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. Can a shoe be dangerous?
Oh, yes, it can. Can it be very dangerous? Oh, it definitely can. We're going to talk about the most dangerous shoes in the world on this episode of the Movement Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a healthy, strong body.
Starting at first because those things are your foundation. We're going to break through the propaganda and the anthology that sometimes lies that you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or dance or play or hike or do yoga or cross or to play dance dance revolution or all the myriad other things you might do on your feet and to do it efficiently and enjoy and less emphasizing joyably. If you're not having fun, do something different until you are. And I'm Stephen Sashin from zero shoes.com, your host of the Movement Movement podcast.
And we call it the movement movement because we're getting a movement that involves you. And I'll say more about that in a second about movement, natural movement. We want to help people rediscover that natural movement is the obvious, better, healthy choice the way we currently think of natural food. And if you want to find out more, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
That's where you can find previous episodes and all the different places you can interact with us. You can find this podcast wherever you find podcasts. And you can find us on YouTube and on Facebook and on Instagram and all those other places as well. And also give a question.
You can try me an email. You can use the contact form on that website or just email move at jointhemovementmovement.com. But the more important part about the movement is the movement part of natural movement. Like I said, involves you because we're spreading the word and that's you telling people about whatever experience you've had, whatever discoveries you made.
As maybe you've gotten out of big, thick padded motion, controlled shoes and into something that lets your body do what it's supposed to do, then move flex and feel. So if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe and like and share and hit the thumbs up and the bell button if you're on YouTube and all those things you know how to do. I don't need to bore you with all that. I'm going to talk about danger.
Oh wait, first before we talk about danger, let's move. I'm going to do a really simple movement. I can't believe we haven't done this one before. You can do this pretty much anywhere and it's really nice.
Just like angle rolls. I mean, you're not actually rolling your ankle. You're just moving your foot around. So point your foot, most people say point your toes, but we're going to do that separately.
Point your foot and then pull your foot back towards your knee and then move your foot in. I don't care what you do this with, by the way. You can do both at the same time or one at a time. Point your foot in as far as it'll go.
Don't rotate your shin or your femur, your leg. Just rotate your foot as much as you can. Then rotate your foot out as much as you can. Then try and make a circle.
I can't tell if I'm going clockwise or counterclockwise because it depends on which way I'm looking, but just make a couple of circles and then go the other way and then pull just your toes back towards your knee. Leave your foot where it is and then point just your toes and then try to pull your toes to the left and right. You won't be able to, but try it anyway. It's interesting.
Then do both. Point your foot and your toes and then pull your foot and your toes back towards your knee and take your foot and your toes as far to the inside as you can and the outside as you can. Then do a couple more circles and then just shake them out. Just shake them out.
Shake it like you're shaking out of the sun, whatever you shake. What is it you shake? All those things. Shake that.
See how that feels. Just bring a little circulation and movement into your angle. Have some fun. It's the bottom line.
Then if you only did one foot at a time, see how your other foot feels compared to the one you just rotated. Feel all that motion and flexibility and space and movement in one. Try it on the other side now to get those balance down. You can do this while I'm talking.
Here's where this whole dangerous shoe thing came from. Someone I was talking to recently said that he went to a running shoe store and they won't sell shoes like zero shoes because they're dangerous. The most dangerous shoes ever he said. Okay, good.
Yeah. Let's jump into the show. By the way, I got to tell you this is really a funny thing because if you go to running shoe stores in Europe, they don't tell you this story. They don't have this idea that something truly minimalist, something that lets your foot move natural is somehow dangerous.
Why? Well, A, they have a longer tradition of natural movement. There are a number of footwear companies, Birkenstock and a bunch of others that have been making shoes based on this idea of natural movement. Now, I would argue that they don't necessarily live up to the promise of Birkenstock.
It's thick so you don't really feel the ground very much. The cork and it's quite a while until it breaks until it's really moving. But it is nice and wide. That's really a lot of the European brands.
The biggest thing they have is a wide toe box. That's a good start. But for natural movement, you also need that flexibility in that ground feeling as well. That's a fact.
It's a fact that you don't need to mess up with technology. You just need to give them a little protection and a little way to hold that on your foot. Which interestingly is what the American College of Sports Medicine says is the only reason you need shoes anyway, little protection, something to hold that on your foot. Something as simple as I'm holding up one of our Genesis sandals which is just some rubber and some string to hold that on your foot basically.
That works. By the way, I'm not saying you should but I am saying you could do what many other people have done in that sandal walk, run, hike, go all the way across Madagascar. There's lots of things you can do with a little protection underneath your foot. Backing up to the US dangerous thing.
Here's my favorite part about a running shoe store saying they won't sell something like a truly minimalist shoe because it's dangerous. Most of the people walking into that store, oh, and by dangerous they mean you're going to get injured wearing it. Or you're going to step on hyper-dramatic, those are your mortgage rates, they're going to go up or your kids won't get into college or you won't be able to remember the number three or whatever nonsense they make up. Here's the joke.
Most people walking into that store, they're already injured. They're looking for something to get over injuries with or they've been injured. They're one of the 50% of runners that get injured every year or 80% of marathoners that get injured every year wearing regular shoes. They're already selling the most dangerous shoes in the world.
Many shoes have not improved injury rates at all in the 50 plus years they've been around. People forget that prior to like the early 70s, most shoes were more like zero shoes. They were basically thin. They weren't, you know, they typically had pointy toe boxes.
They were basically thin and flexible. Even the first Nike shoe, the waffle trainer, it was maybe 10 millimeters of foam and really lightweight and pretty flat. Still pointy toes, still have a little thing called toe spring. But suffice it to say, way, way closer to what we do now than anything you've seen ever since.
So they're already dealing with danger, but then suddenly this is more dangerous. Okay, well, that's an interesting question because the studies that have looked at this and there aren't very many and they aren't very good. And the reason is, I think the major shoe companies know that natural movements legit. They know it.
We've heard people, we've had friends of ours here from the people like in the VP and owner level and president and CEO level of major shoe companies say, oh, yeah, natural movements legit, but we can't do it because it would be admitting that everything else we've been doing is a lie. So it's here saying you heard it from me who are from a friend, but regardless, the, what was the point of that? So the, oh, so the studies that are often quoting about natural movement, wait, hold on one sec, there's an, I should have written this down. If you've been listening to me for a while, you know, I'll get on a tangent and then completely forget where I started.
So, and I am in that situation right now. Totally true. So, oh, so shoes cause injuries. There's that first Nike shoe, 50% of runners, 80% of marathons get injured.
People are looking for solution. Let me tell you, actually, I've talked about this recently. There's a new Nike shoe. They say reduce injuries by 50% compared to other shoes.
This is, they say it was an independent study. It was actually paid for and designed by Nike and then run by and someone who wasn't Nike. And it's true that new shoe did reduce injuries by 50% compared to the other shoe, which was Nike's best selling motion control padded or supported running shoe. What you really have to look carefully to find out is that the old shoe, the original shoe during this 12 week study injured 30% of the people who were wearing it.
The new shoe only injured about 14.5% of the people. I mean, what? Let's reframe that. That's kind of like saying which restaurant do you want to go to tonight.
The one that will only give you food poisoning, one of every seven meals or one of every three meals. And the answer, of course, is neither of those. So, so people forget that, you know, prior to the 70s, things look like this. People forget that the injury rate hasn't changed despite all of the advances in quote advances in footwear technology.
By the way, that Nike study, we'll see how it pans out. That was a single study 12 weeks longer. People will see what that ultimately does. No, no.
If it does reduce things from 30% to 15%, that's okay. This is not great. Now, I've been, I'll confess, I've been injured. Since I switched to running and walking around barefoot or in zero shoes, I've gotten injured.
In the last 13 years, I mean, I really don't want to admit this, but I'll say it. I have stubbed my toe twice. I don't mean to stub my toe, like, ouch, I mean, like, you know, drew blood and I had to wear a band-aid for two days. I mean, you know, serious, serious injury, like about a two millimeter square chunk that I took out of my toe.
Unbelievable, horrible, horrible injury proving that this whole idea of barefoot totally totally dangerous. What happened was the first time I was walking up my sister's driveway and the garage pad was at the word for it was like two inches higher than the driveway and I didn't notice and I just slammed right into it. And the second was about three weeks ago, I was taking a walk with a friend and didn't notice there was a big rock in the middle of the sidewalk and just slammed into that. I actually got kneaded walking fast.
I've actually gotten a couple of like minor injuries as well. So I'm a competitive sprinter, which means I'm doing very fast motions where it's not uncommon for professional sprinters to pull up because getting nervous signals into the muscles in the right time and the right speed in the right sequence sometimes it goes wrong. I mean, I'm not going to promise that if you switched to barefoot or truly minimal shoes, you'll never get injured. But I will say that the experience of natural movement might make it worth it for whatever you might experience.
My injuries previously prior to natural movement in zero, et cetera, would put me out for weeks at a time. The most serious thing I've had in the last, oh gosh, as far back as I can remember, like I'd kind of work out short because something felt a little bit of a twang. I'm also 58 years old. So you know what, I used to push through.
I don't do that anymore. So maybe two or three weeks ago, a little bit of a twang in my calf. So I decided to take it easy by the next week, totally fine. And that's basically what I've had.
Well, I can't remember the time that I had one of those before that maybe two years ago and something similar. So not a whole lot. I was in a panel discussion talking about natural movement, talking about barefoot running, and truly minimal issues. And some guy very accusatorially, if that's a word, said to me, oh, you're going to say that if someone running barefoot gets injured because their form is bad.
And I said, yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to say. It's not about being barefoot. It's about what you're doing when you're barefoot. It's about the form, not the footwear.
It just so happens though that when you're running barefoot, it's hard to do things that are wrong. It's hard to do things like overstride, which is reaching out with your foot and landing with your foot in front of your body because when you pull your foot back, you're actually trying to use your hamstrings and glutes in a position where they're the weakest, not the strongest. Your hamstrings, well, your hamstrings do a lot of things. But when you're running, their legs are about extension, not about flexion, not about pulling towards you, but about pushing out of the back.
So yeah. And the other thing is that when it comes to form and footwear, you need that feedback from the ground to know how to let your body use these muscles and ligaments and tendons that are built into your legs. There's natural shock absorbers and springs. So the, you know, former footwear, the answer is it's about the form.
Again, it just so happens that certain footwear makes it very close to impossible to really make those form changes because you're not getting the feedback or if the heel is high enough or the flare of the sole is enough or there's enough cushioning, it can literally just change your gate enough that you just can't literally run the proper form. I was in a lab with Dr. Bill Sands when he was out here in Colorado. He was a former head of biomechanics engineering, I believe, for the US Olympic Committee.
And Bill's lab was super, super fun. He had a treadmill. It was like five feet wide, 10 feet long, went up to 30 miles an hour. I hit 23 miles for a couple of strides.
And he puts you in a big mission impossible, harness. So in case you fall, you end up just floating over the treadmill instead of hitting the bottom and going, flying off the back and making a great episode of America's most, not America's is most wanted. America's funniest on videos. By the way, I played a killer on America's most wanted.
It's true. Look it up. All right, but enough about that. Is that every shoe that people wore for most people, except for professional runners, changed their gate in some subtle and some not so subtle ways.
And barefoot changed their gate. Their favorite shoe changed their gate. Every other shoe changed their gate. And the amazing thing is most people didn't even know that no awareness of it.
They had no feeling. So it is about the form, not the footwear. It just so happens certain footwear. It makes it easier to make those changes in your form to do something that is most natural.
And I would conclude, no concur. I would concede. I would argue. I would say I'm going to make the assertion that, yeah, if you are running with natural form, that's going to be better.
Now, and again, we don't have studies to demonstrate that yet. We're hoping to, but they're expensive and time consuming. Big shoe companies love to use that excuse. We haven't proven that our shoes from Bladidas are better than the shoes from Flooks because doing that study would be expensive and time consuming and have a lot of confounding factors to which I say, well, you guys have enough money to handle the expense of time consuming who cares, confounding factors, design a better study.
Because if one of you guys had a shoe that was demonstrably better than some other company shoe, well, that's worth billions of dollars a year. So don't tell me that you haven't done it. Just because it's hard, it just doesn't seem like a good answer to me anyway. So sometimes if you go into a shoe store and they tell you about these incredibly dangerous shoes that are definitely going to injure you, there's, oh, I think this is where I was going before.
You've got to think about these two things. The first is simple statistics. Are the people who are switching to barefoot or minimalist, are they getting injured at a higher frequency than people who are already walking in the store who've been getting injured? If it's just changing the injuries, and there's one study that shows that that for runners and shoes, they're getting patellar tendonitis and plantar fasciitis and various other things.
And what the quote injuries that the barefoot runners were getting was things like temporary Achilles tendonitis or calf soreness, things that were really minor and didn't take a whole lot of effort to recover from. But the most important thing is what's the rate? What are injuries becoming just different? Are they more or less severe?
Are they higher percentage, lower percentage? And there's just not good data on that. A lot of anecdotal data, if you read the reviews at zerichus.com, you'll hear lots of anecdotal reports. And I'm the first one to say that stories, anecdotes don't necessarily equal data.
But when you have a preponderance of them, spontaneously given, you've got to take them seriously. You've got to look at that and say that that that means something. So the second thing, sometimes they'll talk about some studies that seemingly show that some runners who switched to, like I think five finger shoes got stress fractures. Okay, so two things.
First, let's talk about all the studies that may show anything about minimalist running or barefoot running could be problematic or could have something to do with injuries. It comes back to the form. When I've looked at these studies, I've never seen video of the people running. I've never seen what happens after maybe that calf tightness or Achilles tightness went away.
Maybe six months later or a year later or two years later. What happens over time? We don't know that. But the biggest thing is let's look at the form.
I remember the first time I went running with someone who was barefoot, she was trying to get used to it and she was reaching out over striding, putting her foot way out in front of her body and then pointing her toes when she landed on the ground. Well, that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to have your foot land, you know, relatively underneath your body. But she heard you're supposed to land on the ball of your foot.
So she just ran with the same motion she was using in her shoes, but then just pointing her toes to land on the ball of her foot. And if you do that, you're not actually putting your foot in a strong position. You're putting your foot in a weak position and then putting a lot of strain on it. So undeniably you do that repeatedly.
That could lead to a stress fracture. So you don't want to do that. But the other thing is it hurts doing that. So most likely you would pretty quickly stop doing that if you were willing to experiment and do something different until you're having fun.
But regardless, that initial thing that this woman was doing, pointing her toes kind of prancing when she ran, was designed to cause a problem. It wasn't proper form. So I haven't seen these studies where I've seen how people are running. What have they done?
How have they adapted? Are the people who maybe didn't run by pointing their toes and landing on the ball of their foot, having different injury rates than those who did? The form was never a factor, it was part one. Part two.
People didn't get stress fractures, but they did some sort of x-ray, some sort of imaging on their feet and found that there were some stress events going on. Well, this is not bad. It doesn't mean that you're going to get a stress fracture if you have these microfractors in your bones. In fact, the way you make your bones stronger, protect yourself from things like osteoporosis is by putting force into your bones.
So you do get these tiny little microfractors that when they heal, make your bones denser and stronger. I had a DEXA scan, which is a low frequency, whole body x-ray thing. And as a sprinter, where I put a lot of force in the ground, they were really shocked to see that my bone density from my hips down, super, super, super dense. Because I'm doing a lot of things that make those little microfractors and then they heal.
You can do that. Jumping rope is helpful. They found even just, if you're lying down, just pushing on your foot or on your leg can be helpful. Not as much.
The more you can do, the better. Don't overdo it. I'm not making suggestions of just slamming your legs into the ground. Although, not all though.
It reminds me, there's a practice, a qigong practice, a Chinese martial arts kind of thing, where they take wooden blocks and then eventually bricks and then eventually stones and they just hit you or you hit yourself all over to try to get these little microfractors in your bones and make your bones stronger to make you impervious to getting hurt. Actually, if you look at karate guys who break baseball bats by kicking with their shins, you would think it would break your shin bone and for the untrained person. It can and it has. Do not look this up on YouTube.
It will make you vomit. But when you practice over years and develop super strong bones by doing that over time, microfractors that heal, your shins can get strong enough. You can kick through a baseball bat. Again, do not try this at home.
But look up on YouTube. Very interesting. So, so, so, point being that there's this amazing phenomenon or what I think of as an amazing phenomenon of people making claims based on either just their ideas that come out of nowhere or misunderstanding some research that they haven't really looked into carefully or just the kind of cultural phenomenon where we're not used to what people say in Europe are. Here's another funny one.
I walk around barefoot in Colorado all the time, even through the winters a lot of the time. And people think it's really weird. Well, let's just pretend the major earthquake does hit and suddenly Colorado is beachfront property. Then people think it's normal because, hey, we're at the beach.
You walk around barefoot. So, there's a societal thing too about doing all this. Maybe this whole idea of dangerous versus not dangerous, in addition to being foreign versus footwear, it's just about, it's just cultural, just societal. Suffice it to say, I hope those of you who've been experimenting or enjoying the benefits of natural movement can help over time debunk this whole nonsensical idea that some shoe is inherently dangerous.
I mean, look back to take it back. I would argue that some shoes aren't inherently dangerous. The ones that make 50% of runners and 80% of marathoners get injured every year. The ones that Nike did a study on that showed that one out of seven or one out of three people got injured within 11 or 12 weeks.
Those are the dangerous ones. Let's spin this story around and look at reality. Let's see what happens when people have the experience, which we all have had. Remember being a kid in a summer day, warm summer day, you kick off your shoes, you feel the grass between your toes or the sand under your feet or the water around your ankles or the dirt you're playing in?
We've all had the experience of how wonderful it can feel, how connected we can feel, how nice and free it can feel. We just need to get more and more people to have that experience so that maybe when they need to wear shoes, they put on something that still gives them as close to a barefoot experience as possible, let's their body move and bend and flex naturally the way it's supposed to and we can change this whole story once and for all and have everyone live life-y first. Anyway, that's my rant for today. Hope you found it fun.
I want to hear your comments. Leave them where all the place you can have comments. If you have any questions, drop me an email. Sorry, move at jointhemovement.com.
If you have any requests, people you think should be on the show I found too today that are super cool that I'm looking forward to talking to. And again, drop me an email and go to jointhemovementmovement.com to find out where you can interact with us and like and share and give a thumbs up and hit the bell on YouTube. All those things you know, like I said before, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe, but most importantly, go out, have fun and please do live life-y first.