Sometimes I feel like I am just shouting into the wind, but happily an Olympian is now backing me up. We're gonna find out what that means on today's episode of the movement podcast the podcast for people who want to know the truth About what it takes to have a happy healthy strong body starting with the first those things are of course your foundation We break down the propaganda the mythology sometimes the lies That's gonna be relevant today that many should come and tell you about what it takes to run or walk or dance or do yoga CrossFit or play or hang out with your kids or just hang out and do that enjoyably effectively that I mentioned enjoy Yes, I know I did and that's because if you're not having fun Just do something different so you are because you're not gonna keep it up if it's not fun anyway So we call this the movement movement because we're creating a movement talk about that in a sec cuz that involves you about Natural movement and what that means is letting your body do what it's supposed to do Letting your your toes spread letting your feet bend and flex and move and feel the world So they tell your brain what's going on at the other end of your body So it knows how to move your entire body the movement part is you and it's really simple I need to do is share this kind of information with other people so go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com You'll find previous episodes you'll find all the different places this podcast appears including YouTube and Facebook and etc And all the places you can download podcasts what else oh and and then like and share and give us a thumbs up or you Hit the bell icon on YouTube you know how to do basically if you want to be part of the tribe please subscribe So let's take a look at this article over here. This is from you can see Running magazine.ca that's Canadian are your carbon should play to choose making you weaker now What's going on lately if you're not aware of this is simple so Nike in particular has put out some shoes that they're claiming make people faster And people are setting records But of course people are setting records in other shoes at the same time and there's another phenomenon Which is that when someone gets a shoe and a lead runner gets a shoe and then wins a race everyone assumes that it's the shoe That's the reason that they're winning the race now Elia kept showing you the guy who ran this up to our marathon for Nike well He didn't do it for Nike, but in these shoes he tried it before Nike didn't make the sub towers It later did anyway, he came out with an article and some comments talking about January I think where he was kind of shouting hey wasn't a shoe is it was my legs But people didn't care about that There's no responding to the shoes because if you're an elite runner and you think that someone's getting an advantage by wearing a shoe Guess what you're gonna do you're gonna buy that same shoe and if everyone's running well People are gonna set records because everyone's wearing the same shoe and then it becomes a self-fulfilling loop of it's kind of an echo chamber Is what it really is but be that as it may the interesting thing the couple interesting things and this is where I've The screaming of the wind idea comes from is that a the research on the four percent shoe was that it improved VO2 max how you're up taking oxygen by up to four percent not that you'll run four percent faster and you look at Kip Chogate and he did not run four percent faster under perfect conditions when he was wearing no shoes So anyway, that's where this all sort of starts from oh sorry back I mean for the win until I've been screaming and shouting that the shoes are not the thing that cushioning is not the thing that the Carbon plate the way some footwear experts air quotes have been talking about the carbon plate and some of these shoes is that it's a Spring which it's not or a fulcrum which it's not you can look at the previous episodes that are fine the previous episode right Talked about this dear why but the simple answer is physics So here's where it gets fun closer look at the physiological effects of the latest trend in running shoes So new technologies popular consumers look for a drawbacks blah blah blah blah blah blah This is interesting so far the major downfall of the carbon shoe revolution has come from more ethical issues like accessibility and mechanical advantage That's not a really an ethical issue per se. I mean, they're super expensive.
So they're certainly not accessible I'm not sure that's ethical mechanical advantage. Are they pretty creating a mechanical advantage? I'm gonna take some comment about that or make a comment about that sec But this is the important thing in there stack height So stack height is a basically the height of the shoe. You can see what this hocus shoe super super high That's a giant stack height versus zero shoes where they're super super thin So here's an interesting thing that is of course the magic question is this for real is this we're making runners weaker now Here's my favorite part where I love it when people agree with me She'll a kid who has it says 2012 Olympian and now a PhD candidate and she has worked on several studies including the original four percent And the argument about weakness goes back decades basically We know shoes can make our feet weaker Why because when they're supporting you supporting any joint and your feet have and ankles have more bones and joints than well But I was a joint of your entire body so lots of joints supporting them not letting them move not using the muscles and tendons And ligaments around them to be strong makes them weaker.
There's research I'm gonna flick back to me. There's research from for pop Protopolis they just came out where they took healthy athletes put orthotics in their shoes arch support in their shoes And within 12 weeks they lost up to 17% of the muscle mass in their feet and that ain't good Imagine what that does over time now doesn't go to zero obviously But does go weaker weaker weaker weaker then just it hits a sort of asymptotic point of diminishing returns where your weak Now the good news is you don't have to stay weak if you just start using your feet research from Sarah Ridge That'd be why you shows they're just walking up here minimal issues can build intrinsic foot muscle strength in his eight weeks as much as doing an actual foot strengthening program So there's always hope all right back to the article all right It's an important point of course that kind of protection technically makes the foot weaker when we technically it just flat out does and the Car the idea that carbon plates cause weaknesses and new again It's just a little buzzword now Here's what's fun We're still not sure if the foam or the plate is contributing more improved economy and recovery in runners which some critics equate with weakening in fact Not back to me for the win in fact the original study from Roger Crom here at the University of Colorado He even suggested that the reason there might be more running economy better Vio2 max is because you're not using your muscles legaments and tendons as much when you're wearing these shoes And of course not using something use it or lose it in case you'd be losing it All right moving on Kip says the idea of a stiffening plates been around as long as orthotics which conceptually working a similar way not even conceptually Totally just a different material different tensile strength and different weight and thickness That's really about it February study on cat and carbon plates shows that didn't improve running economy at all Interesting now this suggests the secret sauce is the cushioning come out of the plate not just one of the other no no no It suggests that they don't know the answer just going with so just saying oh it's the combination of the carbon and the foam This is what the shoe companies have been saying, but we don't know I think it's something I think it's two things that are completely different than what's being suggested here one We'll see both that please simple you put on something and you think you're gonna run faster You may run faster just as a result of what you believe I can tell you I try to pair these shoes on on Saturday So I'm gonna track out of here and when you're just walking around they feel springy because as you're walking they definitely kind of spring a little faster The foam uncompresses a little faster than your foot is moving off the ground So as your foot is leaving around just walking the foam uncompresses and you feel that little pop in your foot feels really cool It feels like it's doing something not really doing something, but it feels like it running especially as a sprinter I felt like I was running in quicksand it was ridiculous, but so placebo effect is one There's another thing related to the placebo effect Which is a thing called the central governor theory this game from Tim Nokes when the idea is there's a part of your brain that Basically tells your body how to not exert all the effort that it possibly could because if you use any muscle in your body You can break your bones just by flexing a muscle your muscles like this and tendons are often stronger than your bones at the very least Your tendons can rip off your tendons can rip muscles I mean there's a whole bunch of things where your brain is basically saying chill out dude because if you put out more force You might hurt yourself the interesting thing about the central governor is that it's often wrong It's often protecting you way in advance of where you're actually dangerous or dangerous to yourself And so the idea of the central governor theory when it comes to endurance running in particular Or as an example is that you're learning to listen to those signals that the central governor is give you and reframe those or not be as Affected by them until you get further along to the point where you might be getting injured So combine placebo effect the central governor theory when you're wearing these new shoes You make get signals from your brain saying who not good and you might be reinterpreting those as some reasons are things that are good And so you keep going another reason you could be faster than there's one other that I mentioned in a sec actually wait Hold on let's go back. Okay. I'm here We go the point kept wants to drive homes the new shoe technologies undeniably lessening a workload of a foot We don't know what the long-term effects are true.
Well, we clearly do you get weaker over time This is not rocket science if the foot isn't working hard. It's gonna be muscles get smaller I mean really really simple after we wear the shoe for months nobody knows that outcome well We haven't done the study but I mean come on It's not like you're suddenly magically gonna get stronger after you get weaker by continuing to not use your foot This is by the way the shoe that I wore over the weekend while shoes are undeniably changing researchers give included a run share of the dramatic results are coming from the plate or the foam or as I said from something completely different and Let me let me address what that other thing is in the episode that I recorded with Jeffrey Gray from Helix a footwear researching company He came up with this theory that I think has some validity which goes back to the US Olympic Committee Banting things with this over a certain stack height these shoes Incredibly lightweight the foam unbelievably light which by the way means it breaks down really fast and back to that ethical thing about accessibility While a regular running shoe they say you need to replace every three to five hundred miles because the phone is wearing out And then they made the rubber to wear out the outside rubber wearing out at the same time the phone was wearing out Well these shoes some of them they say explicitly wear out in as little as a hundred miles So if you're getting a $200 shoe, it only gives you a hundred miles worth of wear Yeah, that's really problematic, but here's the thing that Jeffrey mentioned big big sack height super super lightweight So the lightweight means that your cadence your steps per minute is probably not being affected by the weight at the end of your leg In fact, it may let you have a slightly faster cadence and slightly more economy because you don't have so much weight at the bottom of your foot Now, it's not a huge difference. I compared it to our speed force It was about a half an ounce to an ounce different which you know over the course of America on can make a difference shorter races You won't notice but add the lightweight and the same cadence with the stack height and imagine running in stilts if you could Basically the Jeffrey's idea is that you're gonna get a longer stride length with the same stride frequency or faster stride frequency and stride frequency times Stride length equals speed so that's the way that some people may be running faster If in fact they are legitimately running faster because of the shoes and not just because of all the other points that we made So last but not least for now We know that shoes improve economy world records are falling at an unprecedented rate again irrelevant if everyone's switching to the same kind of shoes Then the fact that world records are falling doesn't necessarily mean anything in particular Some people argue some people have said that the four minute mile when banister broke the four minute mark on the mile It was a psychological thing and suddenly everyone was able to do this Once someone did it once then people knew it was possible and people breaking four out four minutes over and over and over The reality is there's a lot of people who are really close and banisters happen to be the first But the interesting thing is if that idea of the psychology of it is true Then again, this comes back to placebo effect some people are doing better in the shoes Everyone thinks they can do better. They're pushing a little harder.
They're ignoring the central governor in a slightly different way It's just not necessarily the shoes anyway as far as the negative side effects if there are any we have to wait longer discover Wait, wait, we've already this is so funny This is like one of these things where articles try to be fair and balanced by reporting both sides of a story Even if there's only one side as far as the negative side effects if there are any we've already talked about that we've already discussed getting Weeter I mean there's I'm you've already hit that there are negative side effects We don't know what the long-term negative side effects are arguably But think about it logically if your feet get weaker How is that better for you in the long term? Give me one situation where weaker is gonna be better than stronger Anyway, I just want to do that quick analysis because it's wonderful to have not only an Olympian and Olympian who's getting a PhD in the relevant science They say I don't think this is what people are saying it is but again. What's amazing is the marketing is so good I don't mean well the marketing is so effective that I guarantee this article will make no difference in sales No difference in people's perception no difference in how many people got by the shoes at all Which is the sad sad sad thing is that you can't give people information You can't give them data to convince them of something be different than what they already believe What you can do is help people recognize that their experience doesn't match what they think they believe and that might cause some cognitive dissonance Which might cause them to change their mind, but you can't just say hey look carbon plates not good cushioning. That's a great getting weaker That's a good they're gonna go.
Yeah, but people are running faster Anyway, fingers crossed that um enough of this data starts to come out though that it starts making people question their own beliefs about their own experience And we'll see where it goes the other thing I'll leave on this point people keep thinking talking about the pendulum swinging from minimalist to maximalist I just want to highlight that that's also nonsense. There is no pendulum swinging the minimalist thing That's basically what shoes were like for the first nine thousand nine hundred fifty years the people knew we were making shoes The new modern athletic shoe is a 50 year old idea So what we're doing at zero shoes is basically just going back in time to the way shoes really were the only pendulum swinging is this half of a pendulum from These maximal shoes super high super stiff super cushiony super expensive super Undurable whatever that means so maybe if the pendulum swings back It's gonna swing back to normal and we are the normal the modern athletic shoe is actually part of I guess it's like a three-dimensional pendulum I think of it that way we've got modern athletic shoes and you know super maximal shoes on one end and then you know What we do on the other on the other side both of those could go away and we're left in the middle with footwear that lets your feet be feet Bend move flex toes spread feel the world etc. Anyway, I hope this is useful I want to hear your comments about what you think about the article what you think about maximal versus minimal what you think about You know anything drop me an email move at join the movement movement calm or just post comments in all places You can post comments and like and share and thumbs up and you know hit the bell etc Again, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe if you have any comments or questions about anything else again Drop an email to move at join the movement movement calm And as always go out have fun and live life feet first