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 Sashan. If you want to be a faster runner, it's really simple.
You've got to go to Harvard. I'm going to tell you why on this 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 the feet first because those things are your foundation. We're going to break down the propaganda myths. Sometimes the outright lies you've been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or do yoga or cross-water power left or whatever it is that you like to do on your feet.
Then do it enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. Did I mention enjoyably? I know I did. Because frankly, if you're not having fun, please just do something different till you are.
I'm Stephen Sashan from zeroshoes.com, your host of the Movement Movement podcast. Let's get the little stuff out of the way really quickly. If you're new to this, go over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You'll find previous episodes and all the different places you can interact with us on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
You know the drill. And of course, we are creating a movement, movement, hence the name of the podcast and movement. That means the movement part is making people rediscover how natural movement is the obvious, better, healthy choice way we currently think of as around natural food. And it's a movement about natural movement, which means that you are the ones who make it happen.
So like and share and subscribe and give us a thumbs up and hit the bell on YouTube, all those things that you know how to do. And short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let's jump in, shall we? Like I said, if you want to become a faster runner, it's easy.
Go to Harvard. Now that doesn't mean you need to retake the SATs and try to get into one of the most exclusive prestigious and expensive schools in the world. Nor does it mean you just have to go and hang out with some of the really cool people who are doing unbelievably interesting research about running a natural movement like Dr. Daniel Lieberman, who's the one who back in 2009 published a paper that showed how when you take a habitually barefoot runner, and put shoes on their feet with high elevated heels, they will then tend to over stride, land with their foot in front of their body, putting the brakes on essentially, and also sending a giant spike of force up through their joints, rather than using their muscles, ligaments, and tendons of the natural springs and shockers and joint protectors there meant to be.
He also showed how well he basically showed that impact transient force spike, that spike of force that happens in heel striking runners in shoes that barefoot runners didn't have. And then there's also Dr. Irene Davis, who's one of the top researchers on minimalist footwear, natural movement footwear. So we have Dan Lieberman doing the barefoot stuff and Irene doing stuff in shoes.
And Irene is kind of like the godmother of research in natural movement. There's so many people who've worked with her and studied with her and learned from her, including people like Dr. Sarah Ridge at BYU who showed that if you just walk in some minimalist shoes, like zero shoes, although we weren't used in the study because she didn't have our shoes in. But if you just walk in minimalist shoes, you can build intrinsic foot muscle strength as if you're the same way that you would get if you actually did a foot exercise strengthening program.
She didn't do anything where she combined the exercise and the walking around in minimalist shoes, but we both think that would be really, really cool to do. And then also people like Dr. Isabel Sacco in Brazil, her research, she took minimalist shoes, put them on the feet of elderly women and saw their knee osteoarthritis diminish or disappear. And their mobility increase in a number of other benefits.
There's research that I don't think I'm not sure what she had to do with it, but she's also part of people collecting the research to prove frankly what's really stupid. If you use your feet, that's better than not using your feet. I mean, I don't know why we have to demonstrate that, but those of us in the minimalist, the natural movement world seem to have to prove the obvious strengthening is better than weakening using your feet. It makes them stronger, not using a mix of them weaker.
This is the less bit of research I was going to mention. Someone took healthy athletes put arch sport in their shoes and their feet got weaker over time. And the reason why it's like putting your arm in the cast, it doesn't come out stronger eight weeks later. It comes out after a few and weaker.
Same thing. Again, use it. You get it. All right.
So why do you need to go to Harvard to become a faster runner? And what does this have to do with the shoes that you put on your feet? This is an interesting question. So here's why you want to go to Harvard because you want to get on the indoor track at Harvard.
There are more people who set more personal best and world records on that track than any other track up until the point where people started copying the design of that track. So what makes that track so special is that the rarefied air at Harvard from all the intellectual, whatever going on. No, is it the Harvard story? A friend of mine who was there, I went to visit him in February.
Not a great time to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was unbelievably bitingly cold. And there was a place that had just opened. This is in 1984 ish.
No, no, no, no. Still in college, 8182. Incredibly cold. And a place called Steve's Ice Cream had just opened.
And what made Steve's the cool thing is they were the first people who did mix ins. No relation to me. I didn't even think of it that way until just now. They would take your ice cream, put it on a slab of marble and you would add toppings.
But then they would mix the toppings in and then stick that and go to you. So it's like a million degrees below zero in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And there's a line to blocks along to get into Steve's ice cream. That kind of summed it up for me.
Anyway, so no, it's not because of the rarefied intellectual air. It's not because of anything other than the track design itself. So I'm going to put links in the show notes in the description to point you to a paper to explain what they did. But in essence, they turned the track into a trampoline.
Now, if you think about that, you would think, well, you can't run really fast on a trampoline. And when you use a trampoline, you can't just keep bouncing forever. Your legs get tired and you can only go so high no matter what you're doing. So what is it about the track that made it trampoline like?
And what made it work in a way that trampoline or like pogo sticks or power risers? These are these shoe things that you attached to your lower leg that are just giant springs. You know, why don't those make you run faster? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the physics, but the physics is really cool.
I'll give you the synopsis of the physics. What a trampoline does is as you put force into it, it compresses. And then what happens is as you start to take the force off by straightening your legs when you're at the bottom trampoline, it's actually rebounding faster than you are diving board does a similar thing. And for both of these, a diving board trampoline, all three and the Harvard track, you need to tune them to be the right frequency.
So this is most obvious on a diving board where one end of the board is fixed. The other end of the board, the part you jump off of moves and there's a fulcrum in the middle. And you can move that fulcrum back and forth to change the frequency that the board bounces at. And so what divers do is they change the frequency that the board is bouncing at, match the way they jump.
They're mass, how much they weigh, kind of, and mass and weight are not the same thing, but it's like it into that. How much they weigh and then how fast they respond on the board, what their legs do on the board. I knew some divers, I used to dive when I was younger. Same size, same weight that I was.
And we would set the board to very different places to have very different frequencies just based on the way we like to jump. So similar thing happens on a tramp. You can tune the tramp with the tension of the springs and with the tension of the weave of the bed of the tramp back in 1978 or so they came up with a new bed. It was called the Aussie bed.
So instead of what was what used to be just strips of canvas that were sewn together, it was a slightly elastic rubberized bed. So the springs gave spring and the bed of the tramp gave spring and people, it was amazing. Suddenly you had something else that was giving you some propulsion, not just the springs. But again, the trampoline is tuned to your weight and the way that you work.
If you go to a trampoline event, which if you haven't done, you should do it really amazing to watch what people can do on a tramp. You'll see almost everyone's about the same size and same weight. And that's why they're able to jump basically the same height. Alright, so what does this have to do with the Harvard track?
Well, at Harvard, what they decided to do was develop a track that was like a trampoline. So the boards that make up the track were fixed on either side. And what they figured out is that if they made the boards flex, that is going to be hard to describe. So there's a certain speed that you hit the ground and then the boards in the track would absorb some of that force.
So they found, oh yeah, the Harvard track, if you run on that, fewer injuries they found. So it was absorbing some of the force that you would normally put on the ground if you were landing on a totally hard surface. But then it rebounded faster than you. So basically, it was springier than you are.
So you are fundamentally a spring. The board is in attendance kind of like a spring they compress. They expand. Think about you're Achilles tendon, compress is expands or expands and contracts in this case.
That's how it works like a spring. And what the floors needed to do was a little faster than you are, so a little stiffer as a spring than you are internal spring. So this brings us to a couple of interesting points. The people who said the personal best were typically running the same kind of event like the 800 or 400 and they were like the same weight range pretty much.
So they were applying the same amount of force to the ground. If you were much lighter, the floor would be super super stiff and it wouldn't make any difference would be just like running on a totally flat hard surface. So you've made too much. You flex the thing too much and you'd be taking off faster than the trampoline slash track would be propelling you.
So you can see force plate data that shows this is really cool. So again, less force in the ground and it changed the force curve. It changed the way force was coming back off the ground from you applying force into the ground. Now, what does this have to do with you and shoes?
The simple thing is people have been trying to replicate the Harvard track in shoes for years. And if you look at a lot of people talking about some of the new Nike shoes, they say, well, that's what they do. There's a carbon fiber plate in there that acts like the Harvard track. Just FYI.
No, it doesn't. So there's nothing that can replicate the trampoline thing other than something that's like a trampoline. And the key thing is that you have two anchor points outside of where you land that stay put. And then the surface that you're on flexes and has to again flex the right frequency with the right amount of stiffness.
There's nothing you can build into a shoe that simulates those anchor points and therefore nothing that can have that springy effect because, well, two things. But the biggest one being that when your foot hits the ground, it doesn't just land flat on the ground. It kind of goes from what's called supination of pronation. You land typically on the outside edge of your foot.
You roll to the inside of your foot. It goes over a point where it's basically flat and then rolls a little on the inside. You're coming off the ground. That's a natural thing.
So on something, the only way then that the track, the Harvard track works trampolines work is because the suspended points, the anchor points are outside of where that little motion is happening. They basically minimize the ground contact force area. A shoe can't do that. Now, this is important to know simply because what shoe companies love to do is they love to tell simple stories that are often factually inaccurate.
So when people say they said of the carbon fiber plate and some of the new maximal shoes, those act like a lever. No, they don't because a lever, they get a lever, diving board, fixed on one end, fulcrum on the other, and then that's what gives you the spring. There's no lever in a shoe. There's no fixed point.
There's no fulcrum. So it doesn't do that. There's a company that makes an insult. It's a carbon fiber insult.
The way they like to demonstrate it is that they bend it. They put it in a shoe. They bend the thing in half and they let go and it bounces like crazy except that when you're running, your foot never goes into a position that would put that kind of force into that product to make it bounce. And if it did, it would still again be tuned to your weight, the speed that you run, et cetera.
So I guess the point of this is something that I talked about before, which is I wish more people understood physics because it would make it so that you would be less susceptible to being sold a bill of goods. So for example, back to Adidas came out with their boost foam a number of years ago and they showed off how bouncy the boost foam was because they took like a two pounds steel ball and bounced off the boost foam, really, really bouncy. And they bounced that same ball off of you know, quote the other company's foam, not very bouncy. Well, ignoring that no other company ever used a foam that was the other company's foam.
The interesting thing about bouncing the ball off the boost foam is yeah really bouncy. Except that and you might have noticed you are not a two pound steel ball. You are not, this is going to sound weird, perfectly elastic or not quite perfectly elastic. But in from physics terms elastic doesn't mean that it stretches and retracts the way we think about a rubber band.
It's the more elastic it is actually the less it compresses. The more actually it compresses and then gives energy back, which means it's more elastic if it compresses less frankly. So the most elastic thing you could do is a diamond ball bouncing off a flat diamond surface because those things won't contract at all. It's like it gets all the energy right back.
So it was a really compelling commercial to see how bouncy that was. And they refer to the extra energy return. There's no energy return from something that's internal like that. The Harvard track gives you extra energy return.
If you're the right weight and speed, if you're not, it sucks energy. But and that's the key thing. Energy return is a shoe marketing term for how little or much something sucks. And you'll never see it advertised as less energy suck, which is the more accurate way of doing it.
So anyway, that's just a little bit of rant on footwear design and the Harvard track and physics that I hope you find someone interesting. If you don't mind, apologies, go check out what's going on in www.join the movement movement.com and maybe you'll find something like more. You're like this one. Great.
Share with your friends. You can do that with you again. You know, like and share and all the things you're not to do. And if you have any questions for me or any suggestions, anyone you think should be on the show, whatever you want to suggest or ask, drop me an email.
Move at jointhemovementmovement.com and try to think if there's anything else. No, that kind of covers it. So thanks for joining. I look forward to what's next.
As always, go out, have fun and 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 jointhemovementmovementmovement.com.