Fix Your Calves, Fix Your Feet
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 134 with Butch Phelps
Butch Phelps is founder of The Muscle Repair Shop and the Stretch n Release Technique. His mission is to help you regain the freedom of movement you once had and age more pain-free. He created the “Stretch n’ Release Technique” after 15 years of studying Aging Sciences, Neuromuscular Massage, Active Isolated Stretching, and how the brain affects our ability to release our muscles. This was out of necessity to solve his own pain, more than just pure education.
Butch’s patients benefit from the release of pain through guided stretch sessions, daily homework, and instructional videos to support a healthy stretching habit.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Butch Phelps about how fixing your calves will fix your feet.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– Why you must use your muscles to make your bones work.
– How going barefoot can help your muscles get stronger and take pressure off joints.
– Why having tight calves leads to back pain.
– How not using your calves properly will force you to use your hips and thighs to walk.
– How the brain is more emotional than physical and what the means for your body.
Connect with Butch:
Guest Contact Info
Links Mentioned:
musclerepairshop.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
I like to say that feet are your foundation, but if you’re going to build a house or something, you have the foundation. Then you have the next layer and that’s just as important. What is that layer when it comes to your feet and ankles? It may not be what you think and what you need to do with it for optimal health may definitely not be what you think. We’re going to find out 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.
But now we’re going to move up a little bit, and it’s also where we look at the propaganda, the mythologies, and sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, walk, hike, play, do yoga, Crossfit, Dance Dance Revolution, Sim racing, anything you can do on your feet. To do that enjoyably and efficiently, effectively, did I say enjoyably? Of course I did. It’s a trick question because if you’re not having fun you’re not going to keep doing it, so find a way to make it fun.
I’m Steven Sashen from Xeroshoes.com, your host of The Movement Movement podcast, and we call it that because we’re creating a movement, more about that in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. In fact, if you want to find out more, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. There’s no membership fee. There’s no nothing. There’s no secret handshake.
It’s just that’s where you can find previous episodes all the way, so you can find the podcast in all your favorite places and how you can find us online at other places, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know what to do when you get there. Review, like us, give us a thumbs up, click the bell icon on YouTube. In short if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. Let us jump in and find out what is the next floor, if you will, once we get from your feet. Butch, do me a favor. Tell people who you are and what the hell you’re doing here.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, my name is Butch Phelps. I’m a functional massage therapist, and many times when people hear that they think well, you’re doing massages, but I really focus on the mechanics of the human body from the muscles perspective. I also have a degree in aging sciences, so I’ve studied how the human body ages over time from age 25 to death. It’s interesting as I put these things together how the muscles can control so much of the aches and pains, so I’ve spent the last 20 years working on my own body originally, because I had severe back pain at 40 years old and was able to solve that, solve the problems and stop the pain. I’ve been teaching people ever since.
Steven Sashen:
I love the first thing you said about muscles and movement. Have you ever heard Joe Rogan’s comment about what fighting is?
Butch Phelps:
I have not.
Steven Sashen:
His line is fighting is the art of using your muscles to throw your bones at people.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly. That’s exactly true because there’s a scientific law. I think it’s called Wolff’s Law that says that the bones follow the muscles, and what people forget is that without the muscles, the bones would just kind of fall to the floor like a dishrag. I mean, think about a quadriplegic. You see what I’m saying? When people talk about their bones hurt, many times it’s the muscles creating that.
Steven Sashen:
It’s amazing. You gave me a funny flashback. I was a street performer, oh my God, holy crap, 40 years ago, and after I was done, I did a lot of tumbling on the street and a bunch of other things and my knees were killing me. I went to various doctors and they would put me on a Cybex machine or something and I would max the thing out. You can’t max out a Cybex machine, but I had crazy strength and they were saying well, you’re seemingly fine. I went, did you notice I could barely walk in here? They never understood that what was going on was something in the muscular system where even though I was strong, I wasn’t strong enough in the right way and so things were out of whack, and I figured it out somehow and was fine ever since.
Butch Phelps:
Well, and sadly they run into the same thing on a daily basis, and what happens is understanding that the muscles cross the joints. In other words all the muscles on the lower leg crosses the knee, the upper leg crosses the knee, and when those muscles get tight from walking, from thinking, because muscles are very emotional, when they get tight like that it puts pressure on the joint, squeezes out the synovial fluid, which is like a WD-40.
That’s a cushioning agent and a lubricant in the knee, and when you do that now you start to hit bone on bone into the knee and damaging the cartilage in here. I work with doctors all the time and it’s like when we’re talking about it, and the same thing in my background and education, nobody really teaches us about that mechanical impact of the muscles from the movements that we do. Most of it, if you look at peer reviewed studies on the muscles, most of it is about strength training.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. You reminded me. Dr. Isabel Sacco in Brazil, she did a study. She took a bunch of women who were 65-plus who had knee osteoarthritis and put them in a super cheap, minimalist shoe, and over time the amount of pain went down. The amount of medication they were taking for pain went down. For many of them the knee osteoarthritis went away, and I asked her why do you think that happened?
She goes, “The muscular system got stronger in the right way, took the pressure off the joints,” and then we were joking. It’s like when they do research on knee osteoarthritis with animals, they’ll take a rabbit, extend its leg, hit its heel so it’s putting force into the knee joint until it gets arthritis, and then they’ll test whatever drug they’re testing. But the control is the original rabbit where they just stop hitting its damn foot.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
Then it gets better over time.
Butch Phelps:
Well, and the thing to keep in mind, and I just read an article by Dr. Ritten the other day in the newspaper, and he was talking about our training is about how to alleviate the pain, not find the cause.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah. That’s how I was taught.
Steven Sashen:
You reminded me of another one. There’s a sprinter/sprinting coach. This is so embarrassing. His name is not popping into my head. It will at some point. Anyway, out of the UK, he calls strength training the thing you do after you’re done working out to get your body back in balance.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
That’s it. It’s like you’re getting it all out of whack when you’re sprinting or running a marathon, just getting it back in shape.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly, because again, when you look at the mechanics of the leg, the mechanics of the foot going all the way up into the hip, you’ve got so many stabilizing muscles around those joints that in a particular sport, and when I was younger I played football, basketball and baseball, but in a particular sport you get into a routine and a habit of going one direction, and you shift and you go to a different sport, which you realize is you feel like you’re out of shape even though you’re not. But you’re not used to using the muscles in that way, so when I went from football, which was pushing and shoving people, to jumping on a basketball court, I was using two very different sets of muscles, you see, and that’s exactly right.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it’s a thing. As a sprinter people say, well, in the winter you could cross train. I went no. There’s no carryover from riding a bike or whatever else to sprinting, so no. We don’t think about it. We think about people just being in shape, but we don’t think about that motion specific or activity specific thing and the limitations that creates as well as the opportunities.
Butch Phelps:
Well, exactly right, especially up in the hips. On the outside of each of the hips are two muscles called tensor fasciae lataes, and those muscles, every time you take a step forward they expand. As the leg comes back they contract. The thing is that depending on the movements that you have, one of those can go into a slight spasm and shift the pelvis slightly sideways and you’ll have massive back pain or you’ll have massive knee pain. This is a muscle not much bigger than that.
It’s just a tiny muscle, but those are the kind of things that people don’t fully understand, so when you get into the calves where you’re talking about four muscles, you’re talking about three muscles in the hamstrings, when you’re doing something like golf, for instance, or tennis, you’re going to end up with back pain when they’re tight. I’ve never met a golfer with back pain that didn’t have tight calves and tight hamstrings.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Butch Phelps:
The thing is the way we stretch them, where we put a heel down on the floor or we lean against a slam board or against a wall, or if we’re doing our hamstrings, we lay on our back with both legs flat out and we pick one leg up, we’re not stretching those muscles. We’re doing strength training exercises because the brain plays a huge role with that, you see.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, I’ve got so many things to think about. First of all, we’ve already hinted about what I hinted about at the top of the call, which is what’s the floor above the foundation, if you will, in that horrible analogy, past your foot? It’s going to be the calf, so we’re going to talk about the calf. But I want to put a bookmark on this one. There’s someone else, I did have him on the podcast, Jon Call, aka Jujimufu. Juji is famous.
He’s a bodybuilder, strength trainer, and he’s famous for being on America’s Most Wanted and doing the splits between two chairs while holding Heidi Klum over his head. He and other people talk about flexibility as not being about stretching the muscles, but about strength. I want to talk about flexibility and strength, but let’s start with the one floor above the foundation. You hit number one on the elevator actually if you’re in Europe, and number two on the elevator if you’re here, so let’s dive into the calf and the importance thereof, and what people don’t understand about the calf. Continue.
Butch Phelps:
Okay, so if we start at that first level, we’re looking at a foot with 29 muscles, 26 bones, and 33 articulations. Now above that, coming from the calf, we have four calf muscles that make up the calf area on the back side of that lower leg. The calf muscles are responsible for the foot on the lateral supination or pronation of vertical-
Steven Sashen:
For you who are listening, for people who are listening, for supination and pronation, put your hand out flat and then just tilt it left or right like you’re pretending to be an airplane flying and you’re tilting left or right. It doesn’t matter which one’s pronation or supination because that’ll depend on which foot you’re looking at, so just know that that’s the lateral motion we’re talking about. All right.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly. Then the third thing that it does is rotation. When we’re rotating our body, we mostly think of our hips rotating. I’ve heard golfers talk about it, I’ve heard tennis players talk about it, baseball players talk about it, the rotation of the hips. But the problem is if the calf area has not been stretched properly, then what happens, the little rotating muscles in the hips overwork, fighting with the bigger muscles in the calves, causing back pain.
Now, the calves’ role when it comes to walking and what we do every single day, and this is where your shoes play a role, is that when the calves are stretched properly and the ankle can bend properly beyond the 90 degrees, what happens is that now when they push off, if the shoe can bend, if they push off with their foot, they’re going to push off with their toes. But if you watch most people walk with thicker sole shoes that don’t bend, they’re going to walk with the upper quadriceps, which is the front of the thighs. When the front of the thighs get tight, you’ll wake up tomorrow morning with a stiff low back almost every time.
Steven Sashen:
It’s so interesting. People don’t think about the role of certainly the quads or the hamstrings when it comes to back pain, but even moving up closer, they don’t realize what the hip is doing. They think it’s their back. Way back when I just started Xero Shoes, someone gave me an eBook and I wish I could find it, but organization is not my thing, that was basically all about getting rid of back pain, and it was all glute exercises.
Butch Phelps:
Yes. Yes, and so the lower back pain, and that’s what got me in trouble, and that’s how I got in this business, was that I had back pain so bad at 40, I’d just lost 105 pounds at 37, worked out like a fiend like everybody else, and I got so stiff and so tight that I had back pain that would literally drop me to my knees. I’d get out of my car, put my hands out to walk out of my car, and then grab the handles on my car door and pull me back up. Everybody kept looking at my back, but there wasn’t a problem there. What I found out was that my upper quads and the rotating muscles in my hips had hardened, and when they did, it tilted the pelvis forward, increasing the compression in my lower back.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly, so let’s go back to the calf for a bit. Let’s talk more, then, about what the calf’s doing from a rotational perspective, what the problems people might have that maybe they could self-diagnose this in some way, and what you’re actually doing with people to restore natural function.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly right, so my whole issue, back to what I was dealing with the back pain, literally started with my calves, because the calves didn’t move properly, it forced me to use my hips and my thighs to walk. If you watch most people walk, in fact most of my clients, they’ll always laugh because I’ll say to them watch your friends walk. When they walk across, look at one of their feet.
If you watch their foot in the typical shoe, it bends just around the toe area, but up around the arch area there’s no bend. There’s no give there so the ankle doesn’t bend, so the foot literally stays flat as they walk. But it forces them to walk with the front of their thighs, which are the quads, especially the upper part of it, and if you go even farther up the line, you’ll see their head is out in front of their chest. They’ll lead with their nose and not their belly button.
Steven Sashen:
I wonder if this is related. I’ve seen this a bunch of times. The research shows that the best way to engage the arch of the foot, for all the reasons that’s valuable, is landing sort of ball of your foot basically, mid-foot to the ball of your foot depending on how you’re doing it. Some people say well, can’t I just run like that in regular shoes?
I was actually watching someone on the trail this morning, and she was landing forefoot, but she’s in a shoe with a big thick heel, and so she’s not actually letting her Achilles stretch and provide all that rebound, spring-like action, so how does just being in a higher heeled shoe impact the calf in a way that then impacts all these other things you’re talking about?
Butch Phelps:
Perfect, so there’s a study that was done in 2018 out of Harvard by Dr. Daniel Lieberman, and he had the same guy on the treadmill that was running barefoot, he was running with minimalist shoes, and he was running with normal running shoes. What he found was, was that the thicker the heel on the shoe, the more we’ll get to the heel/toe type of a walk. Well, so when you have that heel/toe and you step down into the heel, because as soon as the heel hits the ground it stops you for that moment, and it drives your weight straight back up through your skeletal system.
Hitting where you’re hitting, right around the ball of the foot or actually just behind the ball of the foot there, that arch then flexes like a shock absorber, allows the articulations in the foot to literally give, to add cushion from the impact to the knee. Then the calf muscles, by allowing the ankle to bend more than 90 degrees, allows you then to use your muscles in your feet to push off with your toes into your next step.
Steven Sashen:
By the way, when we talk about letting the foot be more than 90 degrees, the idea is having your toes coming up towards your knees, not pointing your toes.
Butch Phelps:
Right. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. But that’s the thing is that, and when I got into this business I never really thought I’d get into feet and calves, but it sort of morphed into that, okay? Because I get a lot of people down here who are in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s with joint replacements. What you start to find out is that once you free those muscles, now all of a sudden they can go back to just about full range of motion. It’s amazing to watch them.
Steven Sashen:
Backing up a little bit, for people who want to self-diagnose about whether their calves are causing them problems, what could they do?
Butch Phelps:
There’s a couple of things. Number one is when you take a stride, and you walk, have someone to take a look at your ankles to see if they bend beyond 90 degrees. That’s the easiest way to do it. Number two, if you’re sitting on the floor and you have no one to watch you, take a yoga strap, a piece of rope or a towel, put it around the ball of your foot. Now as you’re sitting on the floor, have your hips and back against the wall so that one leg is straight out in front of you. Take that yoga strap or rope around the ball of your foot and just gently pull the toes back towards you.
What you’ll feel is a tightness up behind the knee, but more importantly, when you look at your ankle, you’ll see how little the foot actually moves from the ankle. That’ll tell you. The mistake that people make when they’re trying to stretch their muscles is that they want to pull as long as they can for as hard as they can because they think that the muscles are mad with them and want to fight with them.
It’s really their brain fighting with them, because the brain is designed to protect you and so once you pull for a long period of time and you create pain in that muscle, then what happens is the brain will contract the muscles, fighting with you and now you’re doing a bicep curl. What you want is you want the brain to, as you breathe out while you’re doing the stretch, relax the tension in the calf muscle, and as the brain sees that it can easily do that, release it after about a five to six second hold, and then come back again. What you’ll see is that the foot then will move just a tad farther than it did the first time because the brain is no longer afraid.
Steven Sashen:
Is it valuable to do, it’s not reciprocal inhibition, so you’ve got the towel around your foot? If you’re pushing your foot, trying to point your toe as hard as you can, and then release and then pull and stretch. What’s that called again?
Butch Phelps:
Okay, I can’t remember the name of that, but I understand what you’re talking about. The idea behind that is that as you push the toe downward, you’re contracting the calf muscle, which puts it into a form of fatigue. Then the fatigue allows it to relax, and the idea is now I can pull it back and it will relax. Here’s the problem. The muscles are more emotional than they are physical. The brain itself, if it doesn’t know that it can do that without pain, won’t let you do it.
That’s why your brain won’t let you jump off the side of a building without a parachute. For some of us, even with a parachute, my brain still won’t let me do that, okay? But the thing is that the brain then, as you start to stretch that muscle, the brain is anticipating there’s going to be pain because for most of us, the way we’ve always been taught about stretching is that we’re going to create pain. What we really want to do is release the tension in the muscle itself.
Steven Sashen:
Now I want to ask, actually, about reciprocal inhibition. In that case, you’d be instead of just passively stretching by pulling on the towel, you’d be actively pulling your toes towards your knees, so you’re actively dorsal flexing, so you’re using all those posterior muscles in your lower leg, the idea being that when you’re doing that, and doing that under a load as well. I mean, if you do that under a load, using the tibialis that way, then that could relax the calf as well because-
Butch Phelps:
No.
Steven Sashen:
Did you say no? Oh, interesting. Tell me more.
Butch Phelps:
No, because what will happen is, is when you-
Steven Sashen:
But I want to ask, sorry go ahead.
Butch Phelps:
When you tighten the tibialis anterior or the peroneus muscles in the shins themselves, if you tighten it trying to stretch the calf back out, what you’ll do is fatigue the shin muscles, which will wind up with a knee pain just below the kneecap. You’ve heard of shin splints?
Steven Sashen:
Yes.
Butch Phelps:
That’s what you get.
Steven Sashen:
The thing I’m going to toss in the question is there’s another friend of us, a guy named Ben Patrick. He’s known as the Knees Over Toes Guy, and he helped develop the first device to be able to do loaded exercises for the posterior tib.
Butch Phelps:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, anterior actually, so is their value in strengthening those muscles which typically don’t get any attention?
Butch Phelps:
Yes. Yeah. Absolutely there is, because you want to keep your muscles strong and you want to have the stamina so that you can walk as long as you want, or run as long as you want without having any injury. I always say to my clients think of stretching in strength training like gas and oil in your car. They do two very different things, but if you leave one out the car is going to stop. All right? The same thing happens in the body. You want the strength training so that a, you have the strength and the stamina to do all the things that you want to do in your life no matter what your age is, but at the same time if you don’t have the flexibility and the pliability in your body, now what happens is that you use part of that strength just to move from A to B.
Steven Sashen:
Right. We’ve done our test to see what our calf is able to do, and holy crap, I just had another flashback. Actually this is a reciprocal inhibition flashback that you will get a kick out of. When I got back into sprinting 15-ish years ago, I was getting injured all the time, and I pulled a calf muscle repeatedly. I just hadn’t thought of this until right now. I went and saw this one sports medicine guy, and he had me do the classic calf stretch. I’m facing the wall, I step back. I lean into the wall and see how far I can stretch. But then he was having me do the reciprocal inhibition, so while I’m stretching, trying to push my foot into the ground, my toes into the ground without lifting my heel off the ground, and then relaxing and stretching more. I got way, way far, like crazy far down, and then I couldn’t walk for a week.
Butch Phelps:
Right, right, because of the reciprocal inhibition.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that was my crazy thought. Anyway, so without doing something stupid like that, and my God, if I had a list of the number of stupid things I’ve done to my body in the name of trying to make it better. Anyway, so we’ve identified that there may be some calf tightness that we want to address, and again, just to reiterate, part of doing this is to take the pressure off of the hip and the upper thigh, which will then take pressure off the back as well. That’s our goal. What are we going to do, short of coming to see you to work on that calf?
Butch Phelps:
Absolutely. A couple things I’m going to do, and I’m going to set up a landing page. I’ve got a landing page set up that your listeners can go to actually see the videos of these stretches that I’m going to talk about. With the calf stretch, what we want to do with that is if you can sit on the floor, have your hips and back against the wall and one leg straight out in front of you, use something like a yoga strap, a rope a towel.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to pause right there. What’s the other leg doing?
Butch Phelps:
The other leg is just laying off to the side.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Got it.
Butch Phelps:
You can bend it; however, you feel comfortable there with it. Now, if someone can’t get on the floor, you can also do this on a hard-backed chair, like a dining room chair, with your foot up on an ottoman. You can do the same thing. The key to it is something solid on your back so that your back doesn’t go backwards. But you put that strap or that rope around the ball of your foot, and what you’re going to do is you’re going to pull the toes back towards you with your hands.
Do not use your leg muscles, but just use your hands. You’re going to breathe out as you pull your toes back. Let that tension relax for five seconds, let it go, and you’re going to repeat it 10 times. Now the five seconds, the reason for that is not to kick in the stretch reflex because once you hold it beyond five seconds then there’s pain. The brain will contract the muscle to get you out of the pain. The 10 time repetition is to allow the brain to see that I can do this and I didn’t die. It’s just a simple test.
Steven Sashen:
That’s because it’s the 11th one that kills you. We all know that.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly right, that’s exactly right. Then once you do the 10, keep the strap in the same place, but roll the foot inward, and when you do that, now as you pull the toes back, instead of feeling the stretch in the middle of the calf, you’re going to feel it to the outside of the calf. Again, you’re going to do it 10 times. Then you roll the foot outward, do the same thing again, but this time you’re going to feel it on the inside of the calf. Anyone who’s dealing with supination, pronation issues, those inside/outside calf muscles will help you in that realm and also help you in rotation for that. That’s one of the best calf stretches I’ve found, and here’s the caveat with that too. Things like plantar fasciitis, no lie, I have seen people stop their plantar fasciitis in two to three days, and they’ve been suffering for months.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ve written and talked about this a lot. The majority of people I have met who claim they have plantar fasciitis actually just have tight calves.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
Pulled the plantar fascia from the proximal side and they don’t recognize that. I want to highlight something on this rotating your foot. We’ll give people the landing page to look at, but I’m guessing that you want to be careful when you’re doing this to not be rotating your entire leg.
Butch Phelps:
Oh, yeah. Rotate your leg. Rotate your whole leg.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, the whole thing?
Butch Phelps:
The whole leg, yes.
Steven Sashen:
Oh.
Butch Phelps:
You want to rotate the whole thing, and the reason for that is that the hamstrings, which are above the calves, the three hamstrings, are tied in with those calf muscles, and so one of the rules I have with the stretching is always do your calves first and then do the hamstrings for that reason.
Steven Sashen:
Fascinating. I’m playing with this. I don’t have a strap, but I’m just rotating my leg and playing with this, and it’s like yeah, there’s a there for that. It’s really funny. In fact, when I’m doing so, when I externally rotate, when I rotate my leg so my toes are pointing out, and I start just pulling them back, then I start to actually feel some tension in my hamstring.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, yeah you will. You will. In fact, when people have tight calves and tighter hamstrings, what they’ll find as they start to pull back, you may feel it all the way up to the hip joint.
Steven Sashen:
Is there anything to pay attention to if you’re feeling that, or is that just that’s what comes along with the-
Butch Phelps:
That’s a normal thing, but the thing that most people will make a mistake on, and the way we’ve always been taught to do this, is if we start to feel it, we want to pull really hard. If a little bit is good, a lot is much better, and I always say to people no, no, no. That’s not how this works. What we want is we’re showing the brain literally, we’re showing the brain that if we pull this muscle and allow it to release that tension, it can let go.
Think about it this way. If you take someone who’s passed out, if you’ve ever been out drinking with your friends and somebody’s passed out, they’re like a dishrag. You can pull their legs apart, put them in splits and spreads, and do whatever you want, but the minute their brain comes back online, they can’t do it. The thing is it’s the brain that stops people from really stretching well because of the fear of pain.
Steven Sashen:
Two things. One, did you just admit to something you did in college that no one knew until right now?
Butch Phelps:
Yes. I’m teasing. I’m teasing. Actually I was not much of a drinker in college. I was a boring kind of guy, but that’s a story for another day.
Steven Sashen:
Stand in line. The other thing about that, again, this is one of those interesting things about flexibility, and what our friend Jujimufu talks about is if you’re going to do the splits, if you can stand in front of a table and lift your foot and put it on the table, and then switch legs and do the same thing, there’s no muscles crossing your hip that way that would prevent you from just doing the splits. On the one hand it is your brain telling you what to do. I don’t think people really give credit to the brain. I can’t remember if it’s an Emo Philips joke or a Mitch Hedberg joke.
I think it’s an Emo Philips joke, either one of those, you’re saying the brain is the most important organ in your body but look who’s talking. But people don’t really think how much of our movement is actually not a limitation of our muscular system, but of the brain and the signaling you’re getting. Back into Juji and doing the splits, or doing one of these things, one of the exercises that he talks about doing is strengthening the upper quad so you’re lifting your leg up, which is not about reciprocal inhibition as much as getting the strength to allow your brain to recognize that it can relax the hamstring enough to then get into the more extended split.
Butch Phelps:
Keep in mind in that same vein, how many people in the country can’t lift their leg to probably put their pants on? I run into people every day that part of their goal is to be able to sit in a chair and cross their leg and tie their shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Wow. Well, that’s an interesting question, so who are the people who are typically coming to you for help? What’s the range of that population?
Butch Phelps:
It’s kind of funny. Pre-pandemic usually I would say to you is people between 55 and 60 and older. Now, since the pandemic it’s dropped down to about 45 and older. But they’re typically people who are trying to improve their lives. They’re into football, well not football, but golf and tennis and biking, running and so forth, and they want to improve their bodies and reduce their risk of injuries.
What I do is I study the sports that they’re doing, understanding the mechanics of how each of those athletes are moving their bodies, and then when you can start freeing those muscles up, it’s amazing how quick they can change and run, and in fact many of the runners themselves, I’ve taken them from the traditional running shoes and actually got them into wearing shoes that are more flexible, that help their feet. Xero Shoes is one of the ones I always recommend, as a plug for you, but they do switch to that and all of a sudden they’re running much better with less injuries.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I was talking to Dr. Irene Davis, who’s now down in your neighborhood-ish. She’s down at the University of Southern Florida, and she was talking to some guys who were on a track team back in the ’70s, maybe the late ’60s, before the advent of the modern athletic shoe, with the pointy toe box and big thick heel, et cetera, and he said we just never saw anyone get injured. It just didn’t happen.
Butch Phelps:
I saw that interview with her by the way.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah?
Butch Phelps:
Exactly right. When I work with ultra-marathoners who use the minimalist shoes and they’re running barefoot, they don’t have near the injuries that the marathoners have.
Steven Sashen:
Same thing, one of the most successful coaches in history was Arthur Lydiard out of New Zealand and coached more Olympic and world champions than anyone else out of this tiny little country. He was a shoemaker and his shoes were like ours, flat, thin, wide toe box, and he did a whole lot of training that was all really about foot strengthening, basically having people run up mountains. That was his thing for strengthening, especially the foot.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely, because everything about your balance, everything about your power as you’re pushing off, everything’s coming from the muscles of the foot. Like I said, the foot and into the calves is what’s stabilizing the rest of the body. When people have weak feet, wearing arch supports and heel supports, and the pointier toe shoes, you’ll see more and more of those people with bunions and Morton’s neuromas in their feet, and so what happens is it’s undermining the foundation to the body. Now they start to compensate with their thighs or compensate with their hips, or they’ll start leading with their nose so they can get the momentum of their head literally going forward.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Butch Phelps:
Not realizing that all of those things coming down their spine that they’re dealing with started down in their feet years before.
Steven Sashen:
I wish I could remember the name of this book. It’s basically about how we think about the world based on our physiology in ways that people don’t think about, like our eyes are in the front of our head, and so we don’t see what we look like behind us, and so we don’t pay attention to the whole posterior everything, if we had eyes in both directions. That one’s really interesting. I think about when people talk about running in minimalist shoes or barefoot running, and they say well, you have to shorten your stride. No, no.
Stride length is a function of how fast you’re running and your cadence, how many steps per minute you’re taking. Yes, if you pick up your cadence and run at the same speed, you will have a shorter stride, but there’s just this misunderstanding about these things. The reason that I bring that up is because you can’t see your stride behind you. You don’t have a sense of what the length is. If you’re reaching out, you go oh, that’s longer, but if you watch really good runners, their stride is all behind them and they have this long stride.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, because if they’re running really well, that stride behind them allows them to push off with those toes, is where their power comes from. That was the interesting thing about Daniel Lieberman’s study was that you could see the same person on the same treadmill, running the same speed, and just the changing of the shoe changed everything. It was just amazing.
Steven Sashen:
I was in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands, who was the former head of biomechanics and engineering for the U.S. Olympic Committee, and what he would do when you came into his lab, he’d put you on these super big treadmills, like five feet wide, 10 feet long. It was really fun. In fact, it was really fun because they’d put you in a Mission Impossible harness to keep you from face planting in case all hell broke loose. The first thing you have to do is practice not falling on your face, which is super fun.
Anyway, so he has you run in your favorite shoes, and he’s filming you from behind and from the side at 500 frames a second. Then he has you try on every other shoe that you typically wear or run in, and people completely oblivious to the fact that every shoe they wore changed their gait in some very noticeable way, and then of course it changes even more as that shoe wears down, the mid-sole, the foam wears down, and they’re not aware of it at all. It was shocking to see.
Butch Phelps:
Yep, it is fascinating. When I was the University of South Florida I did an unofficial study with some of my fellow students, where we measured the pressure on the ball of a woman’s foot in a high heel, and we used different heels from a flat to a 2-inch, 3-inch, and a 4-inch. At flat to a 2-inch, that pressure only increased on the ball of the foot by 10 pounds. By the time we got to a 4-inch on an average woman of 123 pounds, the pressure went up to 85 pounds on her ball of her foot.
Steven Sashen:
Holy moly.
Butch Phelps:
When you tie in that the shoes were pointy most of the time, then what happens is it crams the toes in with all that weight down on the ball of her foot, and so if you’ll notice anyone with pointy toe shoes, their toes will slightly splay outward, and they’ll push off by the inside of their big toe. Well, as you do that over time, you start to develop the bunions in the foot and also in between the joints of the toes, you’ll wind up with things like Morton’s neuromas. But more importantly, as you get older, the muscles then collapse between what’s called the metatarsal bones, which is what you can feel in your foot, and when those muscles collapse like that, the foot becomes thinner. It becomes more difficult for balance.
Steven Sashen:
My analogy is you don’t squeeze your fingers together to do pushups. You spread them out because that’s all about balance and strength production. Same thing for your feet.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
Actually, the number one thing, when people ask me about what I do, my typical response is I look down to their shoes and go, “Is that the shape of your foot?” They go. “No.” I go, “Then what are you doing in those shoes?”
Butch Phelps:
Thank you. I do the same thing with people. My wife won’t even take me shoe shopping with her anymore because I go in and she’s like, “You see any shoes that you like?” I go, “I don’t see a shoe in this store I’d put on your foot. I’m sorry. They were not made for your foot.”
Steven Sashen:
Lana, my wife, had a similar complaint. She goes, “I hate that we have this company.” I said, “Why?” This is years ago. She said, “Because I just found this really cool pair of brown boots that I wanted, but they have a half-inch heel. I put them on. I felt like I was going to fall on my face.”
Butch Phelps:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
She was the inspiration for improving our women’s line. She says, “I got to go out and raise money or do whatever I’m doing. I need footwear to wear.”
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, exactly, but I’ve done that with a lot of my clients. They’d bring me their shoes in and they’re like, “What’s wrong with my shoe?” I’d pick it up and I’m like, “Does your foot look like that? No. It doesn’t look anything like that.” They’ll talk about, “This is a lightweight shoe, so I’ve got Prios I’ll wear, and I’ve got the Hana hemp I’ll wear.” I’ll take one of my shoes off and I’ll say, “Now hold mine and hold yours, and tell me which one is heavier.” They’re like, “Holy cow, yours doesn’t weigh anything,” and I go, “I know.” First time I got a box and I picked it up and I think they forgot to put the shoes in.
Steven Sashen:
So funny you say that. We did a TikTok video that was that idea. It’s like I can’t believe it. It’s someone showing the box in front of their doorstep and the packaging’s been opening. It’s like I can’t believe it, someone ripped off my shoes. I just bought these and they ripped them off. Then he opens the box and he goes, “Oh my God. They’re still in here.”
Butch Phelps:
I know. I know. Well, I wear size 14 and when I fold them up, I’m like, “You want a shoe that’ll do this,” and they’re like, “What?” I’m like, “Yeah, this is a 14. You’re wearing like casts on the bottom of your feet.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. What’s so fascinating to me, and frustrating of course, is that the only reason people have put up with some of this stuff is it’s just been going on for so long they didn’t have an option. They think this is normal. They think your foot are supposed to hurt. All this stuff that just makes no sense, and in no small part because the big shoe companies, aka Big Shoe, and you can do the abbreviation for that, their message has been our shoes are great.
If you’re having a problem, it’s because of you, which of course has led to the multi-billion-dollar after-market industry of orthotics and insoles and cushioning of various kinds that you would add to it, which you would think that people would eventually realize if there’s all this other stuff that I’m supposed to add to the shoe, why can’t they just fix the damn shoe to begin with? They know how to make stuff, right? But they don’t.
Butch Phelps:
Right. Well, and it’s back to what I said before, the shoe is to alleviate the immediate foot pain.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Butch Phelps:
What it doesn’t tell you is that yeah, we might get your arches to stop hurting, but they’re going to atrophy over time. Now your knee’s going to hurt, but that’s not our problem. We sell shoes.
Steven Sashen:
I said that to people when the Maximalist shoes came out, God, however long ago that was. It was maybe about eight years ago when that really kicked in, nine years ago. I knew a bunch of successful runners who were switching to those and saying, “I can put in more miles. My feet feel great.” I went, “In two years, your knees are going to be shot.” They went, “No, no, no,” and they just argued with me, and then two years later they were all entering different sports because their knees were shot.
Butch Phelps:
Well, and the other thing is that the thicker the sole on a shoe, I mean you have 272 nerve endings on the bottom of your feet. They’re sending messages to your brain about the change in the gradation of the ground, so what happens is that the thicker the sole, the harder you’re going to hit the ground because the brain is trying to get those messages from the bottom of your foot. Not only is it not bending so that atrophies the muscles, but you’re messing with the nervous system on the bottom of the foot as well. It blows my mind, but all of our lives we’ve heard people say well good shoes have good arch supports and good heel supports and blah, blah, blah. That’s just not true.
Steven Sashen:
There was a guy who went to Kenya, I believe in the ’60s, a podiatrist, to study the Kenyan army, where these guys all grew up in bare feet. That’s a funny phrase, in bare feet. With bare feet would be more accurate, because in bare feet, that’s creepy.
Butch Phelps:
That’s a given, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
They came into the army with really strong and flexible and functional feet, and the podiatrist’s report after studying the guys in the army was a podiatrist would go broke in this country. Now, things have of course changed, because sadly people have gotten the idea that what you do in the west is somehow better, and therefore we need these shoes and it’s a status symbol, et cetera, et cetera, but ai, ai, ai.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, I’ve had actually conversations with a couple of podiatrists, and they would say, “I tell all my patients never walk across hard surfaces in bare feet.” I go, “Really? I do it all the time.”
Steven Sashen:
My answer to that is do you really think that we’re not able to walk across a hardwood floor in bare feet, that that’s normal.
Butch Phelps:
They do, yeah. They think that’s normal. That’s being taught. I said to one of my friends, and I knew that he was fairly religious, and I laughed and I said, “So you’re saying God made a mistake.” He looked at me really funny and he goes, “What do you mean? He doesn’t make a mistake.” I go, “Well, apparently because without the other shoes, how would we walk?”
Steven Sashen:
What was his response? Did it freak him out or did he just kind of-
Butch Phelps:
He looked at me really funny and he goes, “Huh.” Then he just kind of walked away.
Steven Sashen:
You know, when you back people into a corner where their own logic has them unable to reconcile it, the cognitive dissonance is so severe. It’s so rare that you actually hear someone go, “Oh.” At best they do what you just described, like huh, and then they walk away. Maybe they’ll think about it in the future.
Butch Phelps:
I was saying to someone, he and I were sharing booths and he was on one side, and I was on the other, which was kind of an odd match, but anyway, I was sharing with people that the arch of the foot should be as soft as the palm of your hand. If you think about how the foot works, it’s very similar to the hand, and when the foot is solid like that, think if your hand was solid. You couldn’t open the door in your house to get out. When you look at the foot, if it’s as soft as the palm of your hand, now all of a sudden the foot can go back to work properly and walking barefoot is no longer a problem.
Steven Sashen:
I remember when I first started going barefoot, we had in our next-door driveway, I don’t want to call it gravel, because it was bigger than gravel. It was decent size rocky things that at first I could not walk across at all. It was super, super painful. It’s not like I went and tried it very often. I just didn’t know what I could or couldn’t walk on, so I was just walking and it’s like ooh, that’s not good. Then a year later I walked across it again, just not thinking, no problem. I mentioned that to someone. They said, “Oh, your feet, they’ve become insensitive and the skin has gotten really thick.”
I went, “No, no, no, no. Check out the skin. It’s basically the same.” I would contend that two things are happening, three. One is I’m putting my foot down underneath my body so I’m able to move and shift as necessary. Two is that my foot’s gotten more flexible, I think, and the biggest one that I can’t prove, that I wish I was smarter and had thought to record some of these things from day one is that I think my reflex arc has improved. I think I just step off of things more quickly if it’s painful because I’m more sensitive to it. I’m more aware.
Butch Phelps:
Well, with the brain, once you do it a few times and the brain go, oh, that’s not bad, that’s not bad, the brain then lessens the high alert. The first time you see a pile of rocks that you’re going to walk across, your brain’s like ooh, that’s going to hurt, and then all of a sudden it goes into fight or flight. Well, then the muscles become tense.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, brilliant.
Butch Phelps:
That’s what I say to people all the time. Your thoughts in your head control the muscular system in your body. If you think of an octopus, think of the brain like in the head of the octopus, but the muscles are like the tentacles. When you hear people talk about they have muscle memory, what about muscle memory? I laughed and I said to a gentleman one time, who worked with heart patients, and I said, “You see a stroke victim. They have a stroke. They lose use of their arm and a leg. If the muscles have memory in my arm and my leg, but my brain gets damaged, why wouldn’t my arm and my leg remember how to keep doing what it was doing?” He looked at me really funny and he laughed. He goes, “I hadn’t really thought about it that way.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, you know, I’m thinking about that same thing in two other ways. One is one bit of muscle memory, you see this with bodybuilders or weightlifters who got really big and then they stopped working out, and then they start again and they get back to pretty much the same size pretty quickly. That’s one version of muscle memory. It’s just that. But the other one, I just had a flashback to watching a videotape of Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter. Let’s ignore the fact that he got busted for steroids, and let’s ignore the fact that the thing they busted him for was one that he didn’t take because he tried it two years earlier and didn’t like it.
Let’s ignore the fact that the guy who he said doped him, when asked did you actually dope Ben Johnson, said maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Let’s ignore all of that for a second, which is the most amazing admission I ever heard, but Ben, who’s about my age, there was a video of him sprinting, and he weighs 50 pounds more than he did before. But just coming out of the blocks, if you didn’t know who it was, if you didn’t know that he weighed that much, just looked perfect and gorgeous. The muscle memory is just getting those patterns in your brain so that you can’t do it wrong.
Butch Phelps:
Right. It’s neural pathways in the brain, and the second thing is again, the brain is not afraid because he’s done it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s so interesting you said that. I just realized, so back when I was getting injured a lot. Well, when I was getting injured a lot there were a couple of things that happened when I had just got back into sprinting. It took me two years, I realized, maybe 2 1/2 years until I wasn’t afraid to go full speed.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Then when I was getting minor injuries, my entire way of thinking about whether the injury was resolved was not how the muscle felt, was I afraid to go full speed or not?
Butch Phelps:
Exactly, exactly. That’s where most people get hurt.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I’d never thought about that.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, that’s where most people get hurt.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there are a couple times, because I’ve got a screwed-up spine, there a couple of times with sprinters in particular, you’ll see, like I remember watching, oh my gosh. This is so embarrassing that I can’t do names right now. Tyson Gay, who at the time was the fastest man in the world before Usain Bolt. He was in a race in the 200, and coming around the turn, it looked like someone shot him. He just exploded and fell to the ground.
I could feel things similar in my body when I had problems, where it was very clear that the nervous signal, the impulse, didn’t make it to the muscle at the right time. Then the brain just went whoa, crap, and just seized everything up. I remember I could almost feel that the message wasn’t getting to the right place at the right time, and when I saw Tyson Gay blow up I was like ah, that’s what just happened.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah. Exactly right. It’s like every time you stand up, the brain knows exactly which muscles to recruit so that you balance and don’t fall down. You take a step, it knows exactly what muscles to use, and so the thing is once the brain understands, and that’s the importance of stretching this way, is once the brain understands that the stretching like we do in our stretch and release technique, once it understands that, now it lets it go and there’s no longer a fight.
Steven Sashen:
Love it.
Butch Phelps:
Yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Butch, this has been a total, total pleasure. We mentioned the landing page that people could go to so they could see how to do this calf stretch we talked about. I’m going to ask you to make sure you mention that. But how else could people find you to find out more about what you’ve been doing so they can have healthier happy bodies?
Butch Phelps:
Great, perfect. They can find me at musclerepairshop.com. I have a newsletter that comes out every Tuesday, and I always put in two videos of stretches, talk about specific things that can go wrong with your body, so that’s something you can continue to follow with that. I have a YouTube channel called The Muscle Repair Shop. I have 60, 70 videos already on there and I’m putting new ones out every Friday, and again we’re showing specific things of how to solve those problems. With the landing page, it’s going to go to musclerepairshop.com/movementmovement.
I’ll have not only the calf stretch video, but I’ll put in the hamstring video and the tennis ball massage. The tennis ball massage is one that, as I had one doctor say to me one time. He came in and he had American Express, because I had told him to put it in a sock. He had American Express written on his sock, and I said, “What’s up with the American Express?” He said, “I never leave home without this thing, man.” He said, “I’ve got one in my car, I’ve got in my office, in my house.” But it’ll show you how to use the tennis ball in a sock against the wall, and using the brain to soften your muscles so that your hips can be nice and soft and you can move better.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. I’m going to have a hard time finding a tennis ball to use because we recently got a dog, and the tennis balls are missing. They’re totally MIA. He hasn’t figured out fetch yet. He just likes to take them somewhere. I don’t know where.
Butch Phelps:
Exactly.
Steven Sashen:
Well, Butch, once again, total, total pleasure. I’m looking forward to hearing from people who take advantage of checking out that site and seeing what you’re doing, and seeing what the results are. We’ll stay in touch about that. For everybody else, thanks for being part of this. As always, a reminder, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Find all the previous episodes, all the ways you can interact with us.
If you have something you want to ask or something you want to say, if you’ve got a request or a complaint, or someone you think should be on the show, maybe someone who thinks I have my head completely up my butt because I’ve been known to have a case of cranial rectal rear end patient syndrome before, happy to have that conversation. We can hack it out and find out what the truth is. You can send an email to move, M-O-V-E, at jointhemovementmovement.com. But most importantly, no matter what you’re doing, go out, have fun, and live life feet first.