Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement about if you can have barefoot form in shoes.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How talking about footwear is talking about the form of your foot.
– Why wearing shoes with a lot of cushioning limits the use of your Achilles tendon.
– How the Achilles tendon is the biggest spring in our body and many runners aren’t using it.
– How you can un-train your brain from limiting the use of the Achilles tendon when you run.
– Why runners who wear padded running shoes need to retrain their brain.
Connect with Steven:
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@XeroShoes
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@xeroshoes
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen :
I often say that when we’re talking about footwear, we’re really talking about form, not footwear. So people say, “Well, can you run with proper form in regular shoes?” Let’s take a look at that in a little rant 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 happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, those things that are your foundation and we break down the propaganda, the mythology, and the lies that you may have been told about what it takes to enjoyably and efficiently and effectively run and walk and hike and play, do yoga, and CrossFit, all those different things. Did I say enjoyably? I know I did. It’s a trick question. If you’re not having fun, do something different to you are because you’re not going to keep it up if you’re not having a good time.
I’m Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.com, your host of the MOVEMENT Movement podcast, which was called that because we’re creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do without getting in the way. The way you help with the movement is just spreading the word. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can engage with us. Give us a review, a thumbs up, a like, hit the bell icon on YouTube. You know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So a couple weeks ago, my wife Lane and I were in the Czech Republic because we have an office there in Prague for our European business. And then we took a couple days and went to a unbelievable beautiful freakishly, gorgeous looks like a fantasy wedding cake on acid town called Karlovy Vary, K-A-R-L-O-V-Y, Vary, V-A-R-Y.
Look it up. It’s spectacular. Well, they were having a half marathon. It just happened to happen while we were there. So I sat watching the marathon, enjoying a locally made dark beer. Delicious, by the way. I’m not even much of a beer drinker, but it was really good. And I watched the runners run by and the majority of the runners, definitely the guys and women at the front and all the way, mostly back all the way to the back of the pack in many ways or in many situations, everyone was running with great form. They were landing on their midfoot underneath their center of mass. Their cadence was just about right. A lot of really, really good form. But the biggest thing was landing midfoot, not heel striking, not over-striding, not reaching out, putting the brakes on with every time they land, not putting all that force that’s going into your heel, not being absorbed by the cushioning and then going straight into your joints.
So you would think that I was happy about that. Sounds like I was kind of happy about that. But there was one other thing that was really interesting. They were all still wearing big padded shoes with giant elevated heels, and most of the time their heel wasn’t coming all the way down to the ground. Again, you would think, I’m happy about this. Why is that not the case? I will tell you why. Because they had basically trained themself to limit the amount of use they could get out of their achilles tendon by not letting their heel come down and by not being in a shoe that would let their heel come all the way down, they weren’t using the biggest spring you have in your body. The thing that literally does, that tendon literally captures energy and returns energy if you let it.
Now, it wasn’t because their Achilles has “shortened,” and by the way, I see this with the really accomplished runners in my neighborhood as well. Their Achilles hasn’t shortened, but what they’ve done is they’ve trained their brain to only let them use their Achilles to a certain amount. You could untrain your brain to do that. I’ve seen this with a guy actually. He was a Feldenkrais practitioner, which is a body work style, and he had someone who had a “frozen shoulder,” could not lift her arm above shoulder level. And what he had her do was lean down in the direction of the arm that was problematic and lift her arm from that angle, and she got her arm up next to her ear, and then he had her stand up and there’s her frozen shoulder “fixed” because it basically reminded her brain, “Oh, you can move this much.”
Well the same thing could happen if you’re not used to letting your Achilles be fully extended, get the maximum spring out of it and maximum spring back into it. In other words, these people were not being as efficient as they could be because they weren’t letting their body do what’s natural. Because from wearing higher heeled running shoes with a whole lot of padding, they have trained their brain to not use their body correctly. So this is the world’s shortest little rant I’ve ever had because I’m going to end it there. What I’m going to tell you is take a look around and watch people running in regular shoes. If it looks like they’re landing midfoot underneath their body, well see if they’re using their Achilles properly. And if you’re not, you want to basically, I’m not even sure the best way to do this, where you need to retrain your brain about what’s possible.
Maybe we’ll figure that out in a subsequent episode. If you’re not sure, there’s going to be some test about this. Actually, you know what it is. I’ve got one. Stand up in bare feet facing a wall. Maybe be a couple feet away from the wall and see how far you can lean forward, keeping your heel on the ground. Don’t try to overly stretch. Just see how far you can go. And my bet is that you can go much, much further than what you would need to do when you’re running to let your heel come all the way down to the ground. Because when you’re running, maybe you’re at about a 15, 20 degree angle, maybe a tiny bit more, and I bet you can lean way more than that when you test it against a wall. I’ll see if I can find some way to demonstrate that so you can really check and remind your brain about what you can really do, if your brain isn’t letting you do what you can do.
But just pay attention to this whole Achilles thing and see what you discover. Let me know. Anyway, once again, head over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, find previous episodes, find all the ways you can interact, and if you have any suggestions about how to tweak, play with this idea that I just tossed at you, or any recommendations about things where we can say more about this, or if you just want to reach out and give me a recommendation about someone who should be on the show. Someone maybe who thinks I have cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, just drop me an email, [email protected]. But until then, go out, have fun and live life feet first.