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 buy a new pair of running shoes or even walking shoes or any kind of shoe, frankly, and you go for a walk or a run and certain point the shoes get bad and what could happen to you if you don't replace them in time.
And when do you replace them? Well, I've answered two both of those questions. In today's episode of the Movement Movement, podcast for people who like to know the truth, it's about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with the feet first as those things are. You may have noticed you are a foundation.
They're at the bottom of your body. We also break down the propaganda, the mythology. The outright lies that you've been told about what it takes to walk, to run, to hike, to dance, to play, to do yoga, to do cross-fitters, whatever it is you like to do, enjoyably, efficiently, effectively. And that's why we're here.
I'm Stephen Sashin. You're host of the Movement Movement podcast, the CEO at Zeroshoo.com. And more importantly, what we're doing here, we call it the Movement Movement podcast because we're creating a movement about movement. So the about movement part is that we're trying to make natural movement and footwear that supports it.
The obvious, better, healthy choice, the way natural food currently is. And the other part of the movement is that it's you. A movement happens because of the people involved and you are the people. And what that means is if you enjoy what you hear here, then go to www.jointhemovement.com, where you can find all the previous episodes, you can opt in to find out about the new episodes, and of course, all the places that you can get this podcast from Spotify and iTunes and Google Play and on YouTube and Facebook and everywhere that you know.
And you can do those things like leave reviews and give us a thumbs up and subscribe and hit the bell on YouTube so you're alerted when new videos are posted and all those things you know how to do. Basically, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe and you know how to do it. Okay. Oh, yeah, I'll say the rest of that for the end.
But let's jump into this question of what happens if you wear shoes too long and how do you know when that is? First things first, the reason I'm bringing this up is we're making this recording during what we hope is the height of the coronavirus issue. We have no idea how long this is going to go on, when it's going to change. Suffice it to say, one thing people are trying to do is figure out what they can do to stay sane.
Some people are going for runs and walks and hikes and rides. Some people are just staying inside. There are some people who are doing more active things. And so this question of like, do I need to get new shoes to come up knowing that footwear is a totally discretionary purchase, not like toilet paper, which people are still hoarding in ways that make absolutely no sense.
So here are the answers. First things first, let's talk about when things go bad. Now, the joke about this is years ago, the endurance running coach, Dr. Phil Maffetone, wrote a book in fitness and health, I think.
Don't help me to it because I'm really bad at remembering things like that, but let's call it that. And Phil's book said, suggested that if you're going to go buy a pair of running shoes, go to somewhere like Walmart or Target and buy the cheapest shoes you could find. And the reason is because back then when he wrote this book, a cheap pair of shoes had very little padding, was low to the ground, had no motion controller, art support, they were just a cheap pair of shoes that frankly, when they wore out, who cares, they cost like 10 bucks. But more, they were closer to what we now think of as a minimalist shoe.
He also recommended that when you wear a regular shoe, like wear it down until the cushion gets so packed down that it's again like a minimalist shoe because they just didn't have those back then. But the problem with that now is that when you start to wear down shoes, the foam and the cushioning will wear down in a way that could be really bad biomechanically. They could make your feet twist and put strain on your ankles and your knee and your hip and your back be biomechanically really bad for you. In fact, I was at the airport a while ago and there was a guy walking in front of me on that little moving walkway who I just noticed his feet were like way caved in because he had worn out the inside of the foam on his regular running shoes.
I don't know if he was a runner or a walker or whatever, but suffice to say, big, big curve on the inside and that was setting off the rest of his body in a way that was crazy. I whipped out my phone. I got the video of this from the knees down. We posted it online.
And this will tell you the difference between audiences on Facebook versus Instagram. On Facebook, people were all commenting, oh my God, this looks horrible. That's what happens when you're padded motion control shoes. That's what happens if you don't know when to replace them, et cetera, et cetera.
On Instagram, people yelled at us for body shaming the guy. I'm mystified by that one because all you could see was like, knees down, didn't look like he was, well, anything. You couldn't tell anything about the rest of his body. I didn't know this anything about the rest of his body.
I was looking at his feet. So either way, but what I saw was a normal kind of problem, foam always breaks down. That's what foam does. Madamaterials collapse.
They crush. out, et cetera. And if they wear out in ways that alter the position of your foot, again, that ripples all the way up-stream and can cause all sorts of problems. So how do you know when to replace your shoes before that happens?
Well, obviously one, just look at your shoes and check and see if that's what's going on. If, of course, you're wearing regular shoes, and we'll talk about the difference between that and zero shoes in just a few moments. But the other thing that's kind of funny is you might not have to figure that out to look at the bottom of your shoe and see when and where it has worn out. Because here's what shoe companies have figured out.
They figured out how to make the outsole, the bottom part that's usually black sometimes white. They figured out a way to make that wear out around the time that they think the midsole, the foam part, the cushioning part has worn out as well. And if that sounds like planned-offs lessons to you, you are correct. That is exactly what that is.
They, over the years, have figured out how to make the entire shoes sort of fall apart when they want it to fall apart and therefore you have to replace it. I just remember this. Back in 1980-81, I was a street performer in the summer, actually year-round in North Carolina, but mostly in the summer. And I didn't act it involved a bunch of gymnastics.
I would flip over people and do a bunch of crazy things. And I eventually found a pair of shoes that I was wearing that were basically like a minimal shoe made by Adidas, or if you're super hip, Adidas. And if you're really obnoxious, you say Adidas to other people. But regardless, it was this great, Adidas shoe.
And I wore a couple pairs out and then I just happened. I found a place. I don't know how I got turned on to it. In New York City, that bought shoes in bulk that they sold to Prisons.
I was not in prison, but luckily they were open to the public. And I found that they had this shoe that I liked. I can't remember the name of it, unfortunately. And they had like five pairs left in my size, so I bought them all.
And I said, I can't believe that they stopped making the shoe. It's great. And the guy said, oh, yeah, they stopped making because it was lasting too long. Wow, that floored me.
Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent. So I don't even remember what it was a tangent from. But the question then becomes, how do you know if it's too late? The shoe is breaking down.
What's the story? Well, the common wisdom is that you should replace your shoes every three to 500 miles. And most people don't do that. But that's what shoe companies say.
And they mostly created that idea just to get you to buy more shoes more often. Most people don't track how many miles they put on their shoes anyway. So how do you know if it's three to 500 miles? For those who have, many of you have found, especially if you have really good form, that number is really kind of arbitrary.
But you can see there's a chart behind me. And if you can't see it because you're just listening, I'll describe it in a moment. This is something that I've kind of borrowed from Dr. Brian Heidershite, friend of ours, and Zero Shoes Wearer and researcher.
And in fact, if you go to jointhemovementmovement.com, you can listen to the podcast that we did with Dr. Brian Heidershite. And what Brian and his team did is they wanted to see how long it took to the foam in your average shoe broke down to the point where it wasn't providing the benefits that the company claimed the foam and the cushioning was designed to provide. So what they did is they had a device that was basically just like a piston that just kept bouncing off the foam and they just checked to see how much bounce the foam had.
Now I'm going to show you this chart and tip up the camera. And what you'll see is on the bottom, those lines at 100 miles, 200 miles, 300 miles, 400 miles, 500 miles. And there's a curve that starts way up when the shoe is in brand new condition and then curves down to the point where you get that 300 to 500 mile mark of when you're supposed to replace your shoes. First things first, there's also, you can see this little wooden arch.
If you know what that is, just sitting on the ledge where you rest the pens for my white board. If you're watching this, you can see it. Just a little wooden arch made with five blocks. If you know what that is, put that in the comments, bonus prizes if you do.
Oh, and there's a magic eight ball. Also, put in your favorite magic eight ball answer in the comments. And this one that I just got was, what does it say? Most likely, it's most likely you're going to put something in the comments.
Let's look at the chart. If you look at the 300 to 500 mile area, and again, this chart is not drawn exactly based on Ryan's research, just kind of summarizing or whatever the word is I'm looking for. I don't know that you, but I'm going to be 58 soon and I have lost the ability to get names and specific words. They just don't chop my head when I want them.
So by so to say, you can see between 300 and 500 miles, things look pretty bad. But you know, back up to 200 miles. Things are not a whole lot better at 200 miles back up to like about 150 miles where I've drawn a little vertical orange line. You can see things are not really that good there either.
So check that out. The three to 500 mile thing is probably not accurate. And of course, it's going to be different based on different kinds of foam, different kinds of shoes construction in general, how much you run, how much you weigh, what your form is like. The line is still the same.
Things wear out way faster than you're being told. They're not lasting as long. They're not providing the benefits. Now you may think, well, what if I just get those maximally cushioned shoes that have come out recently with more foam?
That's going to be better. Right? Oh man, that could not be more wrong. First of all, our friend Dr.
Christine Pollard in Oregon, her research on those maximal shoes, and she really thought more cushioning would be better. It would reduce the impact forces and actually cushion your body, cushion your landing. What she found was the exact opposite. That impact forces did not go down with more cushioning.
Sometimes they even go up. And of course, the higher your shoe gets, the more cushioning you have, the more unstable you become. It's like wearing a pair of stills. I don't know if anyone has collected this data.
This is totally anecdotal, which means I could be pulling it totally out of my butt. But just from people that I've been talking to, I hear two things. From people who wear more maximal shoes. One, some of them feels great right away.
But then after about a year, not so much. The other is more people falling and breaking risks and collarbones than I've ever heard runners talk about. We have a number of friends who've been running for 40, 50 years plus, never had an injury, never fell down, started wearing the maximal shoes, falling down, broken arms, broken wrists, broken collarbones. Saying that'll happen to you, saying again, anecdotal info that may be fully, rectally engaged.
If you want to put it that way. Interesting is that, why is it that impact forces would not go down if you have all that cushioning? Well, one theory is that your brain is always trying to get information from your feet. That's why you have all those nerve endings in the soles of your feet to tell your brain what's going on at the bottom of your body so it knows how to control everything in between.
And when you have all that cushioning, it can't feel anything. It's a princess and P issue, but there is no P down there at all. Unless you're running on a trail and there was a dog in front of you. That was too easy.
I'm sorry that I had to do that. But the point is that your brain is looking for information and since it can't get it with all that cushioning, you're landing harder to try and get some information to your brain about what's happening. And then landing harder, you're actually putting yourself in a position where you're less able to respond quickly to changes in terrain and other problems. And let's go back to that tripping issue.
Let alone the issue of if the sole is flared out and you land on an edge, that's a fulcrum and that changes how quickly your foot goes from supination to pronation as you move. Or maybe you do what Zion Williamson did, the basketball player who tripped on one of those flared edges and that's why he then tried to catch himself with his other foot and he blew through the Nike shoe that he was wearing while playing basketball. The important part was not blowing through the shoe. The important part was that he fell over the edge of the sole which created a fulcrum which he then was trying to capture or save himself from.
Let's use that. So, but here's the crazier part. The two super maximal shoes. When do they wear out?
Oh my God. If you haven't looked at this information, this will blow your mind. The Brooks Hyperion Elite, it says you should, they will last between 50 and 100 miles. This came from their own press release, 50 to 100 miles.
The Nike Vaporflies, they say maybe 150 miles and they recommend that you don't wear these shoes until you're racing. Well, I don't recommend wearing a brand new shoe for a race because the research that I saw and this time that I spent in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands was that every different shoe can change the way you run unless you're a super elite runner where you can put bricks on your feet and nothing changes pretty much. But if you've got a brand new shoe and you're not sure how you feel in moving it, that could cause all manner problems.
So you don't want to just whip out a shoe for a race only. You don't have to do some training in it. So if the Hyperion Elite is only in the last five to 100 miles, you get some training and then one race out of it. For the Vaporfly, if it's 150 miles, you get a little bit of training and three races out of it.
If you're a marathoner, if you're an ultra marathoner, you get halfway through some races and you need to replace your shoes and these things are excessive. So, what's this pointing out? It's pointing out something simple. Manmade products break down.
When they break down, that's not good. I already mentioned the Plan Obsolescence that the outsole is designed to wear out when the phone wears out. I'm not sure if that's the case in the newer shoes. But again, the phenomenon of making something that has this amount of Plan Obsolescence or this limited lifespan, I personally define Reprehensible.
I find it utterly incredible, which brings me to talking about zero issues and I'm not saying this to sell the product. I'm saying this to talk about the difference between our products and quote, normal products. When we first came up with the idea for making our own rubber for our own out soles, the rubber that we call Field True Rubber, we approach the rubber manufacturer and say, here's the performance characteristics that we want. We want something as lightweight as we can make it knowing that rubber is heavy.
We want something thin enough that it's really, really flexible, durable enough that it can last for a long time. We had a bunch of other characteristics as well. Our rubber manufacturer said, you know that's not how they make shoes for households. And we said, yeah, no joke.
That's why we're doing it this way. We're trying to make something totally different. We want something durable. We want something flexible.
We want something lightweight. We want something comfortable. No one had done that, it seems. So, and we realized that what happened after the first couple of years, people would email us when all we had was a do-it-yourself sandal making kit, which we still sell on our website.
It's still one of our best selling products. Really fun DIY project you can do at any age. We've had five-year-olds make their own. Sometimes the kids are actually better at doing it than the adults.
Regardless, after a couple of years, we have people emailing us and saying, well, how long are these going to last? We checked and no one had said that they ever wore out of here. So our response was, we don't know. And after a couple of years of realizing that we don't know how long these things are going to last, but it had been a couple of years, that's when I came up with the idea of our 5,000 miles sole warranty.
The warranty is basically if you wear down the heel or the ball of a foot to less than a millimeter, we can replace your shoes for a nominal cost. I just like the idea that our sandals were inspired by tire sandals, and so we have a warranty inspired by tires. And that doesn't guarantee that your sandals or shoes will last for 5,000 miles, because again, that mostly depends on you and your gate. Friction is friction, physics is physics.
If you're over striding, you're applying extra force when you land. If you're pulling and pushing on the ground, you're applying extra force. So your soles may not last that long, but that's why we have the warranty. So, and also the way the soles wear gives you, it's like a training aid.
It's like your own coach. If you look at how the soles are wearing, that'll tell you, are you over striding? Are you pushing and pulling on the ground? Are you trying to push off the ground rather than lift your leg off the ground?
You'll get all this valuable information. And we made them thick enough so that they're also going to last. Most of our soles are roughly in the 5 millimeter range. So actually our do self-sandal kits come in either 4 millimeter thickness or 6 millimeter thickness.
Our speed force is a 4.5 millimeter sole. The HFS is a 5.5 millimeter sole. The Prio is I think 5.5 for 6. Don't hold me to it.
Our trail shoes have basically like a 2 to 3 millimeter base and then lugs that are 3 to 4 millimeters. So you get some extra traction there. The bottom line is we don't have a midsole. We don't have a foam piece that's going to wear out like that.
We have a little bit of foam in the hiding on the inside of the terraflex and the mesa trail. And then of course our sandals, we have a little bit of foam in the forefoot of the cloud and the upper on the varicrues and the Z trail have our bare foam layer. When we design that foam, first of all, it's really thin so it doesn't do a whole lot. It's a weird thing actually.
There's a bit of a tangent. People report that that little bit of foam that we have in all those products I just mentioned makes them super comfortable. But it's weird because if you look at that foam, again, it's like 2 to 3 millimeters thick and when you put your weight on it, it only compresses by like a half a millimeter to maybe a millimeter tops. And so you've got to ask why does that register in people's brains as super comfortable?
I have an evolutionary biology theory and that is that way back when we learned that that tiny bit of cushion, that tiny bit of give in the surface that we're walking on is letting us know something good is nearby or about to happen. Maybe it means that there's food nearby or water nearby, somewhere good to rest, etc. I don't know. I'd love to hear your feedback about that.
Bottom line, tiny bit of foam that's made super high density so that it lasts as long as possible. Actually, I take it back. We use bare foam for the top of the Z trail and the varicrues and in the cloud and we use what we call trail foam which is more dense in the teraflex and the mason trail in that middle layer of the Z trail and the varicrues. So we designed those things to be super, super long lasting because we're not trying to provide quote cushioning because we know that that doesn't work.
We're just trying to provide that little bit of give, that little bit of extra protection that'll make you feel more comfortable if you're on a particularly rugged surface. All that said, I hope that's helpful in helping you realize why you do want to pay attention to how things are wearing out and how you can know when things are wearing out and maybe considering trying something that doesn't wear out quite the same way. By the way, we've got emails from people who still got our original do-it-yourself sandal kit when we started the business at the end of 2009 who are still wearing that same product which I find utterly, utterly amazing. I actually still have my original pair.
I do pull them out every now and then wear those. Mostly I go around barefoot or in the summer I'm in my Z trail or my teraflex or my genesis and when I need to wear shoes I'm mostly in the speed force of the HFS or, well, you get the idea. I now own more shoes at one time than I think I ever owned in the rest of my life combined. That's what happens apparently when you start a shoe company.
Anyway, hope that's interesting. Hope that's helpful. If you have any questions, toss them in the comments. I will do my best to answer.
If you want, drop me an email. I'm in emailable at move at jointhemovementmovement.com. And by the way, if you have any questions, recommendations, people you think should be on the show or whatever else you want to give me feedback for, send an email there or leave comments in the various comment sections of the places where you can leave comments. You know how that goes.
So again, thank you for being part of the movement movement. Thank you for being part of the group of people who is moving this movement forward. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. You know how to do that for other podcasts and this one as well.
So I look forward to what's next. I want to thank you. Good luck dealing with virus related things. I'm hoping that some of you are listening to this on the other side of this where it's all gone and we can get closer to each other than 60 to part.
And until then, live life. Feet first. You've been listening to the movement movement podcast with host Stephen Sashan. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at jointhemovementmovement.com.