Is Pronation Bad?
– The MOVEMENT Movement with Steven Sashen Episode 140 with Rick Merriam
Rick Merriam completed a 600-hour Massage Therapy Program at The Connecticut Center for Massage Therapy (CCMT) In 1994.From 2003 to 2009, he worked as an applied biomechanics consultant at ESPN. After a few years of serving as a consultant, his primary role at ESPN was to work with sports- and work-related injuries. Over the last few years, Rick has been quoted in Runner’s World UK, Massage Therapy & Bodywork, Massage Magazine, IDEA Fitness Journal, Massage & Fitness Magazine, and The Guardian Liberty Voice. He has also served as an applied biomechanics consultant for the fitness staff at Canyon Ranch, The Greenbrier, and ESPN.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Rick Merriam about if pronation needs to be corrected when running.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How people must think beyond their joints and consider how force is being applied to their muscles.
– How pronation is actually a part of the gait cycle and not inherently bad.
– Why landing on the forefront of your foot makes it difficult for pronation to occur.
– Why shoes should be able to twist with your foot movement.
– How you can’t change what the foot does mechanically without changing what the knee does.
Connect with Rick:
Links Mentioned:
engagingmuscles.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
xeroshoes.com
jointhemovementmovement.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
You go to a running shoe store to get a new pair of shoes, they’re going to throw you on a treadmill, or in some other way identify how much you pronate, and then give you something to correct that, because pronation is a horrible thing that needs to be corrected, or is it? Well, we’re going to be talking about that, and many other things on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first, those things are your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run, or walk, or hike, or play, or do CrossFit, or yoga, or whatever it is you like to do, and to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively … Did I say enjoyably? Don’t answer, trick question. I know I did because, look, if you’re not having fun, you won’t keep it up, so do something different till you are.
I’m Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.com, your host to The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, and we call it that because we’re creating a movement, we includes you, I’ll tell you how in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. The part that involves you is really simple, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You don’t need to do anything to join. There’s no secret handshake. There’s no fee. There’s no nothing, just that’s where the previous episodes are, that’s where you can find out all the places you can engage with us, download it from all your favorite places where you get podcast. Find out how you can interact with us on social media, on YouTube, and Facebook, at Instagram, et cetera, et cetera, and you know what to do when you go there, like and share, and give us a thumbs up on the places you can give us a thumbs up, and hit the bell icon on YouTube. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe, because it’s what you share that’s making this whole thing grow, and we’ve been excited to see that happen.
All right, let us jump in. Rick, tell people who you are, and what you’re doing here.
Rick Merriam:
My name is Rick Merriam. I’m a licensed massage therapist, and I have a background in biomechanics, and my office is in Dallas, Texas.
Steven Sashen:
Tell me about your biomechanics background, because most massage therapists, they get into massage therapy by going to massage therapy school, and don’t necessarily have the biomechanics part. How did that happen and how does that inform what you do?
Rick Merriam:
Well, originally it started I had an injury to my back, so this is right after high school.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to stop you for the fun of it for a moment. I want you to continue, and we’re going to keep going, but just FYI, since you’re on your iPad, whatever you’re doing with your hands, it looked like you have giant thumbs.
Rick Merriam:
Oh, sorry, man.
Steven Sashen:
No, it was pretty entertaining, but it was also kind of a little sci-fi looking with your giant thumbs and hand, so just know where your camera is. Anyway, please continue.
Rick Merriam:
Okay. So I had an injury to my back right after high school. I had cracked my tailbone earlier on just racing BMX bikes, and … yeah, racing BMX bikes. It was not racing BMX bikes, but I was at camp, racing BMX bikes, cracked my tailbone, and then ended up running in high school and had injury after injury. Eventually, I had an injury to the disc, this is now after high school, so I go from playing Ultimate Frisbee, running, anything pretty much I wanted to do, to not doing anything.
Now, my parents were into alternative medicine so I started working with a chiropractor, at that time, I didn’t really understand chiropractic like I do now. A friend of mine was going to massage school, he said, “I’d like to work on you to do my case study,” and that was really … I was always interested in muscles and movement, and really trying to figure out why I was injured, which I think is a lot of people’s story. So I remember just sitting in detention and in school suspension a lot, and I’d be reading, at that time, Runner’s World, and Men’s Fitness, and looking at muscles and trying to figure out why I was injured, but I didn’t really have anything that was … Looking back on it now, I didn’t understand things like I do now, so I was just trying different things.
Long story short, I was always interested in that, so I go for massage school … Well, so I’m going to the gym, I keep going into the gym, getting stronger, the massage part really helped me, and then I knew, when I was in massage school, that I wanted to get into personal training. So, I get out of school, I’m doing personal training, I’m working as a massage therapist, and I had been into Tony Robbins many years earlier, and one of the things he teaches you is model the people that you most see yourself being like, for lack of better term. So I start going to these fitness conferences with a girl that I started dating at this gym that I was working at. I’m doing massage at this gym, I have an office there. I’m doing real basic personal training at that point. We started going to fitness conferences, and I knew right away, “Okay, I want to figure out who the biggest players are in this field of personal training at this time.” This is like 1995, 1996.
The first time I listened to this one guy, who ended up being my mentor, unofficially, he sounded like … I just wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say, and I think if you were to talk to him he would say he was not the best presenter at that time. He was a little rough around the edges, a little prickly, and ultimately I hurt myself doing some stretching stuff, that I had learned at a fitness conference, and then I start to question what I’m doing. Then, he comes up on my itinerary maybe a year later, a year and a half later, whatever it was, I’m in another fitness conference so I’m like, “Oh, I’ll give him a shot again.”
Now, I hear him a second time, and I’m hearing it through, or I was seeing it through a different lens because I had been injured via exercise, via stretching specifically, but anyway, it was like, “Wow, this, this guy makes so much sense.” He was a physical therapist, his name is Tom Purvis, and to put a name to the face, he was the pitchman for Bowflex for many years. He was the physical therapist on those infomercials, and he is really, I think a genius. He teaches critical thinking, and he just has a whole different way of looking at everything, and that was huge, especially in my 20s, because it really helped me to think differently critically. That’s how I ended up teaching actually, was via critical thinking, and that ended up working out really well for me.
Steven Sashen:
Well, let me pause and ask a couple questions. So one, when you said you weren’t ready to hear it the first time, what was it that you weren’t ready to hear?
Rick Merriam:
It’s so long ago now, but I think that he was talking about the joints a lot. So if you’re doing stuff in the gym, we think a lot about muscles, but we don’t think about joints, and then more specifically, how you’re applying force to those muscles impacts the joint. That was in the early stages of his training, and then, he, of course evolved like everybody does, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking about … I always understood, “Okay, you want to control the eccentric phase.” The negative for the gym science kind of thing would be the negative, but that’s the muscles eccentrically lengthening, but I always knew to control both ends of the movement, but I wasn’t thinking about the joint. I definitely wasn’t thinking about how you apply force to muscles, and that makes a world a difference.
He had a background of having done body building for years and hurt himself. He had hurt himself and started … as a physical therapist, started to look at these things differently. I always look at it like, and this has happened many times in my career, but when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, and I feel like that’s the opposite too, having taught for many years. I taught kinesiology, which I guess I didn’t mention, but having taught kinesiology many times, I think it’s the opposite too, where when the teacher is ready, the student will appear. Does that make sense?
Steven Sashen:
It does. Well. I just like how you’ve highlighted something in the fitness world that people don’t think about, that a lot of people get into certain things because of their own personal problems that they’re trying to solve, and then they deal with that. It’s similar to most therapists who get into therapy because they’re trying to fix themself, and then they go into being therapists. Sometimes they really need to do more of the former before they can do the latter. The thing about muscles and joints is very interesting, because certainly when most people think about exercising, they just think about moving the weight, or if you’re doing body weight stuff, just moving the body, and aren’t paying attention to what you said, which is how these things actually interact in the right way. It’s really easy to put strain on the joints.
Look, I talked about this with arch support. When people say, “Well, I need arch support,” I go, “Well, what you’re doing is when your foot is hitting the ground flat, your arch isn’t engaged and you’re trying to engage your arch when it’s in a weak position to start with. Then you put in arch support and you can’t do it at all anyway, or you have a stiff shoe and you’re trying to move your foot isometrically because it can’t actually move all of these foot strain on the ligaments, the tendons, and the joints,” and people are like, “Oh.” But they don’t think about it, in part because they’ve been sold a bill of goods about orthotics, for example, and we can dive into that later if you like, but there was one other thing that you said that was really interesting to me. Oh man, it just flew right out of my brain.
Well, since I can’t think of it, let’s back up to the thing I teased this with. So, you and I started chatting, and we talked about this whole phenomenon about pronation, and orthotics, and support, and the mythology around that, and what people don’t understand about that. Do you want to dive into that, and we can see where that takes us?
Rick Merriam:
Yeah. I think ultimately talking about the joints and joint forces, in this case with running, we’re talking about ground reaction forces, so no matter what you believe, if you believe orthotics are good or whatever it is, you still have physics. The physics are going to be there no matter what you believe, and that’s really important to think about because ground reaction forces include a lot of things, friction for an example. So, very often this is kind of a light bulb-
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, let’s pause before you do that, say more about what ground reaction forces are in this context for people who don’t know that term.
Rick Merriam:
Basically when the foot comes into the ground, we can get into specifics about the foot, but when the foot comes into the ground, the ground is pushing back at the foot. So, if you land on your heel, and I know you know this, Steven, you land on towards the outside of the calcaneus or heel, and then the ground is what drives the heel. It drives it into what’s called eversion. Do you want to give your pronation supination example before I go on?
Steven Sashen:
You can do that too. Well, I’ll explain the pronation supination thing. We’ll start with supination, so when your foot is approaching the ground, if you’re relaxed, you’re going to touch the ground on the outside of your foot first, and that position where your foot is angled so the outside is down is supination. Whether you land on your heel, or your midfoot, or the ball or your foot, same thing, if your foot is angled in that way, that’s supination, and then your foot’s going to hit the ground fully, and it’ll be flat. As you’re coming off the ground, you tend to roll onto the inside slightly, and if you’re thinking about the inside of your foot being down, that’s pronation.
What most people have come to believe is that pronation is bad, because frankly, shoe companies realized they could sell that story because it’s one of those things that everybody does, it’s a natural part of the gait cycle. But if you can pathologize a natural thing, then suddenly you have a unique selling proposition, and you can convince people that they’re wrong and broken, and then you can sell stuff to them because you’re a lying sack of crap. Is that a good explanation?
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, to add to that, before the heel touches down, I think it’s an important piece that a lot of people don’t talk about, is that the foot is actually turned. Imagine you pull the top of your foot towards your shin, so that’s called dorsiflexion, so if you’re sitting there right now, you pull the top of your foot towards your shin, and all you have on the floor is your heel, now imagine turning your foot in, and when you turn your foot in, your lower leg follows your foot, so that’s like you’re preparing the landing gear before the heel touches down. You’ll see that in some of the running magazines, they’ll capture an image with the foot right before it strikes the ground. That’s really important because it’s how well are you preparing the landing gear for the landing, and so the heel touches down, and we’re going to touch more to the outside of the heel. The ground drives the heel, and then ultimately you have to go to your big toe.
Right. Now, I remember many years ago, I was on the … You probably don’t remember this, the Run Barefoot Girl podcast, and I remember hearing an interview with you, not on that podcast, but on another podcast from a long time ago, and I love this about you, because you had just started your company at that time, and I remember hearing you say … she was asking you biomechanics. Now, this was not the Run Barefoot Girl podcast, it was a different podcast around barefoot running at that time, I think the lady was out of Canada, if I remember correctly. It was the very beginning of the podcast, and you talked about landing very lightly on the outside of the forefoot or front foot, and then you go to the big toe, and she was challenging a little bit on that. I was like, “Yeah, he’s absolutely right about that.” I mean, I knew that, but I was super impressed that somebody who had started a running shoe company actually understood how the foot comes into the ground.
Because I had never heard that before from anybody who had started a running shoe company, so I was like, “Man, I like this guy.” I also recognized that you understood marketing, and I really appreciated that too, not only did you understand marketing, but you were good at marketing. But I love that part of it, whether you land on the front foot or the rear foot, meaning the heel, you’re going to touch down on the outside of that front foot, and then you’re going to the big toe, but once the heel touches down, it’s going to be the same thing. The same motion is going to occur, but at a different time, and that’s really the important thing because either way you’re … I’m going to go back for a second because I think this is really important. I don’t know if you thought about it, but if you touch down on the outside of the front foot, and you go to the big toe, what is the ground going to do to the front foot?
Steven Sashen:
Well, the same thing that it’s doing no matter where it hits, it’s always pushing back in the place.
Rick Merriam:
That’s right, so what would you call that?
Steven Sashen:
Hey, we’re back to ground reaction forces.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, because ultimately if you’re touching down on the outside, your foot, your big toe, imagine the front foot, you’re going in, so to use the running shoe store analogy, you’re going in, so the big toe comes into the ground, which is pronation. It’s pronation of the front foot or eversion of the front foot, and then ultimately the ground’s pushing back, which is throwing the foot in the opposite direction, and then the heel goes in the same direction it would if you touched down on the heel.
Steven Sashen:
One of the things that I think that’s so interesting about if you’re landing on your heel, and pronation, is that, and the … Well, I’ll say two things. One, it’s almost inevitable because your heel is a ball, balls are unstable, and so there’s just no way to avoid it basically, but more, you just don’t have … If you think about landing on the ball of your foot or your forefoot, when you land on the outside edge of your foot and you come in, you have this wide structure that’s actually designed to address that, to handle that. In fact, if you’re landing on your forefoot, it’s really hard to pronate because you’ve already engaged the arch. You’ve already engaged the ankle, like you said, you’ve already basically prepared the landing gear to handle that force the way it’s designed to handle that force with the-
Proper alignment of the bones and ligaments, and muscles as well. It’s this misunderstood idea, but of course, if you’re landing on your heel, there’s just no way around it. I’m remembering I was in the lab with Dr. Bill Sands when he was out here in Colorado, he used to be the Head of Biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee, and he would say, “Pronation is not an issue. Hyperpronation, having it happen so fast you can’t control anything is an issue,” and not only does that happen when you land on your heel, but it happens even more … I’m holding up a shoe, if you have a shoe with a flared sole, so the part that hits the ground first is not where your heel would hit the ground, but a half an inch to an inch further out, which if you think about using a wrench, you can basically move more with a wrench than you can with your hand because, for physics people, because you’ve increased the moment arm, it gives you more leverage.
But the flip side is true as well, in this case, having that flared sole creates that fast movement into pronation, which you can’t control. The shoe itself is a problem in multiple ways, especially if you’re landing on your heel, but same thing on the forefoot. If you have a flared sole on the forefoot, same thing, it creates hyperpronation, which is just again, you just don’t have the time to correct for what it does, and no amount of foam is going to do it because you’re hitting the ground with so much force, there’s no foam that can stand up to that force.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah. I think what I was trying to get to too is looking at a minimal shoe. When I talk to patients, I’ll show them what a shoe should look like when they go out. I have a lot of clients, patients that have Xero Shoes. There are other shoes that I recommend, a lot of clients do have Xero Shoes though. But long story short is, I could pick up a shoe, let’s say they walk in with their Xero Shoes, and I will twist the front of the shoe and the back of the shoe in opposite directions, because that’s what the foot’s doing when it’s on the ground. We can show it from a marking standpoint that we can roll it up in a ball, but really we want any shoe-
Steven Sashen:
To twist.
Rick Merriam:
Where I could hold the front and the back, and twist it in opposite directions. Now, a lot of shoes won’t do that, right? But if we’re walking around in our casual wear, say it’s a female, walking around in their casual wear, and they’re wearing Xero Shoes or somewhat, whatever minimal barefoot shoe it is, they’re often looking for other shoes that they can wear so you have sandals. We would want something that would be on the back of the foot, a strap, whatever it is. That’s where I think Anya’s doing a great job actually. I don’t know if I said her name right, but Enya, Anya-
Steven Sashen:
Anya.
Rick Merriam:
She’s doing a great job because … well, she’s helping me tremendously because I have females all the time ask me what are some other options, because once you start going barefoot, or barefoot shoes, minimal shoes, it’s hard to go back. I’ve been doing it for 12 years, and I can’t wear anything else, nor would I want to, but that’s really the big thing. Then, of course podiatrists say the opposite, they’ll show you the stiffest shoe you could ever possibly imagine, which makes no sense based on going back to function. So you always have to go back to the mechanics, and we’re wearing these shoes for a tremendous amount of reasons don’t allow the foot to function the way the foot was designed to function.
Steven Sashen:
Here’s a weird one for you. If you think about runners who are running, especially the 200 meters or the 400 meters, where they’re taking a turn as fast as they can, the foot has to do something there that most humans never have to experience, where it’s actually … this is impossible to describe, where basically it gets a little banana shaped. So the forefoot’s on the ground, and when the heel’s coming down, it’s basically getting this sort of banana shape, and there’s no running shoe currently that accommodates that, and that creates a whole bunch of craziness for people. When I started training as a sprinter again about running the 200, what they have you do instead is try to teach you to put your foot in a really weird angle, because the shoe can’t accommodate what your foot is trying to do naturally.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, that’s an interesting … I think I heard you mention that on one of your episodes.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, man. That would be surprising because I don’t think I did, but I don’t remember what I had for breakfast so it’s entirely possible. So, back to-
Rick Merriam:
Well, it might not be that exact thing, there was pieces of that, but I definitely remember you talking about those turns, you have to turn.
Steven Sashen:
Well, what I normally talk about is how I’m a 100 meter guy so I don’t take turns. I get lost if I try to take a turn, but if somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, I pronate,” because they got “diagnosed” at a shoe store, how do you respond to them?
Rick Merriam:
At this point, having done this for as long as I have, it’s really difficult not to smile or maybe even laugh a little bit, that might just be my nature too, but you get so tired of saying the opposite of pretty much every practitioner that’s out there. I just kind of keep it a little light, and if they haven’t met me initially they don’t necessarily know my personality, but it ends up working out, nobody’s offended or anything, but I just kind of laugh because that makes no sense.
So recently a woman came in and she had orthotics, and she had been to the podiatrist, and she mentioned her podiatrist three times, and I said … so I listened to her, listened to her, the whole thing, and then as she’s talking, I’m trying to figure out, “Okay, how am I going to take this woman from the way she’s thinking to the way I want her to think, which makes her more anti-fragile?” Because really, she was here because a friend had referred her, so that’s always a good thing, and she was tired of going to massage therapists every week and spending the money there. I think she had gone to a chiropractor for a little while, and then she did the orthotics route. So I said, I just came right out and said, “Well, just so you know, and I can back this up so I’m confident in saying it, but just so you know, anything that a podiatrist is talking about, as far as the foot goes, is pseudoscience. Because here is how,” I mean, that’s true.
I don’t know, I’m probably not legally supposed to say that, but if you look at my background, I can back it up so I’m going to say it because it’s the truth. So literally that’s what I said to her, I said, she’s actually an attorney, which is funny, “Just so you know, everything your podiatrist is telling you is pseudoscience, and I can show you that.” Then right away she’s like, “You know what? I’m totally open to whatever you have to say. My father was a scientist so I’m totally … I’m in it, man. I’m in it on whatever you have to tell me.” Because she had gone so far onto the fragile side of the spectrum that she was willing to take in anything that would bring her to the other side, and of course it’s worked out very well for her.
Steven Sashen:
That’s an interesting point. We do hear from people who, by the time they come to minimalist footwear or natural movement, is because they’ve tried all these things, they’ve spent all this money, and it hasn’t worked, and they’re just looking for something, and they’ve heard from other people that this has been beneficial. But I’m curious, when you refer to podiatric pseudoscience, can you give me an example?
Rick Merriam:
Well, everything. Seriously, I’ll give you specifics, but it’s just crazy that someone goes to school, and what is it? Two? Four years? I don’t even know, and everything is wrong, they don’t even know how the foot functions, but then I think another side of an easier way to say it is, they only focus on the foot, that’s all they’re licensed to focus on. But you can’t change what the foot does, you can’t change what the foot does mechanically in an abnormal way without changing what the knee does, and that’s huge. Going back to joints, and I know this has come up with the knee joint, with the Harvard Gait Lab woman, her name is Casey Kerrigan, I think, Dr. Casey Kerrigan.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, and Casey was there. Yeah.
Rick Merriam:
I listened to that episode, and she’s talking about osteoarthritis of the knee specifically. I think she was saying the medial side of the knee, and we might get into that a little bit, but you can’t change what the foot does without changing what the knee does, that’s a mechanical thing. I’m going to lay it out like this so everybody can-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to back it up, because there’s another part, where you not only can’t change what’s happening in the knee, but also at the hip, and the flip side is you can change what’s happening at the hip, and that will affect what the foot is doing.
So if you’re only paying attention to the foot, you might miss that and make some sort of intervention that’s missing the point. Now, I do want to say, I have met many podiatrists who actually understand this shit because they have, like you, questioned it and started to look, and found things that they weren’t taught. I asked a podiatrist recently on the podcast what they learned about shoes, and his answer was essentially nothing, they had one session, which was, “Here’s the right shoe to fit the orthotic you’re going to prescribe to people.”
Rick Merriam:
Let me rephrase that because when I say these things I’m talking about most, and what I consider most I’m considering 51%, but I do know when you draw that line, right? But I mean, it’s a lot more than, I’m being extremely generous saying 51%, that’s really the truth. I think there’s 12,000 podiatry members in the podiatry, whatever it is, deal, where they probably pay something, and they share information and go to conferences. I think it’s 12,000 because it recently came up in an article. I would imagine most of those 12,000 or so on orthotics on an everyday basis, and how couldn’t they sell orthotics in everyday basis because that’s their bread and butter, right?
A chiropractor’s bread and butter is adjustments, in most cases, again, most cases being 51%. I think I’m being generous when I say 51%, because I think it’s a lot more, a lot more chiropractors than 51% are doing adjustments every day, which I also think is pseudoscience in a placebo. We could talk about that if you want, but then going back to podiatry, okay, going back to podiatry, I do know that there are podiatrists, there is a few out there, and I only know of maybe a handful, you might know more, but that actually do understand these things. I’m going to … I maybe will say, to be generous, and say 10, but I think I maybe heard of five, and so that’s like 90 … that’s a lot of people.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I could introduce you to five immediately. There may be overlap, we may have a little Venn diagram thing going on, but suffice it to say, without even blinking, I could do 10. Now, that doesn’t mean that that’s the only 10 by any stretch, we’re hearing, I mean, I’m hearing from more and more people who are … What’s often happening is somebody’s walking into the office of a podiatrist, sometimes in a pair of Xero Shoes, and then that starts a conversation. Usually the podiatrist is antithetical to the points that person is making or non-disposed to it, but then at a certain point it sits in their brain, and eventually they start looking at things, and they call me and ask me questions. Then, my favorite part is they say, “Well, you know, you don’t have a medical background, and you don’t know anything about footwear design,” to which I say, “Well, no, I was only a pre-med from the time I was 10, and decided not to go to medical school. I’ve got my either biomechanical, autodidactical cred, and yes, I didn’t come in knowing footwear, but in 13 years you learn shit.”
In fact, just for the sake of bragging, kind of, the thing I’m most proud of, one of the two things I’m most proud of are related. One, is that professional footwear designers take my ideas seriously, and know that I have valid input, which I was surprised by, but I just understand how this stuff works. The same thing with people who are researching, and who are kinesiologist, biomechanist, et cetera, is they treat me the same way, and I feel … Pride is not my thing, I just really enjoy that because I like the conversation with smart people who are willing to question things and investigate things, and use critical thinking, which is a tricky one.
For the sake of that, it’s funny, I got accused on YouTube the other day by a European footwear designer of being American, and using science to try to make a point, which I thought was one of the funniest things I ever heard. It’s like, “Yeah, because the science backs up real reality, and you’re just using what people have told you, and mythology to back up what you’re saying. I’m giving you actual data.” One of the responses was, “Well, then how come all these big shoe companies, they spend millions of dollars every year in R and D?” I go, “Right. Well, that’s great, but then how come running injury rates haven’t changed since the advent of the modern athletic shoe? It’s still 50% of runners, 80% of marathoners getting injured every year, if their R and D was so good, don’t you think they would’ve fixed that by now?” That’s when the conversation ended.
Rick Merriam:
Of course there’s no research to show that, or if there is, there isn’t a lot of it, but that is the bottom line, is just thinking again, critical thinking, if all these things you say are working, are working, then why are we spending over a $100 billion on back pain and things like that? Because even though you might not be talking about back pain, your shoe makes an impact on back pain.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and the other one that I say when doctors are saying something about this not being real, I said, “You know the people who try minimalist footwear or natural movement, who have a good experience, don’t make an appointment to come see you, right? You’re only hearing from people who have problems.” Then I say, “And when they say they have foot, hip, ankle, knee, whatever problems they claim to have as a result of wearing minimal shoes, do you ask them or do you get video of them running or walking, whatever it is they’re doing? Do you know how to analyze that video? Have you asked them what their training protocol was, and how they made the transition?” I’ve literally never had one doctor say yes to any of those three questions, and I go, “That’s the important part,” they go, “Oh, well, you’re saying that anyone who has a problem with running barefoot, it’s because of a form problem,” and I go, “Yeah.” End of story.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, and I think the other way I would say that is they have no idea what muscles are doing. They don’t know which muscles are tight. They don’t know which muscles are weak. When I say weak, I mean neurologically weak first, and then we look at the physiological part, but you know that, I mean, they’ll still give somebody a calf stretch for plantar fascitis, and they’ve been doing that for how many years. There’s more than one muscle there, more than two muscles back there that cross that posterior axis, or go posterior to that axis at the ankle, not to mention the subtalar joint. They don’t know which muscles are tight, and which muscles are weak, and a lot of times it’s interesting, the gastrocnemius, which if nobody’s familiar with, that is a muscle you see, it stands out more when somebody has heels on.
Steven Sashen:
Well, sorry, for humans, for humans, AKA your calf.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, your calf, but ultimately that muscle, a lot of times is, it can present as tight, tight is a sensation, but it’s actually not functioning as well as it could, or it’s not functioning to the best of its ability. That’s not the only muscle that will present that way, but it is one muscle, and it’s a very unique muscle because even though we say gastrocnemius has two heads, and those two heads are responsible for very different things.
Steven Sashen:
I’ve pointed out, and I’ve shown this with people who say that their doctor has told them they have plantar fasciitis, and I can kind of spot it from a mile away and go, “Can I stick my thumb in your calf in this one spot?” They go, “All right,” and of course it’s very tender. After I worked that out a little bit, I go, “How’s your plantar fasciitis when you walk around now?” They go, “Wow, it’s like 90% better.” I go, “Yeah, so you just have tight calves that are pulling and giving those same symptoms, but it’s not what they’ve told you.”
Rick Merriam:
Yeah. I originally was on the Podiatry Arena. What do they call that? Podiatry Arena, I think they call it, which is their online forum. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. I had paid attention to it a little bit because it would come up for alerts. I get alerts with different topics every day, like orthotics, or whatever it is. Anyway, I was familiar with the Podiatry Arena so I would read what they were saying, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden I was gone there, and they were talking about an article I wrote about plantar fascitis. The title of the article, I don’t know the exact title, it was something about Plantar fasciitis has little to do with your foot, and it ended up being liked and shared like 21,000 times. So that ended up in the Podiatry Arena, and they were really not happy about it, and then I wrote the article on orthotics, which also took off, and they also weren’t happy about that as you might imagine.
Steven Sashen:
Well, what did you write about orthotics?
Rick Merriam:
Oh, geez, it’s long. I recently update it because I had originally written that in 2016. I wanted to go back for the longest time and update it, so I finally did a couple of months ago, and I don’t think there’s anything good that comes out of putting orthotics in your shoes. I recently, going back to something you say, because I have my online presence too, and I have people that will challenge me here and there too, so I was answering a question the other day on Quora, and it only partly had to do with orthotics, but the question was something like, “If you have really good orthotics, does it matter if you put them in a cheap shoe?” Or something to that effect, and so then I’m like, “Okay, what are really good orthotic?”
You know what I mean? I know what a cheap shoe is, so I kind of went … I know I went into, I mean, that could be a lot, that could be wide ranging, but I then went into, “You know, if you do put orthotics in a cheap shoe, what’s going to happen? The cushion’s going to break down really fast, you’re going to end up on the outside of your foot, blah, blah, blah.” I go through all this stuff, and then I even gave the opposite, and then I might have even gone into … I eventually went into, “If you put orthotics in a barefoot shoe, you’re going to end up with the majority of the weight the outside of your foot, just because they’re driving, the orthotics are driving your foot to the outside of your foot.” You’re basically forced to supinate, which means now you can’t pronate, and so now you’re just supinating a way forward, which is not a good way to go forward. It’s not an efficient way to go forward.
But long story short, so then a physio from the UK chimes in and says, “I’ve found orthotics to be helpful for me, and helpful for many patients throughout the years,” something to that effect. So then I give more science, and then he comes in again with something, and I give more science, and then at the end he says, “You know, you really should get more higher education, maybe study kinesiology.” So I just said, “I taught kinesiology for 15 years, and I actually wrote the foreword to a kinesiology textbook,” and then it was crickets from there. But seriously, a lot of this stuff, and I’m sure you can relate, I can bring the science, but I could also bring the common sense. Then you get into sunk cost fallacy, and the self-serving bias, confirmation bias, we definitely see that, where they’ll cherry-pick little things that, “Oh, there’s this,” and they don’t even stand up to research actually, but anyway, go on.
Steven Sashen:
It’s undeniable that for … Well, I’ve got an article on our site, it’s one of my favorite science writers for two reasons, one, she’s a brilliant science writer, and two, I love her name, which is Gina Kolata. Gina writes for The Times, and has written a number of awesome books, and she did some research on orthotics, and basically came to the conclusion they don’t really do anything. No one knows what, if anything, they do, they’re unreliable, and there’s no difference between getting a $1,000 custom-made orthotic, and a $25 Dr. Scholl’s insole. In the same way, if you’ve injured some muscle ligament, tendon, or joint, and you immobilize it so that it cannot be under strain, that can be beneficial. But then you want to get out of that as quickly as you can, and start using your body again, building up strength, building up flexibility as necessary, because if you just keep it immobilized, it’s a vicious cycle that gets progressively worse and worse, and worse. Not using something feels good because it’s relaxing, but watch what happens when astronauts come back from space, where they were totally relaxed, and it takes them a while till they can walk again.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, and if you think about plantar fascitis, most people would say that their calf is tight, so now a podiatrist gives them the stretches, which don’t do much, and then they put them in orthotics. Now they’re in orthotics, but the subtalar joint can’t move properly, and the more your subtalar joint can move, going back again just to eversion, imagine that the heel is supposed to go out, and the foot ultimately rolls in, but the heel can’t go out, and the foot can’t roll in, and that determines what your ankle does. That determines how much flexion you have at your ankle, so the opposite side of that, say you have no orthotics, stretching the cap doesn’t make a big difference in the bigger picture. Basically you’re going to have to keep stretching your calf because you’re not getting to the root cause, it’s like a bandaid. But basically if you don’t have stability of your subtalar joint, your ankle’s never going to flex more. Does that make sense?
Steven Sashen:
Yes, it makes sense to me. Can you describe the subtalar joint for people who don’t have that physiology background?
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, absolutely. So, if you imagine the heel going out, imagine it rolling, well, say it’s going to roll in, and then on top of that you have a bone that’s called the talus, and that forms the subtalar joint. That talus, when the heal, the calcaneus goes out or rolls in, that sets up a situation where the talus that’s sitting on top can actually slide down and in. Just basically there’s a little shelf there, and it can then slide down and in, now that talus that sits on top of the heel, and I have a foot here … Okay, you have your … I have the same one.
Steven Sashen:
I just beat you to it.
Rick Merriam:
I have the same one. Okay, yeah. So ultimately that heel goes … Let’s do eversion, okay? Let’s show it from the back though, Steven, I think. So then the heel goes, so it’s going from in to out, so it’s going to go out.
Steven Sashen:
There is the out, and then we’re rolling in.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, you’re rolling in, and then that talus is going to go down and in, and the tibia is going to follow the talus. It’s going to follow the talus down and in, and so it’s important to recognize that calf, some of those calf bones are attaching to the tibia or the fibula, but ultimately if that rear foot, so the subtalar joint and the ankle joint can’t move properly, that’s going to impact what the calf can do. Meaning that if you block it with arch support, we’ll say an orthotic, now that subtalar joint can’t move, which means now you have an ankle which is a pure hinge. It’s like if you go over to the door, and you open and close the door, it’s only going to move in that plane. So your ankle joint is a pure hinge, it only moves in that one plane, which is the sagittal plane.
So if you change motion of the joint that’s closest to the heel, which is the subtalar joint or the joint, we’ll say the joint that’s closest to the ground, which is the subtalar joint, that’s going to change what happens with the joint above, which is the ankle joint. That’s where stretching the calf, it’s really not doing what people think it’s doing, whether it’s plantar fascitis or anything, because you’re never going to get more motion of that ankle until you have stability at the joint below, which is a subtalar joint. Now that’s going much further into it than most people do, but that’s really the truth. I mean, that’s the truth of stretching.
We can say that stretching helps. We can say that stretching works. Two words that I hear a lot in the office, so when I hear stretching helped, or I hear stretching worked, or I hear a chiropractic adjustment helped, a chiropractic adjustment worked, you get it, helped or worked, I pay attention to those words, helped or worked, right away I’m thinking, “Okay, how is that possible?” You know what I mean? Because I don’t see that happening, and so then we might have that conversation down the road that, “Let’s stop stretching because it’s going to undo what I do.” Does that make sense?
Steven Sashen:
It does. It’s funny having a foot skeleton to play with. It’s really interesting because we just don’t really appreciate how many bones and joints there are, and what they do. If you just even look at it for just a few minutes, it seems some things just become kind of obvious about what should or shouldn’t move, and what it should do. I have to tell you, one of my favorite ones, is I was not aware that your big toe, your first ray, that there’s this joint right here that cracks just like your finger can crack your knuckles in your hand. The first time someone cracked that joint, because it was a little over stiff, I thought they broke my foot, but then it was like, “Oh, my God, it’s just way more flexible.” It was just all tight and I didn’t know it, because I didn’t know that was possible, and then you look at this foot skeleton, and you see all these places where there are little things that could go right or wrong. Like you’re saying, if you don’t understand some of this, and it’s not like everybody has to understand the anatomy of the foot, but if you don’t have some familiarity, it’s really easy to be misled by someone who’s going to say, “You need an orthotic. You pronate, and that’s a problem,” even though there’s no evidence that there’s any relationship between pronation, and any injury whatsoever. Same thing about the heel, it’s like, “Yeah,” when you see that it’s a ball, and you’re landing on your heel, that doesn’t take any rocket science to know balls are unstable. It’s just fascinating. I wish people knew more physics, I wish people knew more anatomy because it would just save them so much time, effort, and money.
Rick Merriam:
Absolutely, and I see that all the time. Most of the people that come to see me have done all sorts of things, orthotics, chiropractic, physical therapy, they’ve spent thousands of dollars a lot of times, and now they’re going to start paying out of pocket coming to see me. That basically is my niche market, but the foot is a fascinating thing, it’s a big part of my practice. I love the foot.
I’m sure you’ve heard people say that the foot is not designed well, and that is not true, the foot is designed perfectly. It’s a beautiful … I mean, the foot is just so amazing when you think about how it moves, and how it interacts with the ground, and all the things that it’s supposed to do, but shoes have taken away the foot’s ability to do what it’s supposed to do, and then shoes have taken away the foot’s ability to do what the knee is supposed to do. A lot of people, even though they don’t realize it because they don’t have pain, are walking around with weak feet, so that’s where you have to start. That’s really where you have to start. Now that’s probably not realistic at this point, but hopefully with what you’re doing, and what other people are doing, we’re going in a direction where maybe people will start to look at that.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ll tell you something, I’m going to … What’s the word? Preview something that you’ll get a kick out of. So, there’s two really interesting studies, study number one is from Dr. Isabel Sacco on Brazil, where she took runners in regular shoes, and had one half of that group, it was, I think over 200 people, and had half of them do an eight-week foot strengthening program, and then tracked them over the course of a year. Over the course of the year, the people who did the foot strengthening program had 250% fewer injuries than the ones who didn’t do the foot strengthening program. Eight-week intervention, one year’s worth of value. Now, obviously if you had kept doing more strengthening it might have been even better, but it was literally eight-week intervention.
Well, here’s the second study from Dr. Sarah Ridge, showing that walking in minimal shoes builds foot strength as much as doing that foot exercise program. The foot exercise program is in the middle of this equation. Now there’s not a study that shows that if you just walk in minimalist footwear, then you will get the foot strength that will allow you to have that 250% risk reduction of injury, but do the math, it’s the same exercise program in the middle of the equation. So what I’m starting to do, and I’ve just compiled that into an eBook, that we’re going to start promoting to runners to say, “You don’t have to run in these shoes. Don’t run in these shoes. Wear minimalist footwear when you’re not running to build that strength, that seems to be connected to reducing your risk of being injured.”
Now, I will also confess that it’s a bit of a bait and switch, because of course once they start wearing minimalist footwear, just like you said, once you get used to it you can’t go back. One day everyone’s going to put on their running shoes and feel like they’re going to fall on their face, and bemoan that they can’t feel the ground, and get that feedback that they need. So that’s my evil plan, but it’s an evil plan based on … I mean, I call it the dumbest science ever done, because we have to prove use it or lose it. We have to prove strength is better than weak, or strong is better than weak, which seems absurd. But that’s where we are right now.
Rick Merriam:
Well, I think you can go as far as to say like a podiatrist might say to somebody who has plantar fasciitis, “Your heel is dropping, your navicular,” oh, excuse me, “your navicular is dropping, your foot is weak,” whatever it is they’re using that day, depending on the podiatrist. Then they’ll say, “Oh, and we have these orthotics for $500 that we can put in your shoes,” and if you’re a thinking person it’s like, “Okay, he just told me my feet were weak, but now he wants to sell me $500, which are basically pebbles, they’re driving my foot, and then my feet aren’t going to get stronger.” You know what I mean? It just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t add up, and it’s definitely throwing you more towards the fragility side of the spectrum, to the point, I’m sure you’ve seen this, and it’s very sad, people get to the point, I hear this all the … I get emails all the time for people, because of that orthotics article, that they can no longer walk around their house without orthotics.
Steven Sashen:
It was the most amazing conversation I ever had. This was maybe eight years ago, and I’m meeting with a guy in Boulder, who’s like one of the richest guys in town, big deal investor, and he says, “You know, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, and if I invest in your company I couldn’t wear your shoes because I’ve had plantar fasciitis for 20 years.” I said, “Well, first of all, you can’t have an inflammation for 20 years, so something else is going on.” Then he says, “Well, you know, it went away for about a year and a half out of nowhere.” I said, “So that proves that it wasn’t plantar fasciitis because things like that just don’t magically go away, and then magically come back. So I can tell you what you actually have is habitually tight calves, chronically tight calves, that for whatever reason they loosened up for a year.” It doesn’t matter, but I said, “Well, let me ask you a question, how are you walking barefoot?” He goes, “Well, I can’t walk barefoot in my house, I have hardwood floors.”
I said, “Do you think that’s normal? Do you think that you’re somehow some horrible, fragile, little snowflake where it’s impossible for you to walk across your floor? Does that seem right to you?” He was a little dumbstruck, and I said, “Dude, first of all, just because I look like this doesn’t mean I don’t know more than your doctor, because all my friends who became doctors didn’t score as high on those tests as I did, just FYI. But more importantly, I could give you some foot exercises, that if you just did them while you’re watching TV, you could build up enough strength to walk around barefoot in your house. I could give you some extra exercises after that, where if you wanted to, you could probably be running a 5k barefoot, and I’m not suggesting you do it, I’m just saying you could.”
“You could run a 5k barefoot if you wanted to in about six months,” and he just looked at me like I was insane, because he had spent all this money with doctors who told him that he was a fragile little snowflake that needed to have … I asked him, “How much are your orthotics?” He goes, “1500 bucks a year.”
Rick Merriam:
Oh, geez. That’s a lot. I haven’t heard $1500. That’s for one pair?
Steven Sashen:
You forgot, this guy is super rich.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, that’s true. I forgot that part. No, it is sad. I often … One of the things I tell people regularly, and they just think this is the biggest thing, and in some ways it is, is, “Okay, I want you to walk around in your house barefoot, but if you have wood floors, don’t walk around in your house with socks on.” It’s very different, it’s like walking on ice, so your brain recognizes, “Okay, I have to shorten stride. I’m not getting friction,” which is part of ground reaction forces, is having that friction. So then the brain is not recognizing that things can move at the right time, even though they don’t have any orthotics, or any overly support or shoes on, it’s not great to walk around at wood floors with socks on.
Steven Sashen:
It’s very interesting you say that. There were some research with elderly people, I wish I remember where I read it, about injury rates if they got out of shoes, and the highest injury rate was people in socks. It didn’t matter if they had hardwood floors or carpeting, it just makes it so that it is changing the feedback that you’re getting. It is changing the way you move around. It is changing the coefficient of friction, and you might be slipping more as a result, but no one considered that, which struck me as utterly mind-blowing. But again, we just see people who … Look, I can’t fault people for not thinking about this stuff clearly, if for no other reason, as humans, we’re wired to look for authority figures and believe what they say, just like chimps and the other primates, and we want simple answers. Unfortunately, the simple answer isn’t as sexy, the simple answer is harder to sell because it doesn’t involve buying something usually, and we’ve just been trained for so long.
My favorite, you walk into a shoe store and you listen to some 23-year old kid who was told what to say by the guys trying to sell a particular shoe, and he doesn’t know any better. You don’t know any better, and you assume, “How could you get a job in a running shoe store if you don’t know anything about running shoes?” It happens all the time. Again, I’m mad at the industry, frankly, just for the sake of venting for a second, because the people in the industry, the guys who run these shoe companies, they know this, they know what they’re doing. They know they’re misusing physics to sell a story that isn’t true. They know that when someone has tested, “Here’s the shoe that we recommend from having you on a treadmill, and analyzing your running,” versus here’s a random shoe off the wall. They know it doesn’t make a difference, but they keep doing it anyway.
I understand that too, they’ve got to make a living. This is what they do, you can’t just change course like that, in theory, but you can gear up so that you can change course at what looks like a drop of a hat after years of preparation. I understand it all, but it’s infuriating because it’s just not good for people. Anyway, that’s the end of my rant.
Rick Merriam:
Well, you figure if you’re a podiatrist, and you went to school for podiatry, and you hadn’t read Born to Run, or you haven’t listened to your podcast, now you’ve already spent that money, and invested that time going to podiatry school so where do you go from there? There’s always a sunk cost fallacy.
I think that applies to chiropractors a lot, they get into it and they realize, “Oh, wow, this isn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be.” Then, there’s all sorts of things that happen, but the sunk cost fallacy is there and saying, “I spent all this money and all this time to be this professional, so I have to do what this professional does.” That’s kind of the things that go through people’s heads. So they’re looking for everything to sell, any way they can bill insurance, including selling orthotics, because chiropractors will talk about alignment, and that is not what you want. You don’t want to be aligning your foot, and there is … I mean, going back to what we were talking about before, the ground doesn’t care how you feel about aligning the foot. You know what I mean? The physics is still going to be there, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Well, I hope this has given people some things to think about/argue about/complaint, and then we can dive into it, but you opened … Did you open by saying that you did massage therapy? Which of course is such a small fraction of what you’re clearly doing, as we’ve had this conversation that should be obvious to people. So let me just do this simple thing, if people want to engage with you, hopefully to come see you or get some help, or read what you’ve written that would be helpful as well, or anything else that would be useful, or if they want to argue with you just for the hell … By the way, really quick, the guy who I was arguing with on YouTube, I invited him to be on my podcast and he said, “I have no interest in you or your podcast.”
Rick Merriam:
It’s too bad.
Steven Sashen:
It was really hard for me not to reply, “Scared?” Which would’ve been fun, so anyway, if people do want to get in touch with you, which I highly recommend, how do they do that, Rick?
Rick Merriam:
Yeah, so they can reach out to me or go to my site, engaging muscles.com, and there they’ll find all of my information like YouTube, and Twitter, and everything. I am on Twitter @rickmerriam, so @rickmerriam.
Steven Sashen:
Brilliant. Well, this has been super fun, and it’s not just because we’re both preaching to the choir, but it’s nice to take a dive in a little deeper than we often get to. For people who are overwhelmed by the physiology, my apologies-ish, and the ish is this is not rocket science. It’s not hard to learn enough to be able to help yourself, and even possibly help others just because you have information that they may not be getting from a medical professional that they’re seeing, because the joke is, what do you call the guy who graduated last in med school? Doctor. There’s a lot of people who, admittedly, are doing the best they can, but with limited information, and possibly a limited skillset, and maybe not the same ability to think as well as you might be able to.
Sorry, I just had a flashback, when I got back into sprinting, and I was having a bunch of knee problems, I went to a doctor, and after four sessions of him doing things that had no impact on me, he suggested that maybe I should do some exploratory surgery so he could figure out if there was something else going on, which I knew was a dumb idea. He said, “Well, you just have a serious case of patellar tendinitis.” I said, “Dude, that’s what I walked in here saying to begin with, I just didn’t say it in Latin,” at which point he got very upset with me, because he thought he could snow me by just naming it instead of giving me some information. So you want to obviously find medical practitioners that you can rely on, but you also want to know just enough, at the very least, to be able to not just take what they say as gospel. Anyway, that’s rant number two for this podcast.
Rick Merriam:
The problem is people just don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s just such a big thing. I get what you’re saying, but the saying is you can have enough knowledge to be dangerous, which is true. But man, you have a lot of knowledge so you can see it from the other side, if you don’t know what you don’t know, and you’re in pain, people get desperate.
Steven Sashen:
Well, absolutely, but that’s a good place to be, it’s a good place to … I’m not suggesting that I know everything by any stretch of the imagination, but-
Rick Merriam:
You know a lot though.
Steven Sashen:
Well, thanks, but you can learn enough to know how to ask a good question. Even if you don’t know, you can ask a good question like what causes that? What else could be a cause? Is there something where … I’ll tell you something funny. I did something weird the other day, and I tweaked what feels like it’s my lower back above my hip on the right hand side, and if I twist to wipe my butt, to be a little graphic, it was painful. It took me a week of noticing that that was where I was feeling pain, but then I felt a little lower, and there’s something really tight happening lower down, kind of in my hip, in the top of my glute. I hadn’t even noticed that before. If I had just gone to a doctor saying I have pain right here, there’s a high prob … above my hip, there’s a high probability they would’ve never noticed the thing happening with my glute. I don’t know what I did, I just twisted walking because I’m 60, shit happens.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah. No, I understand. I understand.
Steven Sashen:
But just to be able to ask questions like, could this be coming from somewhere else, and if so, where? To get them to start having to think with you, all it takes is some really basic questions, I would think, and you can just start finding those happily from listening to people like you talk about these things. You got to realize that doctors, their job is taking care of the 80% of the people they’re going to see who have 80% of the problems that are simple to deal with, but if you go in with something that’s in that 20%, and they’re not hip to that 20%, then you got to know how to ask good questions, or even ask, “What are the question might I ask that might be helpful?” That’s the craziest meta question to ask that will get them thinking about something different than what their … just their, “How can I get in and out of here?”
Rick Merriam:
I think it’s also been shown that people make bad decisions under stress. I think that’s a … Real research has shown that, so if you’re coming to a podiatrist, as an example, with plantar fascitis, and you’ve been dealing with it, and it’s really … it’s impacting your life, maybe you have a trip to Spain in three weeks, I see these kinds of things, there’s all sorts of things, and it’s like, “I got to have an answer. I don’t care, I’ll pay $500.” They don’t realize that, man, you impacted your life in so many … you impacted your health in so many ways that you don’t know, because there’s the podiatrist that will say, and hopefully it’s not the five that you mentioned, but they’ll say, I think there are a couple that will say this, “Orthotics are good for a short time, and then you kind of work your way out of them.” I don’t agree with that, I think you wear them for a day, and you’re starting to fuck yourself up. I don’t know if you’re recording anymore, but you really are because your brain is taking all of it, but basically you’re adding compensation upon compensation.
Steven Sashen:
My only argument for that would be, if you do have something … In the article that I have, and I’ll find a way to link to it in the show notes, the article that I have, there are a couple of researchers who mentioned the whole point of an orthotic is to immobilize your foot because you’ve injured it, and need to rest the tissue. That’s it. So there are those circumstances where you’ve done something where you need to let things rest, but you can let things rest, and simultaneously build strength, keep that flexibility, et cetera. Irene Davis says it best, “If you’re in a car accident and someone put you in a neck brace, you know it’s only temporary, and that you’d only wear that all day. You need to do things to get your mobility back, and make sure you have strength.” But if a doctor said to you, “You’re going to have to wear that for the rest of your life,” you’d sue them for malpractice.
But not only do doctors do that with orthotics for your feet, they do it with orthotics for your ankles, your knees, your hip, your back, your neck, which again, doesn’t make any sense if you give it the fairest amount of thought. But we’re not wired to do that, especially because we’ve been hearing it for 50 years, “Feet are fragile, they’re not made well, you need orthotics. You need shoes with a lot of cushioning and support.” After you hear it for long enough, you know, you tell a lie long enough it becomes the truth.
Rick Merriam:
Yeah. I’d say the same thing. I heard you say that the other day on the podcast, a lot of these things that we are talking about, and a lot of things we haven’t talked about are based on people saying the same thing over and over again, and it eventually becomes the truth, which is scary. But I know that especially happens in healthcare, I’m assuming it happens in other fields, probably financial.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, let’s not even talk about politics. Anyway, well, once again, this has been a total-
Rick Merriam:
Sorry about that.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no, no, fine with me. As you may have gathered, I’ll go anywhere in these conversations. So thank you again, and thank you everybody else for jumping in, and going on the ride with us. Just another reminder, other than going to Rick’s website, engaging, E-N-G, engaging, like getting engaged, engagingmuscles.com, and Rick Merriam at Twitter as well, and Engaging Muscles Massage on Facebook, is that right?
Rick Merriam:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
You can also go to jointhemovementmovement.com to get previous episodes, to find out where you can find the podcast, pretty much everywhere, to find out how to get in touch with us on social media, and find out stuff we’re doing on other channels, and if you have anyone that you want to recommend for being on the show, or you have a comment or a question, or you want to tell me I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, figure it out if you haven’t already, I’m open, I’m open for the conversation wherever it goes. If someone demonstrates that something I’m thinking is wrong, I could not be happier because then I don’t need to waste my time on something that isn’t true, and I just want to be helpful. So share that as well, and the way you do that, drop me an email move, [email protected]. But most importantly, until then, and until the next one, go out, have fun, and live life feet first.