Peter Francis’ main interest is in understanding how individuals and teams can be the best that they can be. Peter has been described as a transformational leader for his work in creating cultures whereby productivity and well-being increase among groups. Examples include generating a 5-fold increase in research output at a University department, creating a winning culture on the sporting field and helping individuals accomplish physical challenges for the first time.
Peter has a BSc. Sport and Exercise Science, BSc. Physical Therapy and a PhD in Exercise Science. He has worked with teams and individuals at amateur, European and Olympic level. An established researcher, Peter lectures in sport and health science and conducts research into how modern environments effect human health and performance.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Peter Francis about what barefoot running can do for injuries.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How individuals resist changing their running shoes despite evidence proving padded shoes do not improve performance.
– Why the traditional running advice and scientific knowledge can often lead people astray.
– How expanding people’s minds about running differently and understanding injuries challenges black-and-white thinking and embraces nuance.
– Why people should consider their evolutionary legacy in their modern environment.
– How it’s vital for people to have fun when they are participating in physical activities.
Connect with Peter:
Guest Contact Info
Links Mentioned:
peterfrancis.blog
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
The Holy Grail is knowing how to run without getting injured. Whether you’re wearing shoes or going barefoot, I mean, that’s really your goal is to enjoy going out, enjoy running, and not worry about being able to do it the next day. Well, we’re going to be chatting with someone who has some interesting thoughts 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 with your feet first, those things that are your foundation. We’re going to break down the propaganda, the mythology, the often lies that you may have been told about what it takes to run, to walk, to hike, to play, to lift, to do CrossFit, yoga, whatever it is you’d like to do, and to do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively.
I’m Steven session from zeroshoes.com, your host of the Movement Movement Podcast. We call it the Movement Movement, because we’re creating a movement that involves you about movement, and that’s about natural movement. We’re trying to make natural movement or help people rediscover that natural movement is the obvious better, healthy choice. The way natural food is.
If you like what you hear here, then go over to www.Jointhemovementmovement.com. And to join the movement all you have to do is enjoy what we do, check out the previous episodes, like, share, comment, give us a thumbs up where you can do that, hit the bell button on YouTube so you hear about upcoming episodes. You know how to be part of this. In fact, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let’s jump in Peter Francis. Hello.
Peter Francis:
Hello.
Steven Sashen:
We started this conversation just a few minutes ago. And then we started it again right now. And when I started with Peter, I said that I was humiliated and embarrassed that it took me till now to discover him, you, because you are a staunch proponent of barefoot things. And we just jumped into that conversation. I found out about you last week or so when there was an article that came out. Was it in the telegraph? Or where was it? I can’t remember.
Peter Francis:
I think it was originally written on theconversation.com, and then it got picked up by a few other places like CNN and…
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the gist of it… The title was something along the lines Will Barefoot Running Cure Your Injuries? Pardon me for not being in any way prepared. But that’s how I run my life.
Peter Francis:
Yeah. The media gave it various titles like that.
Steven Sashen:
So before we jump back into our conversation, and then I will be asking you to give the tour of your man cave again, because I love your new log cabin. Tell me who the hell you are, what the hell you’re doing here. Before we get into how you got into this whole concept of natural movement. What are you up to now?
Peter Francis:
Well, I guess I’m a lecturer at the Institute of Technology in Carlow, which is a place in Ireland. I’m a sports scientist, physical therapist. I do research into foot development in adolescents, children, adolescents and adults who grow up with and without wearing shoes.
Steven Sashen:
So silly as this may sound that means you have some actual expertise and not just opinions.
Peter Francis:
Well, science is a humble pursuit.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, well it’s funny when people talk to me about the whole natural movement thing. They’ll often say, “Well, there’s a big controversy around this barefoot stuff.” I got “No, no, there’s a bunch of research demonstrating the value of natural movement. And there’s a bunch of people with opinions.” And the Venn diagram does not overlap somewhere, which is always stunning for people to hear. Well, anyway, we’re talking… So tell me if you can start to repeat your story of how you discovered natural movement and barefoot running.
Peter Francis:
So I was a keen runner from the age of 16. And a couple of years into that I started to pick up a lot of injuries. I was studying sports science at the time, and I was mainly interested in performance at that time, and I got so many injuries. And then I graduated, and I went to the Middle East and taught English for a year. And when I was out there, I couldn’t access physio in the same way. And a friend of mine just happened to send me a magazine article then said, “Have you tried this barefoot running?” And I thought, “Well, what the hell, it can’t hurt.”
So I found a grass park, I did two sessions of running and my plantar fasciitis, a painful heel condition, cleared up almost immediately. And when I came back to Ireland to do my PhD, I said to my professor, “Hey, this really weird thing happened to me in the Middle East and I want to do a study on it.” And he kind of threw his eyes to heaven, as professors often do. But he did humor me and he said, “Well, let’s get one of the undergraduate students to do a small research project on it first.”
And we did and we found that runners without their shoes… We took the arm off a treadmill, and we got some cameras around it. And we looked at runners running to different speeds with and without their shoes. And at the lower speed the runners had a shorter stride, more flexed hip, knee and ankle. And that was kind of the beginning of, I suppose, my career more in the research end of barefoot.
Steven Sashen:
When was that?
Peter Francis:
That was 2010.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, so you came in, right as the boom was starting to boom?
Peter Francis:
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I didn’t necessarily feel like that at the time, but I stumbled upon it. And I got some joy from it. And so I became interested in how it was all working.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, you and me both. I mean, I say it that way because 2000… We started Zero Shoes in late 2009. And from late 2009 to mid-2010 basically, every major Shoe Company was putting out content articles, various things, saying “Don’t run barefoot, you’re going to kill yourself, your mortgage rates going to go up, and you’re going to step on hypodermic needles, and you’ll catch Ebola.” And it was just insane. And of course, by the end of 2010, the shoe companies were coming out with shoes they were calling barefoot or calling minimalist, which, frankly, were nothing of the sort. But they were trying to capitalize on it before they found out… Or before everyone just bailed on them entirely. So that’s why I say it was the beginning of the boom. And that was also just that same era when Born to Run became popular as well. Did you read Born to Run at that time? Was that in any way inspiring? Or was this all just based on your experience and going I got to check this out?
Peter Francis:
No, it was just based on my own experience, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Love it. So when you say you tested people to different speeds, you saw that… And I’m putting air quotes around shorter stride length, because that’s massively misunderstood by people. But what did you see at the faster speed? And what were the two speeds? I’m curious.
Peter Francis:
So we saw no difference at the faster speed. And I think that’s because when you run faster you tend to use good mechanics anyway. I have a suspicion that the problem of injury in long distance runners is actually in the volume of low speed training. And so therefore, mechanical changes at that speed are probably most important in terms of-
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Peter Francis:
… Solving the problem. So yeah, we didn’t see a change at the faster speed. But we did at the slower one.
Steven Sashen:
Did you ever bump into Bill Sands.
Peter Francis:
No.
Steven Sashen:
Bill was the head of biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee, he used to have a human performance lab at a university out here in Colorado, and I met him… Must have been around that same time. And in fact, it was definitely right around that same time, late 2009ish. And what he would do is he’d bring you his lab, he had this five foot wide, 10 foot long treadmill, he’d throw you on there and film you from the back and the side at 500 frames a second.
And first, he’d have you running your favorite pair of shoes, then barefoot, and then it was like doing an eye chart or an eye test, better, worse, better, worse with every other pair of shoes that you had. And in over 90% of the people he found that at a normal training speed their mechanics changed dramatically and improved dramatically when they were barefoot. And then so the question was, what shoes can you wear that’s going to give you the closest thing to that experience.
He never even suggested people run barefoot. It was just like, if you’re going to run shoes, let’s see what we can do to be as close to something that we just demonstrated is better. And it was amazing the number of people who found those improvements but still we’re like attached to wearing big, thick motion control shoes that he showed them didn’t help them in any way. It was a fascinating thing about people really being locked into an idea that they had somehow gotten married to, despite the evidence in front of their face.
Peter Francis:
Yeah. Cool.
Steven Sashen:
All right. Good enough response. All right, so you did a bit of research. And what happened next, since that was now 10 years ago.
Peter Francis:
Did that research finish my PhD, which was in an unrelated topic, and then started to engineer my work and research more towards running injury and barefoot. And so probably from around 2015 started to publish more and more in the barefoot and in the running injury space, which is what we do now still.
Steven Sashen:
What kind of response are you getting? Let me see if I can preface that question, after the fact. What’s amazing to me, like I said, there’s all this research on natural movement. And it seems to get A, little press, B, arguments from people who know nothing about what they’re talking about. And there was a C when I started this thought, sometimes just vitriolic responses of people saying “This is complete bullshit.” But the one that amazes me, of course is that is simply how little response that a lot of this research gets, despite how profound it actually could and should be. What did you discover when you started publishing?
Peter Francis:
Well, in science, you just got to do the studies and publish the work. So I can’t say that I’ve had major trouble there. I do try and write blog pieces and try and write media friendly pieces so that the information is communicated to wider audiences. And we’ve had some success in doing that. But I think also it’s complicated because I guess the traditional influencer has an overly simplistic view, which means the advice from them is as likely to send you in the right direction as it is the wrong direction. And then you have a lot of scientists, maybe, who don’t have real world experience and application of the information. And so there’s a sweet spot in the middle.
Because I’m working on a book at the moment about running injury. And, yes, there’s a chapter on shoes, and there’s a chapter on being barefoot, but there’s a whole load of other stuff like not changing your training load too quickly, not chasing previous versions of yourself or other people, learning to introduce variability into training, learning not to take what clinicians say to heart, too much. There’s a whole lot… Being less of entry in daily life, not getting bored and needing instant gratification. And there’s a lot of stuff that goes into why somebody gets injured. So probably when you look at it with a black and white lens, you start getting into trouble and then you just get, I suppose, overly simplistic arguments over and back [and the median 00:10:58], and it probably doesn’t go anywhere.
Steven Sashen:
Well, a lot of that seems to be human beings they want a simple answer. They want to know what’s the step by step thing that I do independent of individual differences. It amazes me when I’ll get an email from someone saying, “I want to run this marathon in two weeks barefoot, what do you think I should do?” And I of course, respond, “Don’t run the marathon barefoot in two weeks.” And that’s another part is people think that if they can imagine something then they should be able to do it the way they imagine it, which is, of course not the case.
With all the things that you described for all those different conditions that can be helpful it made me think of Arthur Lydiard. There’s a great documentary that, I don’t know who did it, about Arthur. And for people who don’t know, he was perhaps the most successful running coach of all time. He coached people from the 800 meters to the marathon, a lot of world champions and Olympic champions, coming out of New Zealand, which is a tiny, tiny little country that I think you guys used to have some connection to.
And Lydiard did exactly everything you just said. I mean, the variability in what he was doing and how he did cross training and how he was… He did a lot of training barefoot, and of course, he was making shoes for people that looked like ours. They were thin, they were flat, they were wide. They were lightweight, he was a professional shoemaker.
And when I’m hanging out at the University of Colorado, watching how they’re training, it’s just like pounding in the miles and seeing who survives. Or I’ll see some guys who are professional coaches, and the amount of strength training they do or anything else. It’s so obvious that that’s something that they’re kind of giving lip service to. Even at the Olympic level these guys who are… I mean, sure, they’re great runners, but can’t do a push up for all practical purposes. I love everything you said. I think that proposing that people adopt what you’re suggesting is a Herculean task. What do you think it’s going to take to, I don’t know, expand people’s mind to get people to think about moving differently, running differently, injuries differently, more than just having this resource that you’re going to be putting out?
Peter Francis:
Well, I think that’s a big question. But expanding people’s mind is perhaps what society is in need of right now. I can’t remember the philosopher who said it, but tyranny is the eradication of nuance. And I think increasingly, in all aspects of life, it’s been turned into black and white sort of ways of looking at things. And I guess if you look at things from an evolutionary perspective, you then have to say, “Well, why are we obese? Why are we suffering more anxiety and depression than ever? Why are we living in an environment where we’re in chronic pain? Why are we so medicated?” And on and on and on in terms of mismatch diseases.
So if you take that sort of evolutionary lens, you will start to say, “Well, okay, how do we become more conditioned in a modern environment?” So, if we are sitting on an iPad and not climbing a tree growing up, then we need to think about that in terms of the knock on effects. So you mentioned my cabin, there’s no chairs with any backs in here, and there’s a standing desk, and there’s a sort of a shoes off.
So you’re constantly trying to steer yourself towards something that’s a bit closer to your evolutionary legacy, eating well and exercising and all of that becomes important. But I guess with barefoot, or not even barefoot running, but just running. If you’re sat at an office desk all day long, you’re really asking your body to go from zero to 100 really quite quickly, and that body is not conditioned either. So those two things of kind of sudden change on a frame that’s not as musculoskeletally robust as a hunter gatherers might have been, is an issue. So I think to get people to expand their mind you got to address it on a whole number of fronts.
Steven Sashen:
Two things, one to an earlier point you made. There’s tyranny within the Barefoot community as well. And I think some of this is just people trying to establish themselves as a someone so they can make a living. So some of it is you have to run this way. There’s some people who say you have to land on this part of your foot in the following way. I’m not going to get into it because it’ll basically be identifying who I’m talking about. Or even just the ideas that have taken hold like that the optimal cadence is 180 steps per minute. I mean, just all these little things that people have tried to turn… That they’ve tried to codify in doing that they’ve really ossified, which is an amazing thing, since this is such a new movement, that there’s so many ideas that have already become entrenched that we’ve got to talk people out of. That’s sort of part one.
Part two, I obviously, and not surprisingly, agree with you about the mismatch between our evolutionary history and where we are now. The thing that I’m curious about, and I wonder, you kind of addressed this, but I want to highlight it, is a point that I made on a panel discussion. I said, “Look, there’s no amount of ancestral movement or climbing trees or whatever that you can do, that really replicates what we were doing as tribal society members, where you have to walk to the river 1,000 times to get enough rocks to build a shelter, where you’re chasing down food, or being chased by things that think you are food.”
And the example I give, I said “Look as a sprinter, I can tell you, I had a really hard workout on Sunday, I felt a little sore on Monday. But if I had a race where I worked out 1/10 as much, but was much more intense, because it was an actual race, then I’d be sore till Thursday.” And so there’s just a hormonal thing that happens that’s completely different in the heat of competition than anything I can simulate when I’m training.
So similarly whatever we’re doing now is, at best, a simulation of our hunter gatherer history. How do you see that and how do you see any way of maybe getting those things a little closer together?
Peter Francis:
Well, I think the key thing you mentioned there is about repeatedly walking to the river and gathering stones and so on. What you see with that type of activity is it’s a constant, low level of conditioning. So I think that was probably how we spent the majority of our time. The other stuff about hunting and so on, it was probably persistent hunting. So again, long periods of low level conditioning, which short bursts of high intensity exercise, so you’re not really in a constant state of inflammation, you’re in a constant state of activity.
I mean, the best example I’ve seen of it recently is my brother is a mechanic, and also a guy who is interested in agriculture and so on. And so sometimes if I look out the kitchen window, having a coffee when I watch him, he’s in and out of his garage, he’s up and down the stairs, he carries this thing across to the compost heap. And then he turns around, and whatever, moves stone here and there. So I watched him one day, and I thought, “Yeah, this guy doesn’t need to exercise because he’s mimicking this constant, upright posture where he’s performing various activities repeatedly.”
So I do think a modern version of it exists if you have a manual occupation, if you don’t, and you’re trying to be an athlete, I think it’s very, very difficult. And something I observed recently is even if I watch duathlons or triathlons or some running events. I noticed that the people in the events they don’t really look like athletes. And I understand it’s a participation sport. And I think it’s brilliant that anybody, at any level, or fitness or whatever you want to say, participates, it can only be good for their head and everything else.
However, I do feel that when you look at them they’re doing a really good thing by engaging with the sport. But you can almost see in how they look and how they move, that they’ve been chained to a desk or a week, or a car or a whatever, some sort of seated position in the way that they’re moving. And it’s really got me thinking around the idea of can sport serve the purpose it once did if we have a population that’s so century that even sport is now quite a stressful event rather than a form of conditioning.
Steven Sashen:
Or fun. I mean, this is one of the things with the Tarahumara Indians they have running games where they’re having fun for days at a time as part of the game. And we’ve definitely lost. That one of the things that I do when I’m teaching people about barefoot running is we’ll go out on a park. And I do things that just are designed to make them do and feel goofy. So I’ll say think about being like little kids, when they start running where they haven’t grown into their head yet. So it’s like they kind of lean their head forward, and then they have to catch up to their head, which they can never seem to do, because they can’t keep it stable.
It’s like, just do that, let your head lead the way and just kind of keep your arms flapping by their side, don’t really use your arms, just trying to do something to make it entertaining, and get people out of this mindset of trying to accomplish something and making it a goal oriented thing that you have to do, that’s got additional tensions. My line is always if you’re not having fun, do something different till you are. Because otherwise, what’s the point. And if you’re not enjoying it for the sake of it itself, not even for a goal, then you’re not going to continue it.
I mean, sprinting is a ridiculous thing, because it’s not easy. But for whatever reason, I love the training, I find it really, really engaging. And now granted, having the competition is really helpful, because I like having the goal as well. But the goal alone is not enough to make me put myself through that at 58 years old. That’s ridiculous. There was some thought that you just said in there. It’s interesting, someone showed some photos of Olympic athletes from I think like the 40s and 50s, compared to now.
And in the 40s and 50s, basically, all of the athletes look relatively similar. They were all just decently fit people versus the genetic freaks we have on every end of the spectrum now that are seemingly tailored to specific sports. Like if there was an Olympic female gymnast and an Olympic basketball player, and they died at the same time, and they were the only two fossils that anybody found in 10,000 years, people would assume those were two totally different species. And it didn’t used to be like that. There was, I think, like a more fundamental level of fitness for people who engaged in sports. And now it’s just gotten crazy, crazy.
Peter Francis:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I guess that wasn’t a question. Well, I’m going to ask you a fun pointed question. So I imagine that every now and then you interact with other human beings, and they ask you what you do, and you start to say something, and they’ll make some comment about some new padded, motion controlled, heel elevated shoe, or they talk about the vapor fly or some other giant cushioned thing. How do you talk about footwear, either to people who probably who are asking for academic reasons, versus people who are genuinely curious. I mean, how do you engage in this conversation that I have on a daily basis with hundreds of people.
Peter Francis:
I suppose a few things, if I’m talking to runners, which is often what I’m doing, if I do a public engagement type talk, I’ll generally tell them the three criteria I use are life, cheap, and comfortable. Because when I did eventually overcome 10 years of injury and run my personal bests, the shoes I was training in were, if I wasn’t running barefoot on the golf course, or around the grassy park, I was, I was running in light, comfortable and cheap footwear. So I wasted a lot of money for a lot of years before I knew all this stuff. So that’s the advice I give to runners.
And then if someone more generally is interested in changing their footwear, whether it’s up or down, or whatever, I generally tend to say, “Well, sure, but take your time.” Because if you change your load in either direction there’s some good evidence coming out to say that you’ll have problems. And I mean, intuitively, people notice if you do circuit training for the first time in a long time, you’re sore. So if you change anything quickly, you’ll have a problem.
Steven Sashen:
So I’m going to play devil’s advocate, or more accurately, I’m going to pretend to be the kind of person that I have conversations with on an ongoing basis. So let’s do it this way. Well, but Peter, I need arch support. I mean, my doctor told me.
Peter Francis:
Well, I think it depends, I think, if you grow up habitually barefoot, as some of the boys we studied in New Zealand do, then you’ll probably have well developed direction and very strong foot muscles, in which case that you probably won’t need arch support. So then you get into saying, well, are we looking at prevention and long term rehabilitation of a foot? Or are we looking at symptom management?
And it’s not impossible that a doctor would be trying to manage a particular symptom using an arch support, but again, you’d have to see the individual and know what the situation was and what the long term management strategy was, and I suppose what background they came from in the first place.
Steven Sashen:
And also, I mean, clearly I need cushioning. Because running, you put all that force in the ground, so I need a lot of cushioning.
Peter Francis:
Again, I’d probably answer that in a similar way. If you’ve grown up barefoot it would seem to us that you can run just fine without cushioning. If you have grown up with cushioning my own experience is that you can adapt to running and moving without cushioning. But again, you would need to adapt slowly.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and I also pronate. Well, this guy at the shoe store he put me on a treadmill, and he showed me that I pronate. So clearly, I needed those anti-pronation shoes, those motion control shoes.
Peter Francis:
Well, getting prescribed anything in a shoe store is not really… That’s very different to the medical professional in the first example, isn’t it? Yeah, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of evidence for the shoe store form of prescription. That’s not to say that there isn’t evidence for biomechanical assessment and subsequent gait retraining. I think there is some good evidence that muscles start to work a bit better with gait retraining, and that gait retraining can be part of an overall solution. But that’s not what happens in a shoe store.
Steven Sashen:
Well, then last but not least, so look, if this whole barefoot thing was so good how come we never see barefoot runners in the Olympics?
Peter Francis:
I think a few things there. That question is the challenge for science. And then another challenge for society in terms of we don’t have loads of data that can show us exactly the difference in injury incidence and prevalence between barefoot and shod runners and a small bit of data that is there suggests that we have less plantar fasciitis and less knee injuries in the barefoot group but we have more calf and achilles tendon strains in… Sorry, the other way around, less plantar fasciitis and less knee injuries in the barefoot group. But the barefoot runners do pick up more calf, achilles, strains, which is indicative of transitioning to that type of stride.
So until we get more clear data on that and how you manage transition, I think you’ll always have kind of muddy water between people who are a bit like me who are miraculously cured of plantar fasciitis and then other people who’ve jumped into it and strained a calf. And so you’ll have that sort of muddy water there in that respect. The other thing is society in terms of… I ran for many years on a variety of public spaces, on grass, even up to 20 miles barefoot at sub three hour marathon pace. However, I was always conscious that particularly when I was in the UK, more so, in New Zealand, it’s sort of culturally acceptable to be barefoot. But when I was in the UK and Ireland running around the park barefoot, it’s not really the done thing. And again, when I was in New Zealand in the equivalent of Tesco, I’m just trying to think what the US, Walmart maybe or I don’t know.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, there’s not a grocery store that spans the US. They have different names. Including my favorite name of any grocery store ever. In the southeast, there’s a grocery store chain called Piggly Wiggly.
Peter Francis:
Okay, well, a grocery store is a good way of summarizing them all. So in New Zealand you can be in the grocery stores doing your shopping with no shoes on, I found, in Auckland. Whereas you couldn’t do that here. So I think in terms of realizing the benefits of being barefoot in an urban modern environment, minimalist footwear can potentially play a role. Because I feel society, I just can’t imagine a society, a westernized society whereby walking around barefoot is the norm.
Steven Sashen:
Actually, I can change that… First of all, and scene. But yes, you can right away, go to any beach town, anywhere on the coast.
Peter Francis:
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
This is the thing that’s so funny to me is like, it’s totally normal at a beach town. But as soon as you get away from the coast, that’s when it suddenly becomes abnormal. I’ve gotten to the point, I spend so much time barefoot, I walk into some stores, and if I’m wearing shoes they’re surprised. But you’re right. I mean, this societal pressure, the normative pressure to fit in is a huge piece of it undeniably.
And by the way, backing up to all your answers to my fake objections. I applaud you for really landing on the science. Where it’s true we have… Anecdotes do not equal data. But when there’s so much anecdotal information, you can’t ignore it. And I hope that someday, we have both the time and resources, financial in other words, to do the kind of longitudinal studies that would be required to, I mean, frankly, put an end to the conversation and just land where we frankly think it would land.
But to your point about the calf and achilles strains, I’ve written a couple of things saying that those are totally optional if you transition slowly and attentively. And if you… I have a whole theory about neurological underpinnings for learning new movement patterns. So as an undergraduate I did research on cognitive aspects of motor skill acquisition. And then I have this weird background of biofeedback and just having a knack for picking up physical skills. I was an all-American gymnast, which learning to do gymnastic skills is a very unusual thing. Because there’s no approximation for almost any of those in the real world. There’s nothing in the real world that prepares you to do a double twisting, double backflip.
And learning how to do something like that is flat out nuts. But anyway, my basic theory is that there’s different levels of sort of neuroplasticity and brain function that put people in one of four categories. So one group of people, they are so unaware of what their body feels, I mean, if you ask them if they’re hungry, they’ll say yeah, and you go, “How do you know?” Expecting, they’re going to say, “Well, I got a thing in the pit of my stomach, I feel kind of empty.” And they’ll just look at you and go, “What are you talking about? I’m hungry.” And you go, “But how do you know you’re hungry.” They go, “Well, I don’t know I’m hungry. It’s lunchtime.”
So some people, if you ask them to run barefoot, they can rip up their feet. And they don’t even know they did it because their brain map has so de-differentiated, they literally don’t feel anything. There’s no connection between their feet and their brain in any meaningful way. And it seems that those people just need to start just walking around barefoot, getting some stimulation, waking up that neural pathway again.
The next group of people, they can tell if it hurts, but they have bad proprioceptive skills. So these are the people who will email me and say that they wore out the heel of my shoe and so the rubber needs to be changed. And I say well, “You’re over striding, and heel striking.” Because it’s just physics, friction creates abrasion. And so the only way to create that abrasion is with excessive horizontal force applied to that spot. And then they’ll send me a video and they are over striding and heel striking.
But I’ve literally had people look at videos of themselves doing that thing, and then say to me “Yeah, but I don’t do that.” And you go, “Dude, it’s a video you sent me of you doing what you do.” But so they need more video feedback to get reality in line with what they’re doing. And then third group of people, they can tell if it hurts, they have decent proprioceptive skills, and you can give them some cues to speed up the process and possibly reduce the chances of injury by suggesting things like instead of pushing off the ground by plantar flexing your ankle, or plantar flexing your foot that you want to think about lifting your foot off the ground so you’re not putting excessive force in your calf and your Achilles. But you can use cues for that.
And then the fourth group of people, they’re just naturals, they figure it out but their problem is they have so much fun, that they get tired. And that’s a slow progressive thing that you don’t notice. And they revert to one of those previous levels. Now, the problem with my theory is I don’t have any way for having people self-assess, and then know what to do to move up the chain, if you will. Any thoughts because I’ve been working on this one for a while?
Peter Francis:
How to categorize existing movement strategies and sensations? And then how to monitor progress via intervention with those four groups?
Steven Sashen:
That was good. Yes, that’s exactly it.
Peter Francis:
Yeah. So you would probably do that in the form of a research study where you would have certain physical, perhaps even psychological markers, to describe the overall experience of a newly barefoot participant when they run on maybe different types of surfaces. You then collate that baseline information, and then you would design an intervention. And you would monitor changes and in the analysis control for which group they were categorized as, that would be sort of off the top of my head.
Steven Sashen:
That’s really interesting. Well, of course, what’s fascinating is that this would not only be relevant for people transitioning to barefoot running, but this could be relevant for people, backing up to what you were saying earlier about people who, they’re sitting all day, they’re sedentary, and now they’re going out to move in, and they’re still just carrying the same movement patterns through. There’s some people who will do that some people who won’t do that. And if we can identify the differences between those two groups, those cohorts, maybe there would even be a way of helping people who are running in regular shoes have better moving patterns.
It’s funny, I’ve seen a whole bunch of people lately, when I’m heading out to the track, who have great running form, and their forefoot and midfoot landers, their heel will barely touch the ground, not saying your heel should stay off the ground. But I mean, that’s just what they do. They’re natural forefoot runners, and yet they’re still in big, thick, padded elevated heel shoes. And I’m thinking “Why? The way you run, you don’t need that, but they still do that.” And so I’m just perplexed by that.
But suffice it to say what you just described is an interesting thing. Then the magic question becomes, how do we then turn that into some sort of self assessment, so that people can figure out who they are without having to go into a research lab, and then know what to do to progress. Because I’m not good at history, I’m really good at statistics. And I’m really good at movement, but I’m not really good at organizing my desk. So we have these natural propensities for things and people have different propensities for movement, but we don’t like to think of ourselves that way.
Or I’ll tell you the one we don’t like to think of ourselves as. As a sprinter my VO2 max is pretty low. And I’m totally non responsive to VO max training. So I can do long, slow distance and stuff all day long. And my VO2 max just does not change. I’m a VO2 max non-responder. People don’t like the idea that there’s certain boxes that you might put them in. Even though once you recognize what box you’re in, it opens up a whole new world for doing the thing that you fit with, instead of trying to do the thing that you don’t fit.
I always tried distance running repeatedly. And I never understood why I couldn’t do it. It made no sense to me. And to your point about persistence, endurance hunters, this is a lightly comedic argument that I had with Dan Lieberman at Harvard, where he said we were all persistence endurance hunters, and we just would stalk down our prey. I said, “No, no, I’m not one of those guys.”
And he said, “Well, you just didn’t train that way.” I said, “No, no, no, that’s what all you slow. People say, I was always the fastest kid that people knew. And the difference between persistence, endurance, and sprinters, you guys would slowly chase down the gazelle. And then my guys would show up, and we’d lift it up and carry it home. Because me and my friends deadlift three times our body weight, and you guys can barely do push ups.” And he was like, “Oh, maybe.”
But anyway, to the point of finding some way of identifying where you are on some kind of spectrum, and how that would relate to what you might need to do any sort of movement better than you’ve been doing it, let alone well, or perfectly. If we’re going to talk about injury, I think that’s kind of the holy grail is people coming to grips with figuring out who they are and what they are and what works with those two things.
Peter Francis:
I think two things. The first one is you do the original study, you then look to apply it. And again, as soon as you look to apply it, you introduce the variable of the individual. So I think you can definitely make positive suggestions for people. But the individual is key when it comes to application. Science is great, until you have to apply it to the individual, then you need to use your nuance to do that.
Now it can be done, you get the original data, even the way I wrote an article that can be understood by the media, you can do that kind of thing. And then you, maybe over time, develop criteria. In other fields they’ve done that. Second thing is, if you want a real quick, fast answers to how someone can start looking at these things, it’s to get out of their head and into their body. So I think because we’re bombarded with technology, news, information, medical practitioners, diagnosis scans, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There’s a lot of ancient wisdom that points to getting into your body. So I’ve had friends come barefoot running with me before, and I will run with me for a while in the shoes, and then we’ve got about 10 minutes left, and I want to introduce into the concept, I get them to pop off their shoes. They talk about things like their childhood growing up on the beach, and things are intrinsically feel good. So what I would say to anybody is take your shoes off, walk across the grass, or sand or whatever, and ask yourself how it feels. And if it feels terrible, then don’t do it. I mean, if you want to be really simplistic about it. If it feels all right, then do a little bit more and see how you get on.
Steven Sashen:
No, the example you gave us is literally one of the things that I say all the time. Is like remember being a kid on a warm summer day, you go outside, you kick off your shoes, you feel the grass between your toes, or the sand under your feet or the water around your ankles. And you just played for fun. And you can have that experience now. I mean, that’s the thing is, I say you can spot a barefoot runner from 100 meters because there’s smiling. And it’s a completely different demeanor when you’re out there and connecting with the ground underneath you, instead of just trying to get over it and get to either the end or just back in a loop. I think we need to have some better system where you could go for a run where you didn’t have to make a loop. I think having that thing where you have to turn around and come back gets in the way of fun. We got to work on that one too.
Peter Francis:
It can be a challenge because a lot of my later running career was dependent on medium firm sand or grass surface.
Steven Sashen:
Right. There’s this one track that I practice on where there’s just a whole bunch of little kids like three to five years old. And it is so much fun being out on that track because their parents are playing soccer in the infield, and they’re literally running, and they’re smiling, they’re giggling, they’re playing, they never run in a straight line, they stop when they get tired. They start again the moment they’re not tired, they have perfect form. They never seem to get out of breath.
I mean, it’s just my favorite thing in the world to watch. And I go that’s what we’re trying to reclaim. It’s sort of a sad thing that running became the thing you do to get in shape instead of the thing you do for fun, or to get from here to there, or it’s become… My line is like it’s a shame that we work out, which we often do indoors, which also makes no sense, instead of having other metaphors and other language for that activity that would make it seem more engaging to begin with.
Peter Francis:
Yeah, I agree. Natural movement, nature, good food, exercise, positive social connections. It’s all what’s kind of going down at the moment.
Steven Sashen:
It’s sort of the shame, the whole obstacle course racing and Spartan runs and all those things Color Runs, things that tried to make it more fun. They had a nice really fast rise, but now they’re having a really fast fall. And not just because of COVID. Prior to COVID, there was a lot of struggle there. I thought that was a really wonderful way of getting people to be more active in a way that was fun and was social and did still have some competitive components and some challenge, but you didn’t really need to engage with that. I’m hoping that something continues or emerges, that continues that thread of just making it interesting and entertaining and enjoyable, independent of the idea of working.
Peter Francis:
It’s funny you mentioned that the obstacle course type event. I’d finished competitive running about almost a year when last October, I did one of those for the first time, and it was a lot of fun and I realized I was doing okay in it, which brought the competitor back out in me. And I won the race, but I ruptured my Achilles at the finish line. I was minimalist when I did it. But I hadn’t been doing a lot of running for quite a while and I guess getting into your 30s, et cetera, et cetera.
Steven Sashen:
Oh stop whining, I just turned 58. Cut that shit out.
Peter Francis:
I just recovered from it now. But I do wonder whether if I hadn’t grown up in shoes, and if I hadn’t spent the first half of my running career in a cushioned trainer, whereby my calf and Achilles was held in a shortened position, whether I might have got a bit longer out of it, I think that perhaps why my barefoot running did a lot for me, and certainly helped an awful lot. I reckon the capacity of my tendon was limited to a certain period of time.
Steven Sashen:
Maybe, or it may just have been one of those things. Because sometimes you step in a weird way. So here’s one for you. And maybe this is related, I mean, not your specific situation. So I have, for the sake of people who get this, I have a grade two L5-S1 spondylolisthesis. Or the simpler way I can put it is I’ve got a slightly broken spine. And if you look at an X-ray or an MRI and look for my sciatic nerve, you can barely find it coming out of my spine.
And so my doctors can’t figure out how I’m running at all. And I do get this occasional symptom that I refer to as butt Tourette’s, where it feels like someone took a vibrating electric needle and stuck it in, right where my hamstring and my glute hit, and then they vibrate really quickly. Now I’m actually getting it on the front of my hip every now and then.
But anyway, point being when I first got back into sprinting, and I was getting a lot of calf injuries and mostly calf injuries, what it felt like, and I think this is actually legit, is it felt like the signal for my muscles to work in the proper sequence wasn’t getting to the right place in the right time. It felt like for example, I’d land and rather than… My foot wasn’t ready to be landing on the ground, even though I thought it was ready to land on the ground. So it was applying force in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that was causing some of the strains.
So you look at… I’m remembering Tyson Gay former world champion 100 meter runner, 200 meter runner from the US. And there was at one time in a race where his hamstring just exploded. I mean, these are high level athletes who are doing the same movement pattern over and over and over. But sometimes, especially at high speed just something goes awry with the signal getting the right place at the right time, or you step an inch in the wrong direction, you’re putting force and the wrong place.
In other words, I get where you’re going. But I want to suggest that in the best of all possible worlds, it’s still possible to get injured. I mean, I’ve had tiny little tweaks in the last 10 years that maybe put me out for a week or two because, especially again, I’m 58 now. So for the last 10 years, recovering just takes longer. Something that would have been a couple of days, when I was your age, is now a couple of weeks.
But by and large, I was thinking about this on the track yesterday, actually. I’ve been totally fearless and completely uninjured for two years. And the thing before that was I had a little weird hamstring pull that had that same feeling of like my spine got in the way, or my compromised spine got in the way of the signals getting in the right place at the right time. Oh, well it wasn’t a big deal. It was annoying, but it wasn’t a big deal.
Peter Francis:
I should have said that I had the tendinopathy for six years prior to the rupture, so I’m pretty sure I wasn’t one of those.
Steven Sashen:
But even that’s an interesting thing, because tendinopathy… Have you ever had prolotherapy? Do you know about prolo?
Peter Francis:
No.
Steven Sashen:
So prolotherapy they basically take a needle, typically a very long needle, or most people know of PRP, platelet rich plasma therapy, which is basically prolotherapy delivered by people who don’t know how to do prolotherapy and they’re using ultrasound instead. But it’s the same basic idea, the plasma and the platelet part is probably hand waving and not necessary or that seems to be the case. But basically, you’re selectively re-injuring the tendon or ligament so that it will lay down new tissue.
Because things like tendinopathy, it’s really… There’s so little blood going into the tendons, it’s really hard to initiate a healing response, especially since your body isn’t necessarily designed to do anything other than get you moving enough that you can get out of the way or not become food. It’s certainly not designed to get you back into high performance or fighting shape. And so this is an intervention that can be helpful for doing that.
So yeah, tendinopathy could definitely have been a causative factor that arguably could have been addressed with some intervention that might have been helpful. But yeah, that’s starting out in a bad spot to begin with, doesn’t help. Yeah, you should have opened with that. But yeah, it’s funny, but even with that, when I think about the little injuries that I’ve gotten, that’s the part that I find most interesting. Is after I start to feel better is how long it takes until I feel fearless. Until I’m willing to go all out, till I’m not thinking about it any longer. And I find that psychological phenomenon really interesting because of course, it’s imperceptible. It goes from a little fear, a little less fear, a little less fear, to then suddenly realizing, “Oh, it’s been months since I’ve been afraid.”
Peter Francis:
No brain, no pain.
Steven Sashen:
Well, oh, gosh, the no pain, no pain is the best. I mean, that’s another thing, like we came up with this idea that pain is somehow valuable, which it’s become… There’s this whole, like martyrdom syndrome, going along with fitness and exercise.
Peter Francis:
That’s a whole nother podcast.
Steven Sashen:
That is a whole other podcast. Well, actually, I’m going to leave on this question. When people talk about the new Vaporfly, when that comes up in conversation. Do you have thoughts and responses about what seemingly is or isn’t happening with the new thing, it’s not even new of just like hyper padded shoes?
Peter Francis:
I think it’s definitely performance enhancing.
Steven Sashen:
Do you? What’s the mechanism by which it does that?
Peter Francis:
I think the data shows a clear improvement in running economy.
Steven Sashen:
Pause there. So most of the studies that I know came from Roger Kram, right down the street from me, who showed an improvement in VO2 max. But after his second study, where he tried to figure out why that was happening, where he couldn’t come to any conclusion, he said, but an improvement in VO2 max doesn’t equate to performance. Which is true, because otherwise, we would just measure people’s we got to max before a race and give out medals.
Peter Francis:
Yeah, but if you follow athletics you’ll see there’s a significant change in performances across the board.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, but question again, the question is why. If it’s not an improvement in VO2 Max, what would it be?
Peter Francis:
Oh, well, the scientist who can speak to this better than me, but there’s a couple of things. There’s the foam, and there’s the carbon fiber plate. And what they both seem to do in conjunction is a bit like… The trouble with shoes before the Vaporfly is you can’t get the response for them because it’s a timing issue. You apply force for a certain time when you first come into contact with the ground. So if you want to enhance performance, you’ve got to get something that can deform and respond quick enough, otherwise you lose the effect.
So if you think about a trampoline. You’ve got to apply a lot of force for quite a long time to them to then get the restitution. So Nike seem to have come up with something between the… As I said, I’m not really a shoe expert, to be honest. But the foam and carbon plate thing seems to be able to give something back to the runner. If you look at them in the context of injury, that’s a completely different thing.
But if you look at it solely in terms of performance, I don’t think you can really doubt. But there’s a bigger issue there around… There’s a lot of issues really around this sort of concept of technological doping. Whether if you look at the swimsuits that were banned, whether it represents the spirit of the sport, whether someone can really have a personal best and see it as their own versus performance enhancing technology. There’s a whole load of different debates around that. But if you just ask the simple question of, can this shoe change performance? I think the answer is yes.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to suggest a couple other possibilities that would argue that. So one is I’m going to suggest there’s a significant placebo effect, that people think they’re going to run faster. And if we use Tim Noakes’s idea of the central governor theory that your brain is basically shutting you down in some semi or subconscious way that you’re reframing some of those signals and basically expect to run faster and push through in ways that you necessarily didn’t, especially if you have more people who are now suddenly wearing this shoe and you expect they’re going to run faster, you’re going to be a little more competitive, perhaps.
Suffice to say a number of psychological components that are at play here. And then actually, I did a chat with Geoffrey Gray from Heeluxe. His theory is that the additional height isn’t effectively increasing stride length and the light weight is making it so that people are able to keep their stride frequency and they just get this artificial increase in stride length, which would mean that there’s fewer steps per whatever. And so therefore a little more efficient, a little faster.
The carbon fiber plate thing, Simon Bartold made a comment. He said it acts like a… How did he say it? He said it’s a… Come on, come on, come on, not a spring, used another… A lever, he said it was a lever. It was getting you extra spring. And I said, “Well, that doesn’t work from physics because a lever needs a fulcrum and there’s no fulcrum.” Back to your trampoline idea that lever in that case, or the fulcrum would be everywhere that trampoline is attached to the…
Peter Francis:
I think they’re losing less energy from the metatarsal heads with the carbon fiber plate.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that was actually one idea that Roger Kram had was that basically the metatarsals and also just in the ankle, the shoe basically allowed you to not use your body as much. So you’re saving a little effort because you’re not having to use your body as much. But to your point about the speed of recovery of the material. A, you have to be the right weight and the right speed to take advantage of that, and B, of course the foam’s going to start breaking down really quickly. And then that benefit will start to disappear quickly as well.
But the magic question still becomes if we had someone who is a really accomplished barefoot runner, at that same level, would we see the same effect? I’m just iffy. And I’m iffy for no other reason, then no one has come up with a single testable theory about why people are running faster in that shoe. And in the absence of something like that, including the absence of that from Nike and then from everyone else who’s now making similar shoes, something seems awry. If you can’t come up with a really simple explanation that you could then test. It makes me wonder if there’s something else at play beyond the quote unquote, technology.
Peter Francis:
Yeah, perhaps. And as you said, it’s going to be massively influenced by individuals.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Anyway, someday we will have answers to this, suffice it to say right now… And look, as you know runners, professional athletes or highly accomplished athletes. And I will include myself in that as a multi-sport all American, we are superstitious, we are afraid of someone having an edge, we’re simultaneously afraid of trying new things and want to try new things to get an edge. So there’s all these other things at play. And a point you made before what a high level athlete does and what a armchair athlete does are very different things and to try to extrapolate from 105 pound Kenyan running 13 miles an hour for two hours to a 300 pound someone running a half marathon for the first time, having not run in 20 years it’s a bit of a stretch.
And yet that’s how they sell those products, is “Look what that guy did, don’t you want to do with that guy did even though you’re nothing like that guy?”
Peter Francis:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
My rant. Anyway. So I’m going to try and give you the last word, which is, what thoughts do you have… I’m going to kind of come back in a way to something else we said before, what thoughts do you have about what it’s going to take to make natural movement something that… We had a lot of buzz in 2009 to 2011, 2012. And it got a little hyperbolic and really hurt things in a way because people were claiming that there were promises being made, that were not being supported by the research that weren’t actually things that most of us who were running barefoot were actually saying.
In fact, backing up to Roger Kram, he was researching VO2 max and barefoot runners compared to shot runners. And I said to him, “No one ever said that you had better VO2 max when you’re running barefoot. And besides the people you were studying were not accomplished barefoot runners, they were people who’d done some barefoot training.” But anyway, point being as things got crazy, the promises got way overblown to possibly.
And now things have been coming back. What we’re seeing in our business is just a… We’ve always seen this, the interest in natural movement has just continued to go up and up and up, no matter what people said was happening, where people said barefoot is dead. Not what we see by any stretch of the imagination. But what do you think it’s going to take to get to maybe a critical mass, where at the very least, natural movement is seen as a really viable alternative that people should explore, let alone, potentially, the benchmark by which we look at things and everything else is an intervention off of natural? Do you know what I mean?
Peter Francis:
Yeah, so the answer is, I don’t know.
Steven Sashen:
Damn you, man.
Peter Francis:
What I will say is, I’ll tell you what we’re doing science-wise and then I’ll tell you what we’re doing running injury and stuff like that. So from the science perspective, what we’re trying to do is quantify the differences in musculoskeletal function, structure and function, between kids who develop with and without shoes, and how that impacts their movement skills as a result of that. And that’s in partnership with a minimalist footwear company Vivobarefoot.
So they are getting behind that project, they’re really interested in that. And also with Vivo, what we’ve got is another project that looks at adults who have conditions already like knee osteoarthritis and plantar fasciitis to see is there any potential and barefoot activities or minimalist activities for the treatment of existing conditions? And the third part of the science is in adults who have grown up shod what sort of ways can we optimize transition to barefoot activities? So if somebody wants to take part in barefoot activities, what’s the dose? What’s the program that goes with it?
Irene Davis in Harvard’s got a really nice foot core program, those types of things. How do kids develop? How do their movement skills develop? How do they change if they’re in shoes, not in shoes? How can adults transition? If you already have conditions is there any potential for this type of stuff there. That’s what we’re investigating with the science. And then when it comes to running injuries, it’s a bit different, because that’s more my own work in terms of sort of, I take the science, but I also take 18 years as a runner, my experience as a clinician, and I try and get right into the nuance, get right into the gray, pull all the behavioral psychology and everything else all into one bucket.
And then I go to public forums, to runners and say, at the moment, this is why I think you’re getting injured. And this is what I think you need to do to not be injured. So those are the two strands that I’m putting most of my time into at the moment. The scientific questions, and then haven’t been through 12 years of injury, on and off, and then managed to run for three years and run some PBs, I’m trying to pull all that knowledge together, which comes from a lot of different sources, experiential, science, clinical, et cetera, into a sort of a usable thing. So that the talks I do, I can send you one after, they’re all about pulling it together into the simple language to be able to use.
Steven Sashen:
Back to the clinical part. What are you doing, especially on the people who are currently injured? And I’ll use the osteoarthritis in particular, what are you structuring that’s different than what Isabel Sacco did in Brazil, where she just put some minimalist shoes on a bunch of elderly women with knee osteoarthritis, and found that it went away?
Peter Francis:
Well, we’re doing a few things. The first part is looking at what is the attitude of clinicians
Steven Sashen:
Walk that way and find somebody if you can.
Peter Francis:
We’re going to try and get a sense of what clinicians think about even just barefoot activities in a clinical setting, in rehab. We’re going to see what they think first, and then we’re potentially going to look at changes in biomechanics and pain as a result of different footwear conditions. That’s where we’re going with that one.
Steven Sashen:
And for the kids, obviously, any way, we can help. We’re happy to help. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Christine Pollard at Oregon State. She’s been doing some research on kids. And basically, I don’t know if I’m speaking out of school when I say this. I’ll just describe the gist of what she’s looking at. Kids running in a motion controlled shoe versus barefoot versus in a pair of our shoes. And just looking at the differences biomechanically and kinematics. And I haven’t talked to her in a while to see what the latest news from the study is. But the preliminary information, let’s just say it was very compelling and interesting.
Peter Francis:
Yeah, I’m sure it is. And Karsten Hollander’s done a lot of nice work in that space as well, yeah. Some good data.
Steven Sashen:
Well Irene Davis, her line, she goes, “If we just get kids living in minimalist footwear when they need footwear, in 20 years, we won’t be treating adults for the problems that we currently treat adults for.” I hope she’s right. And I have reason to think that she is.
Peter Francis:
Yeah, my suspicion on what I observed in the kids in New Zealand would be that that’s definitely a possibility. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Lorraine Moller who was one of Arthur Lydiard’s athletes. She was an Olympic medalist and marathon she was, I think… I don’t remember if she won Boston and New York. She’s a world champion marathoner. She said, she never really wore shoes to train until she came to America and got sponsorship. And she said and that was the first time I ever got injured. And it was really interesting. Lorraine’s a hoot. She’s a dear, dear woman. Anyway, Peter, this has been a total, total treat. I’m so glad that we actually finally crossed paths. We’ll talk after this about more ways that we can hopefully be helpful for you both personally and professionally. But in the meantime, if people want to find out more about what you’ve been doing, or if they want to be helpful in some way, how can they do that?
Peter Francis:
So I have a blog, PeterFrancis.blog, and I right under the tab Running from Injury. There’s about 50 blogs on everything you can do to not be injured as a runner. There’s podcast interviews on air, there’s a recorded talk, there’s all sorts of stuff there. And mainly, I release any of the science we do on Twitter. And that’s just @PeterFrancis_ie. And yeah, that’s where you can get all the stuff.
Steven Sashen:
Awesome. Well, thank you again. And for everyone else, thank you, obviously, or once again, if you want to find out more about Peter’s stuff you know where to go. And you want to find out more about all the other conversations we’ve been having with other people about natural movement. I’m still waiting to have someone who thinks that I’m completely full of it and have a knockdown drag out with them. That’ll be fun.
But go to www.Jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find all the previous episodes you’ll find all the places you can find us on YouTube and on Facebook and on Instagram, and all the places that podcasts are served. And you can leave comments and reviews and do all those things you know how to do, subscribe and share et cetera. Most importantly also, if you have any recommendations or questions drop me an email. [email protected]. And as always, until next time, have fun and live life feet first.