're good for you or bad for you. Another thing with many minimal shoes, again they're made just like regular shoes.
So the soles are designed so that they wear out in like they say three to five hundred miles is when you're supposed to replace your shoes. Well that's just not necessary. When we design the rubber that we use in our shoes, we call it field true rubber. That's what we're trying to say.
We call it field true rubber. We approach our rubber manufacturer and said here's the performance characteristics that we want and he said but that's not how they make athletic shoes. And he said yeah no joke. So we're using material that actually lasts longer.
It's just much more durable. Our soles have a five thousand mile warranty. But that brings me to the other point about the sol. The difference between a true minimal shoe and what Irene Davis and Harvard call it a partial minimal shoe but I call it fake minimal shoe is how thick they are, how much cushioning there is.
Because again you have all these nerve endings and soles that you're a feat for a reason. They're sending signals to your brain about how to balance and use your entire body. If you can't get those signals then not only is it harder to balance and hard to move effectively but what sometimes happens is it makes your brain will tell your body to land harder because it's trying to get that feedback. So when you see a minimal shoe with a midsole, a cushion midsole, not only is that material going to wear out and wear out unevenly but it's also not giving you the information that you're bringing.
And this is why many of the minimal shoe sole body big shoe companies are worse for you than regular shoes because they're reducing the amount of feedback that you get enough that you can still run with bad form but you don't have the protection that you actually need if you're going to run with that form. So make sense? So if you're going to run badly you do need to try and badly means that you're reaching out with your foot too far in front of your body often landing on your heel with a straight leg which stands what Harvard's Daniel Lieberman calls an impact training force spike up through your joints. If that's the way you're going to run you're going to want to try and do something to accommodate that but if you're going to be in a minimal shoe and use your body naturally then you need to get all that feedback and if you get rid of some of that feedback your body might still do the bad thing and not even know that it's doing it.
In fact I did some a little bit of research in a lab with a guy named Dr. Bill Sands who used to be the head of biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee and we took some barefoot runners, some accomplished barefoot runners and their form was great when they were running barefoot. They had minimal shoes on them and they started over striding and heel striding and running with band form and here's the kicker they didn't even know they were doing it. So when you're looking for a minimalist shoe you want something bad again wide toe box, low ground, no big toe spring, no leg heels super flexible and a thin enough sole that you can get the protection that you want to need but the feedback you want to have a protection like this is one of our trail shoes clearly a little more protection on the shoe because if you're going to be on an aggressive trail you may need that.
Now I will tell you I know people who run barefoot on the same trails but until you're ready for that you might need something a little more grip and a little more protection. So you want to do what's appropriate for you but the most important thing is you're trying to let your foot move naturally. That's the whole real idea behind barefoot minimalist footwear is to get from the ground up from the foot up letting your body start to move naturally. That's what I want to encourage you to do and hope this little intro to a minimalist footwear is helpful for helping you do that.
If you have any questions send an email to move at jointhemovementmovement.com or better yet engage in the conversation. Go to jointhemovementmovement.com and then use that to find us on Twitter or Facebook or wherever YouTube wherever we have to be wherever you're engaging with this podcast and ask your questions there and let's see how the community responds because we are again creating a movement. This whole idea that natural movement is a better obvious healthy choice than natural food is and if you are engaging in this conversation you are part of that movement and we are happy to have your love for you to share that. So please do and as I love to say oh actually some things coming up in the future just FYI natural ways of treating plantar fasciitis I'm looking at some notes on white orthotics maybe a scam five reasons why you might never want to run barefoot and a whole lot more.
So if you want to be part of the tribe please subscribe. You've been listening to the movement movement podcast with host Stephen Satchan. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovementmovement.com