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. I'm going to give you some negative advice.
How to not pick a good running shoe. On today's episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a healthy, strong body starting with the feet first because those things are your foundation, where we are going to examine the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that you've been told about what it takes to walk to run, to dance, to play, to do yoga, or cross-fit, or whatever it is you like to do on your feet, and do it enjoyably and efficiently and healthily and I mention enjoyably because that's the most important part. If you're not having fun, do something different till you are. I'm Stephen Sashin from 0SU.com, your host of the Movement Movement podcast in my COVID scruffy phase today.
So pardon that. I actually wasn't planning on shooting this today, but then this thing popped in my head and here we are and I'm ill-prepared from a cosmetic standpoint. Hopefully you'll be able to handle that. So before we get started, we always like to start with a movement, but before we even start with a movement, I want to remind you, if you want to find out more about the podcast, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
That's where you'll find previous episodes and all the places you can interact with us on Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and everywhere that podcasts are served. You'll be able to find us there as well. And we call it the movement movement because we're creating a movement about natural movement. The movement part is you, how you participate in spreading the word, that natural movement is the obvious, better, healthy choice the way natural food currently is.
And if you want to be part of that, you know, what you want to do, subscribe and like and share and hit the like and there, the thumbs up or the bell on YouTube, you know what to do. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. That's the message. All right, so let's do our first movement thing.
And this is actually less of a movement thing than a sensation thing. You know, you have more nerve endings in the soles of your feet than anywhere but your fingertips in your lips. This is not an accident. You feel things with your feet.
That sends information to your brain and your brain then tells your whole body what to do to move well or in that particular situation. Maybe it's stepping off of something that was otherwise painful or stepping on something that's more stable, whatever it is, you've got to get information from the bottom of your body to the top of your body and then back down to your whole body. So let's do a little thing to stimulate that. Take any object and if you're in a car, you can do this now as well.
Kick off your shoes, kick off your socks. I guess you don't kick off your socks, but you can kick off your shoes, take off your socks and then grab any object you can find nearest thing to me, little USB thumb drive, stick it on the ground and step on it gently. Feel what it feels like when you put some pressure on different parts of your foot. Just notice the sensations.
And then pick another object. Literally, this is just the stuff I'm lying around. This is a little tripod thing. So in fact, I'm going to leave it like this.
I'm going to put it on the ground with the tripod legs extended. And by the way, just do this with one foot. Only do it with one foot and just feel what happens with the different parts. Just explore.
Like imagine that you were blind and the only thing you could do to feel something that was there was your foot. So you're using your foot to get as much information about that object as you possibly can. How big is it? How small is it?
How, hmm, what shape is it? One of the textures like just get as much information as you can. Just one foot only. Do this for another, you know, like once to another 20 seconds and see what happens.
I'm rotating these things around underneath my toes to see if I can get more information about what they are. I mean, I know what they are, but you get the point. I'm just putting things in between my toes. I'm seeing the difference between what it feels like on my heel versus the arch versus the outside edge of my foot versus each toe and then in between my toes.
And now stop like step off of whatever that was and just feel the difference between the foot you were just using to step on things and the foot you were using to not step on things and just notice what that's like. And then if you're in a position where you can do it, walk around, take a couple of steps and just feel the difference between what it's like on the foot that was just feeling things that was getting sensory stimulation and the foot that wasn't. And definitely leave comments and tell me what you discover because this is just an interesting little thing. And if you feel unbalanced, which may be the case, then you know, step on whatever those objects were with your other foot.
You won't have to do as much to get back in balance by the way. So that's our moving exercise for today. Now let's talk about how to not pick a running shoe. I think it's important to know how not to do things in order to inform how to do things even when I'm teaching people how to run naturally or run barefoot.
I'll often have them exaggerate bad patterns because that way it really highlights what that pattern is and makes it easier to start doing something different because we get into loops, we get into patterns, we get into habits about motion and thinking as well, of course, it's hard to break out of them if we're not really aware of them. So one way of bringing attention and awareness to those things is by exaggerating those. So here's the story that I want to tell that has to do with how to not pick a good running shoe or this applies to any shoe really, but I'm using running as this example. Okay.
So it's not uncommon that I will talk to people about this book born to run by Christopher McDougall. It's actually launched the whole natural movement barefoot running craze even though it's not really actively promoting barefoot running, but it is talking about research from Dan Lieberman at Harvard that showed how runners who are bicially barefoot, they apply less force into the ground or force in a different pattern than people who are running in shoes. What happens is that barefoot runners end up using their muscles, ligaments, and tendons as the natural shock absorbers and springs they're supposed to be rather than trying to rely on the man-made materials in the shoes which break down over time often very quickly. So the other thing is of course this book talks about the Tatarmara Indians in Mexico, a tribe that runs in sandals they call it wadaches, which is really just a Spanish word that means sandal typically a woven leather sandal.
But when people discovered the Tatarmara and asked what their shoes were, they said, oh, these are wadaches and everyone in the running community assumed that the sandal they were making or that they were wearing, which was made with a used piece of tire for the sole, often some leather on top of that and a leather strap that that was a wadaché, a running sandal was a wadaché, but really it's a Spanish word for spandal. More importantly though, I point out that in the book it describes how the Tatarmara run for days at a time they have games where they run for like hundreds of miles running as their transportation and they will run either barefoot or in wadaches sometimes again for days at a time hundreds of miles. So they'll do this until they're in their 60s, their 70s, I mean as old as they yet they keep running. Now what's interesting to me is I'll point that out to people and it's not uncommon, in fact I had a friend just recently where we had this conversation where his response was, yeah, but they grew up doing that.
I can't do that. They're used to it. They grew up doing it. Now I said to this guy again, who's a friend?
I said, how old were you when you started doing Jiu Jitsu? He was 20. I said, okay, so it's possible to learn things from the age of 20. You can get good at things and he's black belt.
So you can get good at things. You can master something if you started at 20 instead of starting when you were two and he went, yeah, so when did you pick up golf? And he's like a really good golfer and he said, yeah, when I was 40, I said, and you're like really good, right? So you picked up a brand new skill when you were 40, right?
Yeah, I said, so why are you assuming that because the automata grew up running that way, barefooter and sandals, that that's something special that you can't replicate. You've already demonstrated that you can learn something totally, totally new at almost any age. And we know this. I mean, we see people who pick up all sorts of activities, sports or playing an instrument when they're in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s, their 60s, their 70s, their 80s and beyond.
So why can't you do that? And he didn't have a good answer. So this is the really fun part. The running shoe that you were buying before you got into zero shoes, why did you buy it?
And I knew the answer to this one. So this is a setup, but you'll get the point. He said, well, it was a shoe that was worn by, he didn't say it this way, but it was a shoe that was worn by an Olympic marathoner. And then that shoe became really, really popular.
He said, so that was why he was inspired to get it was, you know, all these people were saying records in the shoe and therefore, you know, you got to get that shoe. I said, all right. So, but I'm kind of curious. The guys who were running in that shoe, they were like 105 pound Kenyans who run a marathon at roughly just under 13 miles per hour pace.
Why would you argue that you can't run naturally barefoot or in sandals or natural form like the type of modern because you didn't grow up that way, but you have no problem saying, I'm going to get the shoes that are worn by this other guy who you also didn't grow up anything like. First of all, those guys grew up often running barefoot or in sandals, but then they switched to those shoes because they got paid to wear those shoes. It was a status symbol. It also allowed them to often feed their family or their village with the money they were getting for sponsorship.
So why is it that you're going to use an argument about why you can't do something, basically imitating the time of Mara, and then essentially use the exact opposite of that argument for doing what you're doing by getting the shoes that are being worn by a guy who's 105 pound, 5 foot, 3, 5 foot, 4 inch guy who runs faster than you will ever run ever in your life. Who also, by the way, is doing this with the goal of making as much money as possible as quickly as possible, not necessarily the goal of running enjoyily and healthily for the rest of his or frankly her life. This is an important thing. We often look at Olympians as the barometer of what we should do when their goals are often very different than our goals.
I know a lot of Olympians here in and around Boulder, Colorado who don't run anymore. They stop running as soon as they stop competing. They've gone on to other things or maybe they do a little bit not quite so much, certainly not quite so fast. There's actually a funny story.
My friend Lorraine Mueller who is a Olympian in the Atlanta Olympics and multiple marathon when she was a world champion for quite a while. She said she went to one of the turkey trots, one of the races where they give you a turkey if you're the winner. She shows up, she's because I needed the turkey. They put her at the beginning of the start of the line.
Right before the race started, she looked to her left and right, there were like four other Olympians who were also there because they needed the turkey. This is a very unusual town, but a lot of these former Olympians, they stop or they move to a different sport once they're done competing as runners because the way that they were running to compete and win is not necessarily the best way to remain healthy and happy for the rest of your life. So it's an interesting thing. So my point is that you don't necessarily want to use as a barometer, as a yardstick, as a way of making a decision for what shoes to get, what some Olympian is getting or more accurately, you want to be really careful if you're using that logic of, you know, I heard these runners are using it, therefore I should get it.
If you're nothing like those runners, that makes no sense. And then be careful that you're not using the exact opposite story to talk yourself out of doing something that might be good for you, running in a natural fashion like the Tardomana. They're not suggesting you run in sandals or run barefoot. That's not required.
I mean, obviously look behind you, you see that zero shoes makes things other than sandals. We make shoes. We make boots. There's the right thing for the right situation.
You may not be in a place where barefoot is appropriate or you might just not like it. You might want that little bit of protection off of whatever's on the ground. Totally totally cool. That's what we do.
Point being this is going to, by highlighting this about how we're currently making decisions, about what we can do, what we think we should do, it might just highlight that decision making process, that loop that we're in, that habit that we form. Sometimes that habit is just that we go to a store and ask the person who's working at the store, you know, what shoe do I get for filling the blank? Whether it's trail running or sprinting or road running or because you think you have plantar fasciitis or you think that you pronate as if that means anything. I've done a whole other podcast about how either of those are necessarily meaningful or whatever it is that you do, you can ask this person who sometimes might throw you on a treadmill and film you at 60 frames a second or less and then make some conclusion about how you run and therefore what shoe you need.
So hopefully this whole idea of paying attention to the automara versus the Olympians, it might make you call into question the person that you're asking and how they have come to take whatever information you've given them and then make a product recommendation. I'll give you a hint. A lot of these people, first of all, at 60 frames a second, especially if you're filming from the knees down or the middle of thighs down, you really can't see anything that would be meaningful. But really, let's say you do pronate, which again is not a problem.
Look at some of the Olympians that you're trying to emulate and you'll see they pronate like crazy because that's just part of the natural spring and shock absorber mechanism that's built into your body. But regardless, if you think you need pronation control, again, no evidence that it's a problem, then where's the evidence that that particular shoe, that little bit of foam is able to protect or change your foot position while you're running when you're applying a massive amount of force in the ground three to six times your body weight every time you land on the ground. And how did this person who's giving you this information learn this hint usually from the shoe companies who gave them this entire strategy for putting you on a treadmill so it seems like they're scientific data and then recommending the shoe because it seems like they're scientific data. By the way, this whole notion that there are different kinds of feet and different kinds of movements of those feet that lead to different kinds of shoes, stability shoes or neutral shoes or whatever other, they're going to get from what it is right now has been routinely disproven.
The army did this study. They took, I think it was 900 runners or 900 people and they analyzed the way that they do in a shoe store to figure out which type of person you are and therefore which type of shoe you need. And they took half of that group 450 and divided them appropriately into the categories for, you know, here's the type of shoe you're supposed to be wearing, the shoe you're supposed to be wearing, et cetera. And the other group, they gave them a random assignment of shoes.
Well, punchline at the end of the study period, there was no difference in performance or injury between the two groups. The ones who were given awesome advice, the way shoe stores give it and the ones who got completely random shoes. So again, the whole idea of how not to pick shoe by the way you're thinking might lead you to the question, well, now what? And the answer to now what, of course, from my perspective is actually it's not even from my perspective.
This is something from the American College of Sports Medicine. If you go to zeroshoes.com slash shoes, C-H-O-O-S-E-I-N-I-Thinkers, I can't remember. I've got to look really quickly. I'm going to check on my computer and give you the answer to that.
It's either choose or choice, which is it is choose. Zeroshoes.com slash shoes, you're going to find what the American College of Sports Medicine recommends. And what you're going to find is they recommend something like this. They say the fundamental idea for a shoe is just to give you some protection from the ground.
That's it. So what they recommend is something lightweight, something flexible, something without an elevated heel, something with this little cushioning as you can get away with. And I'm you'll hear that I argue in that point that they only say as little cushioning as you can get away with instead of no cushioning because the American College of Sports Medicine is sponsored by a major shoe brand. So when you know that, when they're sponsored by a major shoe brand and you read these recommendations, you can see it feels like they've couched some of the recommendations to not be too offensive to their sponsor.
And so the other version of how to not pick a shoe is in terms of knowing what you're listening to and how it applies to you and what ulterior motives or other factors might be leading to it. But even with the fact that they're sponsored by a major shoe brand, you'll see what they recommend is something that basically that shoe brand and every other major shoe brand doesn't provide. They don't make products that give you what the American College of Sports Medicine recommends. You do.
So what I like to say, other than what they're recommending and what we do, and by the way, I didn't find out about their recommendations until years after we were doing what we were doing at zero shoes. It was just a when I heard that they had written a white paper about how to pick a good running shoe. I was frankly nervous. And then when I read it, I was shocked and stunned and thrilled to see that they were they may as well as said, go buy a pair of zero shoes.
I'm not. I don't know if I'm legally allowed to say whether or not the people who done that study after they did that, or did that wrote that paper, whether I'm allowed to say whether or not they do or don't actually wear zero shoes. But the fact that I'm bringing that up might give you hint. So point being, or one of the points that I want to make is that when you're picking a shoe, from our perspective, you want to let your body do what's natural.
You want to let your feet bend and move and flex and feel. You want shoes that let your toes spread that keeps you low to the ground for balance and agility, that doesn't elevate your heel and mess with your posture, that doesn't give you unnecessary toespring or a stiff sole that doesn't let your foot function properly. You want something that gives you traction grip and you want to do something that's right for the situation you're in. If you're going to be on trails, you may need something with a little more of a lucky sole to handle the grip that you need on a trail.
If you're going to be on road, you can get away with less than that. If you're going to be walking, you can get away with less than that. If you like the feeling of being barefoot, you can go for something more barefoot. If you feel like you need a little bit more protection, for now at least, then you can add something with just a tiny bit of protection.
So we're not trying to convince people that they need to go barefoot right away, or the next best thing to barefoot right away, we want to convince you to just start letting your body move naturally, experiment, see where that goes, see where that takes you. I will warn you that where it might take you is realizing that after a while of getting used to using your feet naturally, you put on shoes that don't let your feet move naturally and it's going to feel like you're in a body cast. My wife describes it best, she just didn't realize how much she got used to feeling things and connecting to the ground and how that radiated through her entire body and how that affected the way she moved. I totally get it.
I spent a lot of time barefoot. In fact, I go back and forth with our sandals. Like our Z-trail sandal gives you a little extra layer of protection and it's super, super comfortable. After a while, I'll put on the Z-trail or the Genesis sandal and those are much more like barefoot and I walk around going, oh my God, I can feel things again.
Then if for a while, sometimes that stimulation can be a little too much or even at first that stimulation can be a little too much. Imagine being in a dark room for a long time and you put on bright lights. That's too much. It could be like that if you haven't been stimulating your feet the way they're supposed to be.
At first, it can be a little too much sensation. Your brain is going, oh my God, and being a little overwhelmed. But over time, it's not that you become numb to that. It's that your brain and your feet start communicating better.
Frankly, the way your brain works, it learns to ignore things that it doesn't need to know and pay attention to things that it does know. And as you get used to being more natural, it becomes a little smarter about what you do and don't need to know. I'm not going to give you, again, explicit advice on how to pick something. But I want you to explore the how not to pay attention to the thoughts that you're using to make those decisions, see if there's a pattern in there, see if there's some dissonance, some contradiction between how you're using logic in one place but maybe not in another place.
We like to say that wearing zero shoes is like having your own coach and it's your own feet who are becoming your coach. The shoes are helping you become your own coach. But the other thing I love to say is wearing zero shoes can make you smarter. They're smart shoes because they can help reveal the kind of thinking that when indecision making processes that you use prior to discovering natural movement.
And if we're really lucky, that same kind of discovery you make about how you think starts extending in other areas of your life as well. Maybe about your health, maybe about settlements you take, maybe about the kind of exercise you do or the kind of training that you do or what you eat. I already mentioned that one. I can remember.
I'm not going to give you prescriptions for living but it's nice to know that you're the one whose not the prescription pad and if you're the right kind of doctor, your own doctor, then you might get better and better at figuring out what those prescriptions are. And maybe the prescription is about experimenting instead of some concrete answer. Anyway, this is all just about being thought provoking and I can't wait to hear what thoughts it provokes. So leave those in the comments wherever you happen to be.
If you have something specific you want to share with me, drop me an email. Go to ve at jointhemovementmovement.com and again go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, do find other ways you can interact with us wherever you're finding this podcast or video, like and share and subscribe and do all those things that you know how to do. Because as I said, if you want to be part of the tribe, please do subscribe. Let's see if we can make natural movement.
Help people rediscover how natural movement is really the obvious better healthy choice that we natural food is. Can't wait to hear what's next. Thanks so much for being here. As always go out, have fun and live life.
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