Unlock the secrets to optimal health and movement with expert insights on natural practices and regenerative techniques.
In this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, Steven Sashen speaks with Dr. Grove Higgins, Owner and Chiropractor at Neuroathlete Clinic, who delves into the profound connection between natural movement and overall well-being. They explore the importance of learning from indigenous tribes’ functional health practices, the impact of sensory awareness on movement quality, and the revolutionary regenerative techniques transforming orthopedics. Through insightful discussions on biomechanics, brain-body connections, and the power of embracing ancestral wisdom, listeners are invited to rethink conventional approaches to physical health and movement for a more vibrant and sustainable life.
Key Takeaways:
→ Natural movement is crucial for efficient movement and overall well-being.
→ Tai Chi improves balance, sensory awareness, and response time.
→ Humans evolved to run on natural terrains, not artificial surfaces like roads.
→ Environmental factors significantly impact foot development and morphology.
→ Regenerative techniques like shockwave therapy offer non-invasive solutions for structural restoration and tissue regrowth in orthopedic care.
Dr. Grove Higgins has dedicated nearly 30 years to the health field, starting as a physical therapy assistant in the early ’90s and eventually earning a doctorate in Chiropractic medicine. With a private practice and corporate consulting experience, Dr. Higgins helps companies prevent loss from repetitive strain disorders. His mission has always been to help patients exceed their expectations of health.
In 2010, Dr. Higgins co-founded LifeQuest Transitions, a non-profit supporting wounded soldiers in their transition to civilian life, impacting over 2,500 veterans. After the non-profit dissolved in 2012, Dr. Higgins returned to private practice, later reuniting with Lt. Col. Patrick Marques to develop the NeuroAthlete program and clinic. This led to the opening of a new facility in Monument, CO, designed to provide tailored care for clients in person and online.
Dr. Higgins enjoys hiking, backpacking, and community involvement with his wife and three children, two of whom are pursuing military careers.
Connect With Dr. Grove Higgins:
Connect with Steven:
Xero Shoes
Join the MOVEMENT Movement
X
Instagram
Facebook
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen
If you want to walk or run or do anything on your feet, better, maybe the most important thing you need to know, you’re going to learn from a dead body. More about that 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. You know, those things that are at the end of your legs. And we’re also breaking down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, play, hike, do yoga, CrossFit, whatever it is you like to do and to do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. And did I say enjoy? It’s a trick question. You should know that by now. I always say that because if you’re not enjoying it, you’re not going to keep doing it. So you want to find something you enjoy or find a thing that you like and do it in an enjoyable way. And we’re going to talk about that. I am Steven Sashen, co founder and chief barefoot officer here at Xero Shoes and we call this the Movement Movement podcast. Because we, that means you and me, we are creating a movement about natural movement, having your body do what it’s made to do and not getting in the way by using things that people sell you because they tell you they’re going to be better, but actually don’t do that at all the way you are. Part of this is really simple. Just head over to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com where you’ll find previous episodes, the ways you can find us on social media, and most importantly, other ways you can, well find the podcast in other places than the one you found this on this time. But actually the most important thing is just this. Leave a review, give us a thumbs up, give us a five star rating. All those things that you know, that spread the word, that is the movement part, the natural movement thing. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. That’s all I’m saying. So why don’t we get started? Grove Higgins, why don’t you tell people who you are and what you’re doing here?
Grove Higgins
My name is Dr. Grove Higgins. I’m a chiropractor and rehabilitationist and near Colorado Springs Monument area, just north of there. I’ve been in working in physical medicine since 1988. When I was 14, had the ability to go and volunteer in a hospital and found the love of my life working with human beings and making Them move better, feel better, feel less pain, reach potential that they didn’t know that they had. Especially coming back from some of the catastrophic things that I, I first got a chance to work with. But then since that time, I’ve gotten a chance to do a lot of research and a lot of work in the field of, of medicine, developing biomechanical models and, and such like that. And, and where I’m at currently most interested in is in the area of tissue regeneration and helping doctors basically make patients better from the inside out structure. Not just, not just making the move better, but actually making better structure. But it all starts at the ground, like you say.
Steven Sashen
Well, we’re going to talk about the inside out thing in a couple different ways. One that is just personal, so it’s really just about me. But let’s start with my intro. So, because we were talking about this before and it was super, super fun. What do people need to know? What can they learn from a cadaver that might make them go, oh, wait, yeah, what?
Grove Higgins
So I had the wonderful opportunity as I was going through school to work in a biomechanics lab. And one of the many researchers that I worked with, and he’s primarily an anatomist, David, Dr. David Greiner, he was really interested in how the foot works. Right. So this whole idea of pronation, supination and, and, and all those types of things that, especially from a barefoot versus structured foot standpoint, you know, we are all debating about and such like that, and he wanted to define the terms better. So we, we were measuring the specific angles and movements of joints in the foot. And so we were.
Steven Sashen
Hold on, pause right there.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen
If anyone’s just listening to this podcast, I encourage you to watch the video because Grove is just holding up a great skeletal model. And it’s always fun to see bones that you don’t see because they’re on the inside of you.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, well, and because of that, you know, the, the middle of our arch is. There’s something amazing happening there, and he wanted to define that. So, you know, as you look down at your arch, if you have a high arch or even a flat arch, doesn’t really matter. That arch is moving and it’s doing something magical and he wanted to define it. So we took 50 lower legs. So from the knee down.
Steven Sashen
And so again, hold on, pause right there. Where do you order 50 lower legs? Do you go on Amazon and find that one?
Grove Higgins
Well, back then, Amazon wasn’t. Amazon was just selling books then. So, yeah, you couldn’t do that. But you can order up body parts. And so we had 50 of those. Now, granted, most of these individuals were older individuals that died of old age, nursing home, that type of thing. And so these are individuals who had a typical American foot, most of them with very flat arches. When they came in, we stripped them of all of the skin, all of the fat, all the muscle.
Steven Sashen
And.
Grove Higgins
But as we were going down, and I know this sounds kind of gross, but as we were going down and I had the joy of doing this, I would cut the tibialis posterior tendon, which goes down behind the ankle under the foot, and attaches under the arch. It makes this beautiful spider web under the arch, and it helps to compress the arch.
Steven Sashen
And.
Grove Higgins
And as soon as you cut that, if that arch was flat, you would watch it raise up. It was the most amazing thing to watch that happen at that time.
Steven Sashen
I want to break that down. So again, do me a favor. Describe where that tendon is going. And if it’s. If cutting it makes the arch raise, it’s doing something to flatten said arch.
Grove Higgins
Right.
Steven Sashen
There’s something else that. That otherwise is acting in opposition to that that would allow it to raise. So let’s walk through the anatomy on that a little slower.
Grove Higgins
Right.
Steven Sashen
Is very interesting.
Grove Higgins
Right, right, right. So with every joint that’s moving, there’s. There’s two sides, just like you already said. There’s. There’s muscles on one side, muscles on the other side to move that. To move that body part. So if you’re making a. If you’re doing a biceps curl, right. And you’re bending your elbow, the biceps doing the big lifting motion, but the tricep is also balancing that out. So that way your elbow joint does come, doesn’t just explode. Right. Well, that’s happening in the foot, except there’s. There’s 32 joints going at one time in the foot and the ankle. And. And so there’s a lot of things that are in balance, just like the bicep. Tricep idea. Right. So, yes, by the time, of course, these people get to our lab or the parts that get to our labor, those muscles are no longer active. They’re frozen in that moment of time that that person passed away. Right. So as. As we’re going through and cutting these different. Different muscles, not all of them made any difference. But that tibialis posterior tendon that goes down from the backside of your tibia, so the long, thick bone of the lower leg down underneath that ankle bone on the medial side, the inside of Your ankle goes down underneath and goes to the bottom side of your foot. And it, as it goes there, it spreads out and makes this, the spider web of tendons that attaches to multiple places on the bottom of the foot in order to compress that arch.
Steven Sashen
All right, so let’s pause there for a second. So what’s it doing in a healthy person that would, you know, that requires compressing that arch.
Grove Higgins
Yeah. So if it’s doing its job, think of it kind of like a. A suspension bridge. Right. A suspension bridge isn’t actually held up the way that it’s created. It’s actually creating tension in the middle of the bridge and pushing it to its origins so from one side of the canyon to the other side of the canyon. And that’s what creates stability of the structure and allows it to span it, but then allows things to go over the top of it without it collapsing.
Steven Sashen
Right, got it.
Grove Higgins
So your bottom of your foot is like that, but in somewhat reverse. And so it compresses the bottom of. And it takes those bones, and as it’s doing that, it’s compressing them this way and lifting that arch. Right. So a healthy, healthy tibialis posterior with everything else. It’s not just one muscle, of course, but in this case, if it’s doing its job, it’s compressing that arch and making that arch stand up. And this is one reason why, especially working with elite athletes, I see flat feet all the time, but that doesn’t matter. It matters if that arch is doing its job when it’s moving, not while it’s standing there. And an elite athlete has got this amazing nervous system that is queued up for performance. And so when it’s standing there doing nothing, what does it do? It gets lazy. And so most great runners have flat feet, and who cares, right? Because when they’re running, their arches are beautiful. They’re doing these amazing. You know, their feet. Their feet look like hands when they’re doing it. Right, right. So, anyway, so we get to this. We got all these legs cutting these, and I’m watching these arches pop up as soon as you cut that tibialis posterior tendon. And it got me thinking. Of course, it took years for me to. To figure out what I observed, but that. That arch was trained to be in that position.
Steven Sashen
Right.
Grove Higgins
To the detriment of the person that owned it, most likely.
Steven Sashen
And so how would it be trained?
Grove Higgins
Well, this is where research I did a couple of years before that, as a lowly tech in the lab, one of my jobs was to read 500 papers on pediatric foot development for one of the researchers in the lab. And in that, I kept running across several papers that referenced these studies, particularly out of Asia, discussing vestibular function and foot development in children. So I’m going to set this up. You’re born and what’s your foot? Your foot is fat and flat, right?
Steven Sashen
Yep.
Grove Higgins
What that allows the child to do as they’re starting to find their feet is to put more surface area on the ground and be able to sense gravity through a flat foot that has maximum surface on the ground. So as they are developing this now vertical sense of balance and such, now the, the, the vestibular system, as it develops, allows the body to now start to pick up the arch, which now gives the child a mechanical advantage to launch himself and to move fast. He doesn’t need all of that stability from a flat foot anymore. He wants to be able to be unstable so he can move quickly away from danger, towards food, whatever. Right. Play the games, all that type of stuff. So as we, as, as these children got older, right? Yes, their foot would fall, but when would it fall? When their vestibular system would start to spin down as they got older, their foot would start to flatten out in order to find the ground again to give the failing vestibular system, as the person got older, to sense gravity and have better balance.
Steven Sashen
Well, let’s pause there. So that’s very, very cool. I love, so I love the whole idea of the connection between your foot and your brain. And especially it’s something that I talk about all the time. I go, you know, you have 20,000 or more nerve endings in the bottom of your foot. And I ask people, why, like what? I go, why would you need that? They go, oh, I guess. So you can feel things? Yeah. Why would you need to feel things? Oh, I guess. So you know how to move? Yeah. What’s telling you how to move? Oh, I guess my brain is. Yeah. Okay, so there’s that. So your, your point about the vestibular system starting to, you know, down regulate, if you will. What’s causing that to happen?
Grove Higgins
Well, as, as we get older, those, the hair cells on the inside of the vestibular system that sense the swatching of the, of the, the fluid inside your ear, the gyroscope in your ear, essentially, as they, as you get older, and especially if you’re getting less metabolically healthy and such, those hair cells begin to fail and they get brittle. And so then as that becomes less and less competent, your foot finds the Ground in order to make you more competent again to connect those nerve endings to the ground. And so that way, gravity and you have a better relationship because you don’t need. As you get older, you have friends and family that are going to get your food and defend you from danger. Right. So survival is less necessary. You just need to be able to get out of the chair, go with the family and stuff like that. Right. So, yeah, here’s, here’s something that should interest you, because I know you have a tai chi background, right?
Steven Sashen
Yes, correct.
Grove Higgins
So what do the older folks do? They do things like Tai chi. And then in. In Asia, it is not uncommon to go to parks and to find cobblestone mandalas in the parks. And why? Because it’s a play toy for the older adult to come in, take off their shoes, and they walk the mandala. Why? Because it keeps their feet moving and sensitive and such like that. So the rate of fall in Asian countries is much less. And so then broken hips, mortality and such like that is much less in Asian countries than it is in the United States. What’s the difference? In the United States, we put them in orthotics and we put them in stiffer shoes to support their arch, which wants to find the ground, and instead we ruin them. And, and, and, and the result of this, and this might be. This sounds terrible, might be medical malpractice, is that we’re setting them up for injury, failure, death.
Steven Sashen
You know, this is something that I, I have said. There’s a lot of things I’ve said is I, I kind of wish that shoes killed people, because if they did, then we’d have like a, you know, Philip Morris case on our hands where we would see that the shoe companies know that putting big, thick, stiff shoes on people’s feet, elderly in particular, but anybody really is making it harder and harder for you to function properly. And, um, and, you know, can result in what happened to my dad, Trip, fall, die, and. But, you know, instead, they just take a bunch of money out of your wallet and make your life more difficult. And people call it normal. Like watching elderly people shuffle along. And I said, you know, they’re shuffling because they’re not. Their brains are not stupid. They, since they can barely feel and they can barely move their feet, they. Their brain is saying shuffle. So that you’re basically staying essentially balanced the whole time, 100%. You’re never getting off balance to walk normally or to run, and it’s completely upside down. And you may know this, there’s research that Came out of Duke University showing a correlation, a high correlation between walking speed and mortality. At a certain point, the slower you walk. I wish I knew the threshold. But if you’re walking below this particular speed, your chance of dying over the next five years is extremely high. And by that point, you’re walking at that speed because your feet and brain have not been functioning correctly. And your chance of dying is most likely from trip, fall, Die.
Grove Higgins
Yeah. Yeah. And survival is what it’s all about. The brain’s only interested in getting you away from tigers and to the refrigerator. And it wants to do that the best that it can, but it doesn’t care about performance. So if the information coming into the system is poor because we’re either blocking it or we’ve broken it. Yeah. Movement becomes a less and less graceful event. And unfortunately, it sets us up for bad health issues down the way.
Steven Sashen
I mean, one of the things that amazes me is we will see, like, indigenous tribes where people are still living into their 70s and 80s and those people are still fully functional. I mean, totally fine, and no one ever. The way people seem to approach that is like, oh, well, that’s them we can’t do. I mean, we’re different. That’s them. I don’t know why people don’t think, especially in a culture like ours where everyone thinks anything is possible, by and large. If I can imagine that I can become. That I can be that. I can imagine being rich, then sure, I can become rich or whatever the thing is. But when. But when it comes to certain things around physical activity and physical health, people don’t do that. It’s like, oh, I can’t run anymore because my, you know, cause my knees hurt. Well, what about those guys who are, you know, heavier than you, who are able to run without a problem, you know, in these other places? I mean, why can’t you do that? Well, I can’t do that. It’s a different thing. Well, why can’t we learn what they’re doing and do the same thing? Maybe the. Maybe, you know, what’s happening for you is because you did something, you’re doing something different from those people. And if you learn what those people are doing, you can do it too. It’s a weird. I’m not. I’m not articulate. You know where I’m going with this?
Grove Higgins
Yeah, most. Most definitely. We bought into the thought virus that’s been given to us. Right. And. Yeah, and. And a lot of it’s because, you know, unfortunately, as Westerners, and especially in America, we’re so myopic. We look at what’s right in front of us and. And this is even in science, we’re not looking broadly, like in those Native American tribes before us, or into other parts of the country, other native populations, and watching and learning from them, and then saying, why don’t we move or behave like them? Instead, we’re trying to make them move like us.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, why don’t we give it a whirl? Why don’t we try to figure that out? You know, the tai chi thing is interesting. And people. It’s so funny in America when people see that, they don’t necessarily mock it, but they kind of mock it and missing that idea that the biggest thing they’re working on is feeling the ground and letting their brain respond to that in all these different positions. Now, granted, I think part of the challenge there is tai chi is promoted to younger people as a martial art of sorts of. It is a martial art for those people who actually know how to perceive it that way and do it that way. But mostly it’s like, oh, that’s just, you know, something old people do. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, when I was doing tai chi, one of my teacher or my teacher used to go to karate schools, like, big, you know, hard karate schools. And he’d say, okay, I’m going to try something. I want to tap you on the head. And you just stop me. I mean, you don’t even have to stop me. Just like, if you touch my hand or my arm on the way to tapping you on the head, you win. But if I can tap you on the head, I win. And he would just sit there. He said, I’m going to stand on one leg. I’m going to have my hands by my side. That’s where I’m going to start. You can have your hands right up by your face. I’m going to tap you on the head. Okay, ready? Go. And he would just, like, tap them on the head over and over and over, and they couldn’t stop him. And I said, so how do you describe what you’re doing is. He goes, it’s easy. It’s literally not possible for you to perceive. The time that it takes for me to move my hand from my side to your head takes less than a quarter of a second. And the information going from your eye to your brain and back down to your arm takes longer than that. So what people normally are responding to is some subtle other motion that I’m making before I Start moving my hand, that I’d be telegraphing. I just don’t telegraph anymore. And that came from the fighting style of Tai Chi.
Grove Higgins
Right, Right. And that’s an excellent. I mean, again, to tie in what you’ve already said about the feet and the brain connection. There’s a lot going on between those two points, too. Movement is complex. We’re taking in. We’re primarily sighted beings, so we take in a lot of information from our eyes that we’re not even aware of. Like our eyes, our brain sees that pebble in the road ahead of us. But if we’ve. If we’ve trained the system to ignore the pebble in the road because our feet are guarded from it 100 of the time, and we never feel it. We learn to ignore it. And then we go on to treadmills, which, you know, are totally artificial and they cover the. You know, there’s a cowling in front, and so we shorten our steps. And that doesn’t translate to good movement in the real world either, unfortunately. I can’t tell you how many great athletes that primarily train indoors because it’s convenient and easy and such like that, that they break themselves because their biomechanics have been trained by the environment, and unfortunately, an artificial environment, and it’s breaks down over time. We were. We were built to be in a natural environment, taking in all of the cues and sensory information from the ground up, from the outside in, and then address it properly and walk over uneven surfaces with sharp little pebbles and everything and be perfectly fine with it.
Steven Sashen
This is my. My favorite thing when people say to me, well, we didn’t evolve to, you know, run on roads for 26 miles. I went, no. What we evolved to run on are way more difficult.
Grove Higgins
True.
Steven Sashen
Way harder. And. And frankly, we didn’t. We also didn’t evolve to do double backflips, but if you want, I can go do one. So there’s lots of things that we. We evolved to do certain things that allows us to do other things. We didn’t evolve to fly fighter jets, for example. So, you know, you’ve got that whole evolution thing upside down. And. But my favorite is if I said, if you went to the place of where we evolved and ran even in regular shoes, you and your shoes would be trashed because those surfaces are rough, and people learned how to do that without a problem. You know, it Ronci. When I. There’s a handful of things that I wish I had done before I. Or when I just started this whole barefoot journey. If you Will, mostly I wish I had pictures of my footprint when I would get out of a pool or a hot tub or. I wish there was a way of measuring the speed of my reflex arc. I wish there was a way of measuring the flexibility of my foot and the strength of my foot. And I’m sure there’s probably others as well. But the reflex thing and the flexibility is the one that I think about the most. Because the house that we had had a bunch of bigger than gravel, small rocks that were just kind of along the side of the driveway and I couldn’t walk on them at all. But within, I don’t know, some number of months later, I could walk on them. And it was a little sensitive. And I noticed maybe a year in I’d walk on them without a problem. And it wasn’t because I was numb, it was because I was responsive. My foot was flexing around things and my gate had changed. So if I stepped on something that it was going to be definitely unpleasant. I hadn’t fully waited on that foot yet. And so I was able to step off of it without, you know, before it was too late. And I wish I had measurements of those things because.
Grove Higgins
Right. 100. So I did a little experiment last night because I was thinking about you. And so I went and I’ve got a six mile loop.
Steven Sashen
Wait, when you were thinking about me, what was I wearing?
Grove Higgins
You were barefoot perfectly. So.
Steven Sashen
Same as I am right now, actually.
Grove Higgins
Right. There you go. And so I want to do this little experiment thinking about today. And I do this rarely, I mean, like once a year, but I’ve got this beautiful six mile loop. And it’s all urban hiking, you know, it’s so. It’s sidewalks and blacktop and everything like that, but there’s nothing protecting it from having stuff blown on it and such. So I did it last night, purely barefoot, the whole, the whole, the whole thing. And as always, you know, I start out and my foot is afraid of everything that it steps on initially. Right. I feel everything. Right. And eventually though, with. By the mile three to four, somewhere in there, my foot said, I’m okay. Right. And now it became. It became comfortable. I. And I wasn’t. I was sensing, but wasn’t reacting to everything that I was stepping on and, and my speed, my pace just naturally increased. Right. So my performance improved as my foot remembered what to do.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, we just. Layne and I were just in Europe for a little while and. Well, both when we were in Germany and in Denmark, we were in places where there’s A lot of cobblestones. And next to the cobblestones was often some flat sidewalk, which they had done for wheeled things that just to make life a little easier for people. But we were both commenting, it’s like, you know, we enjoyed walking on the cobblestones the most. And when you kind of get used to just that, being able to use the cobblestones as part of your locomotion, your toes kind of grab the thing at the right place or moves in the right way, and you’re getting just that feedback that, you know, feels really good. But to your point, it takes a little while for your brain to go, oh, yeah, yeah, that’s good.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, yeah, It’s. It’s scary, but that’s okay if you want. There’s a saying, freedom is scary, right? And it’s in multiple levels. But getting out there and moving and doing new movement and new sensory information is a little scary. But you give yourself a chance to adapt, and it becomes freeing.
Steven Sashen
Well, you know, there’s another. There’s kind of a myth in the barefoot world, or what people perceive as the barefoot world, that as you’re going barefoot, what’s actually happening is you’re. You’re building calluses, and your foot is getting more, you know, whatever the word is, and basically you’re not feeling as much because it’s. The skin is getting thicker and blah, blah, blah. What’s your take on that?
Grove Higgins
Yeah, no.
Steven Sashen
Could you be a little more. Succeed.
Grove Higgins
I’ll be a little more specific. So when I first got into practice into the chiropractic field, so this 2005, now, Colorado Springs, we get a lot of transplants from South Africa because they’re really good at program management and such like that. So we have a lot of transplants here. But one of the things that I. I noticed is that they weren’t coming to me for foot and lower leg problems. They were coming for other things. But I’d see their bare feet, and their bare feet do not look like American feet. They look. They’re wider, they’re thicker. The toes are not just splayed out, but the pad is wider and such like that. And so I asked one of them, I’m like, I just. I’ve noticed this trend, working with all you South Africans, that you’ve got these hand feet, these feet that look more articulated than the typical American foot. Why do you think that is? And the individual said, you know, that’s a really interesting question. It’s probably because when we go to school, you know, we go to School in patent leather uniforms and patent leather shoes. But then when we go out to play recess, we take off our shoes, we play soccer barefoot. Right. So their foot development is different, but they still maintained that thickness and that and that morphology that they did, that they had then. And then you look at other, like, videos, you can go on YouTube and find this all over the place. Find people who climb trees.
Steven Sashen
Yeah.
Grove Higgins
And their feet, again, have more articulation to it. They can grab the side of the tree and such like that. Their feet are very supple. They’re not leathery. They’re not, you know, and when you look at the bottom of their feet, they’re. They’re like a hands that have been working, but they’re not thick and protected.
Steven Sashen
I think that we’ve. I think that we’ve potentially mythologized that that foot shape and that morphology. I think that they’re partially right. This is my suspicion. I mean, I could be completely making this up, but. But my. I suspect that there’s a genetic component as well, or an evolutionary component. Let’s just leave it at genetic. That’ll be easier. That if you just go back, you know, a number of generations, you’re going to see similar things. So they’re. They’re coming. They’re coming out of the gate already with a different foot shape to begin with. And I don’t know how much of that changes over time based on what they’re doing with their feet. I mean, what you’re doing with your feet’s a whole other thing. My favorite thing is watching videos of people who either were born with or lost both of their arms, born without or lost both of their arms. And what they learned to do with their feet. Everyone goes, oh, my God, that’s amazing. It’s like, no, it’s what any of us could do if we were using our feet, if we had to do. I mean, it’s not that it’s special. It’s. We. We all. We also have a tendency to. To mythologize people who have suffered something that we can’t imagine that then are having a fine life, having adapted to not having whatever that thing is. And we go, oh, my God, that’s incredible. It’s like, no, no. If you ask them, they go, no, it’s what you would do too, this.
Grove Higgins
Right.
Steven Sashen
You know, you learn to do this. You learn to draw. You learn to, you know, draw.
Grove Higgins
The human. The human system is so adaptable to the environment, but it has to be used. If you.
Steven Sashen
Yeah.
Grove Higgins
If you don’t use it, you don’t develop it. And if you’ve developed it and you stop using it, you lose it. Right. And unfortunately, it comes to a point where it becomes more and more permanent and it’s less changeable. Not that it’s not worth trying to change.
Steven Sashen
Yeah. You know, it’s kind of like old people lifting weights. They. They’re going to get stronger, but they’re not going to turn into professional bodybuilders if they haven’t been doing that for a while.
Grove Higgins
Right.
Steven Sashen
Which I kind of feel like that now at 63, it’s like I’ve been lifting a lot. I’m definitely getting stronger. I’ve gotten a little bigger. But, you know, I. I have no illusions about where that’s going.
Grove Higgins
Right, right, right. Yep.
Steven Sashen
Yeah.
Grove Higgins
Just don’t stop moving. Man.
Steven Sashen
I gotta tell you, you know, the, the. I’ve been working out more consistently in the last year and a half than ever in my life, even when I was. Well, a little different thing when I was a competitive athlete, but it’s been really, really satisfying because. And this is not a pitch for my workout per se, but a pitch for finding the thing that fits your psychology and your life. So this is a very intense, very short workout. That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, which is why I like it. I like that it’s super intense and super hard and super short and. And produces effects. So, you know, that’s part of my. Do something you enjoy. And every time I do this workout, it is excruciating. And my wife says, still having a good time? Oh, the best. So what else do we want to talk about on the in? You know, I, I keep thinking about this one other study, actually, from Christine Pollard at osu where she believed, as everyone did, that the cushioning in shoes was good and more cushioning would have to be better. And so when she did her research, what she was studying was the force going into your knee when you’re running. And she was very stunned to find out that even a small amount of cushioning increased the forces that were going into your knee to be a loading forces. And added cushioning did not make it any better. And at a certain point, and sometimes sooner rather than later made it worse, similar to what we’ve been talking about, because the brain was saying, I can’t feel anything. So I’ve had to land harder to try to get some kind of feedback.
Grove Higgins
Yeah.
Steven Sashen
And if that. Well, if that didn’t work, you know.
Grove Higgins
Yeah. So I, I’m going To reveal a secret that I use in, in clinical practice, based off from that study, from way back when, part of that mechanism of how that arch flexes and moves is that it drives that tibia to rotate. So it isn’t just that the tibia goes forward and backwards, it’s actually doing this subtle little rotation medially. So into the middle, towards the, towards your knees. Right. As you bend the knee, it has to rotate in order to unlock the femur from the tibia. So we know this. But, but as you bend it, that the, between the talus and the navicular here, it takes that linear force coming in through the forefoot and turns it into rotational force. And then that rotational force gets transmitted up the tibia. Right. If that tibia does not rotate, where does all that force go? It goes up into a misaligned articulation between the tibia and the femur. And you’re destroying it with every single step.
Steven Sashen
Well, you know, it’s interesting you say that. I’m going to talk. Well, first of all, again, if people didn’t watch that. So tibia, again, the thicker of the two bones in your lower leg, leg, and then the talus and the navicular. Just think of it as the first two bones that your tibia will bump into in your foot, ankle, foot, you know, structure. Easy way to think about that. It’s really interesting to me for the following reason. So 30 something years ago, I was still doing gymnastics. I was 32, 33 years old, something like that. And I landed and twisted at the same time and heard the following noise come out of my knee. And as I lay on the ground, I went, ah. That was the end of my gymnastics career. And so I had just mangled the meniscus in my knee joint and they removed about 30% of it. Hasn’t been a problem until the last, I don’t know, four or five months. I don’t do time very well. Let’s call it four or five months. And so, because after I got an X ray to find out, basically I’m bone on bone, just on that lateral side, just on the outside of my knee. Now, the interesting, the reason that I’m bringing this up is from what you just said. So because of that structural problem in my knee, what’s happening is that rotational thing in the tibia that you’re describing is not happening well. And so I’m getting. There’s some tightness on all of the muscles and tendons on the lateral side of my lower leg, which are interestingly Putting stress on the medial side, the inner side of all the attachments right around my heel. Right around. I don’t need to get into that.
Grove Higgins
Right. Yeah.
Steven Sashen
If I were. If I weren’t who I am, if I didn’t know you and all the people that I’ve met over the last 16 years, I’d say, oh, my God, it’s plantar fasciitis. It’s like, nope. It’s just all these muscles. It’s so interesting to me that the tightness of the stuff on the muscle on the outside are causing pulling and tightening of the other things on the inside. And the proof of this, I mean, I did it to myself the other day, was I just massaged the crap out of everything on the outside side, and I used all the various tools that I had to just, you know, really, like, loosen that stuff up. And the next day I was feeling, like, 95% better. And the interesting solution that I’m crossing my fingers about, I mean, I’m trying to get some hyaluronic acid just into that joint to give it a little bit of protection and get a little space in there. And this is something I wanted to bring up with you because. And I’m doing that instead of getting a knee replacement because. Have you heard about the guys in Sweden who figured out how to make new cartilage for your knee? Yeah. Coming from your nose. Yeah. This is. So I reached out. So for people who don’t know, and I’m assuming it’s most of you people listening or watching people, took cartilage from your septum, the thing that divides your nose into left and right, which has a lot of stem cells in it. They put it in a matrix and let it grow for a couple weeks. Basically, they kind of coerce it to grow in the form they want, and they basically made a new bit of cartilage for your knee, which they say can’t grow. Even though when I had my knee surgery done, I saw a whole lot of growth. It was just going everywhere, so it just didn’t know how to put itself back together correctly. But there was growth happening, just not in a good way. Anyway, they put this new cartilage coming from your nose into your knee, and they found that it created an immediate benefit that got even better over the two years they’ve been doing this. I reached out to see if I could become part of the next study. Unfortunately, they’re studying patellar knee osteoarthritis, which I do not have. So I’m not getting A knee replacement. I’m hoping that by the time, you know, I can’t treat things with whatever else I’m doing, that technique will be improved.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, yeah. So that. That’s a great segue into talking about rebuilding structure.
Steven Sashen
That’s where we were going.
Grove Higgins
Awesome. We’re starting.
Steven Sashen
Structure it is.
Grove Higgins
All right. Yeah. So, you know, you’ve got a couple of problems there. One you had, you know, yours was done traumatically, Right. But I can’t tell you how many people we see where they have no history of trauma. Right. And. And so it’s all repetitive motion. It’s bad movement leading to wear and tear. Imagine, you know, you’re driving your car. You. You check the curb with one wheel, it’s towed in, and now all four wheels are wearing out because there’s this aberrant force going on, and your gas mileage is terrible as well. Right. And you could put new rubber on the tires, but it doesn’t change the alignment. And so you just keep putting more money into the car. More money into the car where. Where all you needed to do is have the one wheel realigned, and now everything works better. Right. So in your case, you know, you. You had this injury, it created an ins. An instant damage to a structure, but it also probably created some instability. And then over the years, because you’ve been fit, you kept it well enough that it was able to keep going down the road again with the wheel towed in. Right. But. Yeah, minimizing the damage. But over time, that instability has caught up. Right. And so now the tensegrity, if you’ve heard that word before, is now off. Right. So the. The. The idea between tensegrity is that if all things balanced. And I’ll use the analogy of a tent, if you want to put up a tent, it has members on the inside that are pushing out, and you have the skin which is containing it inside, and then you have guy wires that are holding it, and it can stand up to wind and snow and all sorts of stuff, but you take off one of those guy wires, and the whole structure starts to lean one way, right? And that’s us. After an injury like what you had there, one of the guy wires was cut or stretched, Right. And so the. The rehab is important because our body can compensate for a while, but then the tissue, the structure, starts to break down. Like your meniscus got worse, and then it affected the cartilage and. And such like that. What do you do about that? As a chiropractor, I can help you with the Alignment. But I can’t put structure back into you.
Steven Sashen
Right, right.
Grove Higgins
I wished.
Steven Sashen
Yeah.
Grove Higgins
That’s where regenerative medicine and regenerative techniques like shockwave therapy and such like that becomes a game changer in orthopedics.
Steven Sashen
Yeah. So talk more about those. And yes, I mean, this is one of those things where, of course, living in or near Boulder, when I describe what’s going on, everyone has an answer for what I should be doing. You know, if I just take some homeopathic whatever or if I see some shamanistic healer, I’m going, no, no, no. This is a building where a couple of the bricks are gone.
Grove Higgins
Yeah.
Steven Sashen
I mean, you know, this is. It’s not a big deal. I had 30 years of being totally fine even after a seriously traumatic injury. I’m cool with that. And so, um. And in fact, what saved me, ironically, was getting out of regular shoes because I was having. Because I’m actually. I totally forgot about this. I actually had a lot of knee issues up until I got out of regular shoes. And so my last, you know, 16, 17 years were saved by or extended by being predominantly barefooter and things like zero shoes. So I didn’t even think about that until just now. But anyway, talk about their. Talk about regenerative things. Shockwave, I find very interesting. I want you to talk about that. But I’m going to preface this by saying the first time I had it, and it was not because I was going for a treatment, it’s because I was at an event where the guys who sell that service were, you know, trying to sell their thing. I said, what’s. You know, do it to me. I want to feel it. And it was the weirdest thing I’ve ever felt. Because you’re getting sensations in parts of your body where you’ve never gotten a sensation because it’s inside your body and.
Grove Higgins
Right.
Steven Sashen
Weird sensations. So, you know, so anyway, talk about it.
Grove Higgins
Yeah. So. So I got into regenerative medicine because I had patients, again, that had deficient structure that I could not fix, no matter how good my hands are. And my hands are really good. Right. And so I. I wanted my. I want my patients to be better. And the last thing that I want, unless it’s necessary, is to have them cut on. Right, Right. And so I had this one patient who literally, his head was not attached to the top of his spine. When he would tilt his head to the side, we have the. The digital motion X ray. His skull would slide sideways, pinch his brain stem, and cause him to have seizure like activities. And he was getting diagnosed with seizure disorder, when really what it was is that the ligaments that hold the whole thing together aren’t there anymore. He was in a head on collision with a concrete barrier. The barrier one.
Steven Sashen
There we go.
Grove Higgins
He should have died. But anyway, long story short, that was my first foray into it because the only option that he had was putting screws into his skull to hold the whole thing together. And there’s one person in the world that did that at that time. Instead, he went to the Centennial Schultz Clinic up there in Broomfield near you and got PRP and stem cell work done to those ligaments and regrew them.
Steven Sashen
The. I want to. I want to pause there on something. Yeah, so I have a friend who is. Do you know. Do you know prolotherapy?
Grove Higgins
Oh, yeah.
Steven Sashen
Okay. I assume that you would. So for people who don’t. Prolotherapy for. So prolotherapy, they take a needle syringe and they stick the needle into your ligaments or tendons and inject something to basically select. Yeah, he added a little tiny. My friend Tom added a little bit of testosterone just to make the cells, like really open to whatever. Anyway, so my friend Tom Raven is the guy who taught prolo to almost everybody. And he’s a former radiologist. It felt like the guy had X ray vision. I watched him do things to people like with needles that were a foot long to try to get to the right spot with someone who was, you know, relatively overweight or. No, very overweight. It’s like, how did you do that? Now, granted, one time he was working on my knee after I had my surgery. He’s working or after I had the meniscus partially removed, and he sticks a needle. I’m lying face down on the table and he sticks a needle trying to get to something in the front of my knee, but has to get there from the back. And he nicks my tibial nerve and I pop off the table. Like I’m a foot off the table in midair and it was like an electric shock just popped me off the table. And I’m in midair thinking, I couldn’t do this. If I tried to physically. And I land and there’s a long pause and Tom goes, yeah, I was trying not to do that. But anyway. But prolo. Again, the basic idea, a little sugar water, just selectively injure the tendons because, you know, you get injured, your body’s going to do the best that it can for a few days to get you back up and moving, but not back to where you were before you got injured, necessarily. And that little injury is going to selectively, you know, generate restorative things to build more tissue. Anyway, the PRP version is the same idea, except that, A, they’re typically people doing it under with ultrasound to know where to put the needle. Tom could just, like, do it. And B, the. Often they’re doing it by spinning platelets out of your blood and injecting that as well with the idea that that will accelerate the healing process. I mean, the healing happens because platelets show up anyway. They’re thinking it’s better if you just do the. If you had the platelets to begin with and. But the biggest thing is by doing all those different things, using the ultrasound, spinning out the platelets, they could do this and bill insurance companies. So when I asked Tom about prp, he goes, it’s prolotherapy with a bunch of hand waving. So I’m not saying don’t do it.
Grove Higgins
I’ve so. And I’ve. And I’ve used. I’ve used both. And, you know, there’s a place for both. In fact, the. The one doctor that I utilize the most, he uses all three, right? He uses prologue. He uses prp. He selects the. He selects the weapon to kill the target, to do what needs to be done and such like that. But the cool part was, is that as I’m going through this, one of my other patients, he was really in need of something and asked about Shockwave. So I reach out to the Shockwave community that’s out there, and it was still just growing at the time, and the company came out, said, here’s one, gave me some training, gave me a unit to use for a month, and let’s see what you. What you think. I treated over 100 people in that month, and I was able to do things with that device that I could never do with my hands. And since then, of course, I’ve learned a little, a little bit more. So the lessons learned from PRPs.
Steven Sashen
Let’s start with explain what Shockwave is or how it. What it does, how it works a little bit.
Grove Higgins
So it’s using sound waves. So there’s ultrasound, which heats things up, and that could be helpful in its own form or fashion. And then there’s Shockwave, which is taking sound waves, putting them into the body, creating an area of high pressure so the sound waves come together. If you ever stood in front of a big concert bass speaker and you feel those waves of sound coming into your body, and you can feel it, you know, vibrating your organs. Right. Well, imagine that. But down at a micro level, happening inside the body. Well, that stimulation stimulates the cells that we’re targeting and, and promotes them to do a couple of things. One, their metabolism increases. So if you sit there and rub your skin, you’re going to get red right there because the metabolism is going to increase. More blood’s going to come to the area, things like that. So blood comes to the area that’s number one. Number two, you’re stimulating them. And like that growth hormone, the testosterone that your friend put into the injection for you, those cells start to express that because they are experiencing what they think is injury. So all of a sudden you have all of these growth factors being expressed from the cells that are in need locally. And so you’re getting better blood flow, better blood vessel formation to areas that don’t normally get good blood. Blood flow like ligaments. And you’re getting all these growth hormones. So you’re getting tissue formation and regrowing tissue. So it’s like prolotherapy, PRP and stem cell, but without the injection. And I could do it here.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, it’s really cool. And, and I, I can’t describe the feeling, but imagine. Imagine someone really, really tiny punching you really, really hard ins.
Grove Higgins
There are ways to go about it. I utilize a technique called focal shockwave. So I can attenuate it down to zero pain and use it to create analgesia. So basically hide the pain.
Steven Sashen
Oh, that’s interesting. Well, I mean, I, you know, look, I mean, I like the intense things that. But, I mean, but the thing that’s so weird about it, again, it’s like you’re getting this thing, you know, maybe 10 millimeters centimeter inside your body. And so you don’t really have a whole lot of sensory input from that. So it’s just a bizarro feeling. It’s like, you know, a tiny little lightning bolt that just hits a spot. And when you find, you know, it’s kind of like if you find one of those spots on your body that’s just a little sore and you kind of rub on it and you’re getting something in there, it’s like that, but like fast and intense. So when you get the right spot, it’s that little bit of like little lightning kind of, pun intended, shock. And it doesn’t hurt hurt because it also has the thing. It’s like, oh, that was just the spot. That was the one. Yeah, yeah, it’s super interesting.
Grove Higgins
One of the cool studies that was done and, and I bring this one out. And so, so many of these regenerative medicine doctors that I teach about this now don’t even know about some of these studies that are out there because there’s thousands of them now. But they took a rat model, they haven’t done this in humans, where they go in and they surgically tear the meniscus just like you did. Right. And then with one application of shockwave and comparing it to, of course, control, which doesn’t have any into it, one application of shockwave at two weeks, you can start to see the surgical tear start to close up on the one that’s been treated and by four weeks and six weeks it’s healing. But on the non treated one, you start to see it degrade and degenerate. Wow. Right. And that’s with one application in a rat model. Granted, it’s a rat, but it still is very analogous to what you see in a human being. And I fixed hundreds of meniscus tears with just shockwave and no need. And with documented MRI evidence of it too, with no need for surgery.
Steven Sashen
Interesting. Well, I have to, I haven’t had an MRI on this one, otherwise I’d show it to you and see what you think. I mean, again, when I, when I. Well, they’ve removed a giant radial chunk of it. And, and like I said, I mean, I, it was really fun when they were going to give me the surgery. I said, they said, we’re going to put you under. I said, can I just get an epidural instead so I can watch? They’re like, what I want to watch.
Grove Higgins
That would be me, man. That would be me.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, it was great. And at one point, you know, they’re doing this arthroscopically and I said, can I, can you pull that instrument out? Because I’m watching on the screen, it looks huge and you know, it’s this tiny little thing. It was really, it was very, very cool. But I mean, by this point I don’t know what’s there at all. It’s not like, you know, just as like right after I did it where it was a pretty good tear. Not even a complete section, but a pretty good tear. Probably something then. And like I said by that, well, I didn’t get surgery for a while because I didn’t have insurance for a while while. And when I finally got insurance, I went and saw the orthopod and he kind of moves my knee around. He goes, so what do you think? Surgery tomorrow? I went oh, geez, that bad? He goes, yeah. So, you know, and here we are 30 years later. So again, I’m not. The thing I’m doing now is just to get some fluid in that joint. So it’s just not so bone on bone. In fact, I went to my p. What the hell? I went to my PT just to. Because I was feeling this like, twangy thing that I thought was one of the tendons around my leg and. Or in my leg and my pt, who’s delightful. I said, see, when I make this move, it. There’s a snapping sound. It’s coming from the 10. And she goes, oh, sweetheart. No, that’s coming from the bones rubbing on each other.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, yeah. And that’s a. Not a nice feeling or sound. Yeah, it’s.
Steven Sashen
It’s uniquely unpleasant. It’s kind of like just cracking your fingers, except much more disconcerting.
Grove Higgins
It sounds like walking on old creaky boards. And yeah, it’s.
Steven Sashen
It. It. Yeah, the grindy part is unpleasant. The snappy part I can tolerate. The grindy part is unpleasant. Yeah, just. Just viscerally. So. So anyway, back to regenerative medicine. So, you know, this whole idea, I mean, I think this is really fascinating. This whole idea that a lot of these methods are basically selectively re. Injuring.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, they’re selectively re. Injuring. Creating a stimulus. And. And again, again, going back to the analogy of the foot and the brain. Right. The. The body needs input into the system in order to. To do what it needs to do.
Steven Sashen
Yeah.
Grove Higgins
So if it’s not getting that, if we protect the body too much. Right. So like that, like the, like your injury there, and we don’t return it back to proper movement patterns, then it continues to degenerate. And that’s typically what we do. We brace it, we protect it, and then inevitably inviting degeneration in. And we really just need to return things back. In a lot of cases, if we did that immediately, from an ankle sprain to a lot of different injuries, then we wouldn’t need to do interventions that cost a lot of money, that are very invasive and such like that. But instead we take a medical approach and unfortunately invite more problems into the situation a lot of times.
Steven Sashen
Sometimes. Yeah. I mean, I’m also. Well, I’m also trying to avoid at all costs the fact that I. My spine’s all out of whack from a gymnastics thing. Well, there’s an argument about gymnastics or congenital. But suffice it to say, whenever I show my. The sagittal picture of my spine to People who know nothing about bodies, and they go, oh, God, yeah, yeah, it’s. It’s. It’s a fun one.
Grove Higgins
Yeah. But your body’s figured out how to make it work and. And make high quality of life.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, I’m not. I mean, I’m. Yes. Is the simple thing. It’s not at a point where I can’t live the way it is. It’s just every now and then annoying.
Grove Higgins
Sure.
Steven Sashen
And my. Well, here, I’ll do this one again. So basically, I’ve got this for people who want to look it up. So it’s an L5S1 spondylolisthesis with a pars defect. In short, for people who. To give that to people in English, my sacrum. And then the first spinal vertebrae above it are misaligned. The spinal vertebrae is shifted forward about 50% of the distance from where it should be. But the pars defect is the fun part, which is basically the muscles that would otherwise hold that in place aren’t there. There’s nothing holding it in place. And the reason I bring this one up is it was a fun one when after seeing an mri, one neurologist said to me, anyone who recommends just doing core exercises, just. Just walk away because there’s nothing holding anything in place.
Grove Higgins
Yep. My wife has the same thing, and she just got back from 12 miles a day in Rome with no pain after doing prolotherapy pro, a mixture of prolotherapy and PRP a month before. And has no pain.
Steven Sashen
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know why I’m doing this for the fun of it. Like, every 18 months or so, I end up getting a little epidural because, like, my feet are cramping or some weird thing that’s happening. Some bizarro psych, some bizarro sciatic thing, but that’s it. I mean, otherwise, again, I was having a lot of problems until I got out of regular shoes.
Grove Higgins
Right. Yep, Yep. See it all the time. Yep, you’re right.
Steven Sashen
All right. And what have we missed, if anything, from everywhere we want to go?
Grove Higgins
You know, I. I think really what it comes down to is, you know, people, if they’re listening to this podcast, are interested in helping themselves one, but they’re getting it from people who are experienced, you and your industry, from all of the research that you’ve done, and. And the people that you. The thousands of people that you’ve talked to in this field. And. And then. And then. So learn from that, but then assemble a team of people and professionals that can help you. And the thing that you really want to look for are people who want you to be. Be at the best that you can be without them.
Steven Sashen
I’m gonna. I’m gonna add a caveat to that or an addendum to that, which is find people who are hip to what we’re talking about. Find people who. Who. I mean, I. I’ll never forget the first not conference. There was a panel discussion about barefoot running before I’d even started the company, actually, when I was just making sandals for people, and it was a bunch of physical therapists and doctors and whatnot. It was held at a physical therapy clinic in Boulder. And they were all saying things like, you know, if you want to run barefoot, it’s going to take you five to 10 years to adjust to be able to do that. I’m going, what the are these people talking about? And finally, I mean, I asked the question. I said, how many of you have ever run for at least a mile in bare feet on a road? And I was the only hand that went up. And I’m not even a runner. Runner. I’m a sprinter. And I’m going, you know, you guys don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re making up stories based on no information whatsoever. And the stories that you’re making up are completely contradictory to the experiences of hundreds of people that I know. And so when people talk to me that they have, you know, some issue where I’m going to recommend that they see a medical professional, I go find someone who’s hip to this whole idea, because there are people who. We all do it. We know very little about something, and someone asks about it. We make up a story to justify the way we believe it. And. And I see this. My God. I met a. I. I met a medical doctor who was. This is going to be weird. He was going to go have surgery for plantar fasciitis. And I said, why is that? I don’t think you have plantar fasciitis. He goes, what are you talking about? I said, well, can you just, like, raise yourself up on your toes? He said, yeah. And he did it. I said, well, does that hurt? He goes, no. I said, yeah, dude, you don’t have plantar fasciitis. I said, can you, while you’re on your toes, just kind of, you know, bounce from left to right so just, like, running in place a little, Just on your toes? Yeah. I said, does that hurt? He goes, no, you’re. I said, you don’t have plantar Fasciitis. I said, can you, while you’re doing that left and right thing, just bouncing back and forth, lean forward and just let your body go where it goes. And he just runs down the block and back. I said, any problem? He goes, no. I said, dude, you don’t need surgery. And he wouldn’t have had it anyway.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you tell the story about the special forces guy with plantar fasciitis.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, same thing.
Grove Higgins
All of his, all of his buddies are right. And pain is very imprecise. It doesn’t tell you anything specific most of the time. Right. And the best example I can give you is a paper cut. You get a paper cut and the whole world exists right there at that moment. Right? That’s all you could think about. But eventually your brain goes, oh, that wasn’t so bad. And it just turns off, right? Didn’t even bleed. But you can be walking around having cut your elbow and your wife looks at you and goes, hey, Steve, what’d you do to your elbow? And you’re like, I don’t know. Why didn’t that hurt? Right? So pain is, is, is just an output of the brain. It’s. It’s our job to then figure out as a good, as a good practitioner to find out what is the pain really pointing to and solve that problem for the person. Or is it just fear? It’s kind of like me starting out yesterday, walking on my six miles. After three to four miles, my brain is like, hey, your feet are not in danger. You’re fine. And so then that went away.
Steven Sashen
You know, here’s my favorite version of that. People who say, I tried the barefoot thing, but I got Achilles tendonitis. And I said, no, no, here’s what happened. You’ve been wearing a high heeled shoe, high heeled running shoe. And your brain has been trained to only let your Achilles stretch a certain amount. And what you then did is you switched immediately to a minimal shoe, a flat shoe, and you didn’t give your brain time to learn that it’s cool to let your Achilles stretch to the fullest extent that it can stretch. And people that what they say is, I’ve been wearing high heel shoes. My Achilles has shortened. No, the tissue has not shortened. If we cut you open, let’s go back to the cadavers. From the beginning, we could stretch your Achilles as far as it needed to be stretched because it’s not getting any, any input from your brain, but your brain is saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s learned that that’s enough. Oops. Did I lose you somehow? Oh, man, I just. Oh, wow. I somehow just lost Grove. Hopefully he will be back in just a moment. Fingers crossed. And even more hopefully, I’m going to have to tell someone that at the one hour mark, roughly, we gotta bring him back. I’m going to pause the recording. We got interrupted by a technical glitch. So let me. So I was saying you’ve basically trained your brain to tell you that’s as much as you can do. And there’s whole methodologies. I’m one called Feldenkrais method. That’s all about retraining your, your brain very, very quickly. But the simplest thing is it’s like, you know, when I got back into sprinting, people said, well, you can’t train in your spikes. You’ll get Achilles tendonitis. Like, no, you’re training in a big thick shoe with a big heel. Then you’re switching immediately to spike that you’re not used to. This is the problem that you’re talking about. And people don’t. I mean, it sounds weird to even say that. So much of what we think is a physical limitation is just our brain trying to protect us from things that are totally cool.
Grove Higgins
Yeah, yeah, most definitely. And training is how you fix a lot of those problems. Proper training.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, exactly. Anyway. All right, Grove, as always, this is a total pleasure. If people want to get in touch with you or hear more about what you’re up to and what you’re thinking and doing, how would they do that?
Grove Higgins
Yeah, definitely. On the, on the, on the interwebs, go to. Yeah. Yes. Go to neuroathletechiro.com you can also reach me directly through Dr. Higginsuroathleteclinic.com and we have a YouTube channel as well and Facebook. And I try to put out some educational material, usually little tips and tricks on how to get the most out of life things that nobody else is teaching. Because there’s a lot of information out there and, and, and I want to be able to contribute to that. But I don’t want, want to just make content. Just to make content.
Steven Sashen
Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, again, thank you. And for everyone watching slash listening, thank you as well. Quick reminders before we call it a day. Go over to www.join the movementmovement.com there’s nothing to do to join. You don’t need to pay anything. There’s no secret handshake. We don’t do a magic dance every morning at 7:00am all right, yeah, we do that. But I won’t tell you about it now. And you’ll find previous episodes, of which there are quite a few places to find us on social media. And of course, other places. Find the podcast if you’re looking for somewhere else. And if you have any requests or recommendations, people you think I should talk to or anything else you want to cover, or if you just want to tell me what you’re thinking, you can drop me an email. Move M O V eoinethemovementmovement.com It’d be great if you can find someone who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome. I would love to talk to one of those people. That’d be a lot of fun. Usually they resist. I’ve talked to a few and said, come on, on, why don’t we do this live? They go, oh, no, no, no. It’s like, all right, whatever. Anyway. Most importantly, though, whatever you do between now and the next time we see each other, not really. You know where I’m going between now and whatever’s next. Go out, have fun, and live life feet first.