Sarah Ridge is an assistant professor of Physical Therapy in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at Brigham Young University. Her expertise is in biomechanics, specifically biomechanics of lower extremities during activities such as walking, running, jumping, and landing. To perform research in this area, she uses a variety of kinematic and kinetic measurement tools including 2d and 3d video motion analysis, force plates and other custom force transducers, and inertial measurement units. Recent research projects include gaining understanding about the movement of the foot and the role of foot muscles, the effect of footwear on lower extremity mechanics, and the use of inertial measurement units to quantify athletic activity. Dr. Ridge teaches Biomechanics and is involved in the research series in the Doctor of Physical Therapy program. She appreciates collaboration with other faculty, students, and clinicians from a variety of areas.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Sarah Ridge about the dumbest natural movement research EVER.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How using both sides of your body makes you more adaptable when out in public.
– Why you might want to pay attention to how you tie your shoes.
– How Dr. Ridges research isn’t stupid, but it should be obvious.
– Why your feet will get stronger when used properly.
– How wearing minimalist shoes has been scientifically proven to make your foot muscles bigger.
Connect with Steven:
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Hey, Steven Sashen from The MOVEMENT Movement podcast. I’m doing this quick recording from my hotel room in Japan, where I just spent the last two days sharing the benefits of natural movement of people out here. Speaking of sharing, what I’m doing on this episode, mark the end of season two is sharing the best episode from season two. In fact, it’s the best episode from season one as well. If you heard it before, I think you will like it again. You’ll get some new things out of it and if you haven’t heard it, well, I think you’re going to enjoy it.
More importantly, I just want to thank everyone who’s been part of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast for being part of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast. It’s been a real, real treat. This is something that I started really by accident, and it’s been just a complete pleasure to hear from all of you who’ve gotten benefits from it. And I’m looking forward to sharing more with you in season three. We have interviews coming up with some really, really interesting people doing some great research on what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting from the feet first because those things are your foundation.
A quick reminder of course, is just go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You can find out the previous episodes and all the different places that you can engage with what we’re doing on Facebook and on YouTube and place where you get your podcasts. Of course, all the places that you can leave reviews and comments, et cetera. If you have any questions or suggestions or people that you think should be on the show, drop me an email at [email protected]. Once again, enjoy this “best of” episode. Can’t wait to see what happens with all of us for season three and until then, and through then, live life feet first.
The woman I’m going to be chatting with in this podcast, we’re doing the stupidest research in the history of human biomechanical research. What can we learn about natural movement from people who don’t move naturally at all? Well, we’re going to find out both of those things on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with the feet first, those things that are your foundation.
We’re going to break down the mythology, the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies that you’ve been hearing about what it takes to dance, to run, to walk, to hike, to move. Well, anything you can think of, while feet first, but doing it enjoyably and healthily and efficiently. I am Steven Sashen, your host and the CEO of zeroshoes.com. You know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. That means go to jointhemovementmovement.com, if you don’t know where to find us, where you can then like, and share and click the bell if you’re watching on YouTube and leave reviews. And if you have any questions, drop an email to [email protected].
Anyway, let’s jump into the woman doing the stupidest research in the world. Sarah Ridge, it is such a treat to have you here. Hello.
Sarah Ridge:
Hello. Thank you of having me.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no. Of course, it’s my pleasure. I’ve been trying to make this happen for a while. And we’re going to have competition today for who has the biggest flyaway hair thing. I think it’s going to be me today. I don’t know what the hell happened.
Sarah Ridge:
If I were still on the East Coast though, totally.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God. I can’t live on the East Coast anymore. That’s where I grew up, but I had short hair on the East Coast. Now that it’s doing this, I looked like Bozo, the clown.
Sarah Ridge:
Terrible.
Steven Sashen:
It gets ridiculous. Why don’t you do me a favor and tell human beings who the hell you are, then we’ll jump into the fun?
Sarah Ridge:
All right. I’m Sarah Ridge. I am a faculty member at Brigham Young University in the Exercise Science Department. I teach biomechanics classes and I do research. I do biomechanics research, mostly concentrating these days on the foot, and then also on injury prevention of overuse injuries and things like that.
Steven Sashen:
Cool. Well, we’re going to jump into your stupid research in just a minute.
Sarah Ridge:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
But first, I like to share a movement thing that people can do. We talked about this before we jumped on, and then I suddenly thought of one that I wanted to do. I’m usurping your opportunity to share a movement thing with people and I’m going to do this one. If you’re anywhere that you can do this, cross your arms, you can do this too. Cross your arms. Okay? Simple, no big deal. You do it without even thinking. Now here’s what I want you to do next. Cross your arms the other way. Come on, you can do it.
Sarah Ridge:
SO there, and then… Why can I not do it?
Steven Sashen:
I know. You got it?
Sarah Ridge:
That was the same way. There, I got it.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, hold on. I think I have a secret for doing it. My right arm is the one that’s further out. If I take it out and then put it underneath-
Sarah Ridge:
There you go.
Steven Sashen:
… my left hand and put it under. Okay, there it goes.
Sarah Ridge:
See, it still wants to stick out.
Steven Sashen:
Right. This is one of these interesting things. We get into these very simple movement patterns and we don’t even think about what it takes to do something really, really simple, like cross your arms the other way. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I can’t remember, which is my normal way. The other one you can do is put on your pants the wrong way. I don’t mean backwards facing forward, although that’s pretty entertaining. But I’m normally a left foot, first person. Try doing right foot first.
Sarah Ridge:
I am such a right foot first person.
Steven Sashen:
How’s that possible? That makes no sense. Why would anybody do that?
Sarah Ridge:
I know. Right?
Steven Sashen:
Absurd.
Sarah Ridge:
All the time.
Steven Sashen:
Try these things, basically look for anything that you think you do habitually, try it the other way around. Try eating with the fork in the other hand. Try using your knife in the other hand. There’s other things that I can think of that you would do with one hand and not the other, that you could do the other way around that I’m not going to talk about. But when I had my shoulder surgery and I couldn’t use my right arm, I got good at some of those. And you’re making up the story of what you think those are. Suffice it to say, I will give this one five minute public bathroom and the toilet paper is on either side. Doesn’t matter anymore. I can handle that.
Sarah Ridge:
So good to be adaptable.
Steven Sashen:
It is. But it’s fascinating to me how we do down these neuropathways, for certain really habitual movements without ever thinking about it. One of my favorite things, I thought that everyone tied their shoes the same way. I’ve now watched now watch thousands and thousands of people and I have seen thousands of ways of tying your shoes.
Sarah Ridge:
Really?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Who knew? I’ll have to record these someday and show all of them. You will undeniably think that all of the ones that aren’t like yours are ridiculous.
Sarah Ridge:
Super weird.
Steven Sashen:
Like why would you do that? That makes no sense whatsoever.
Sarah Ridge:
I’m really curious now. Because I can’t like imagine more than maybe three ways to die your shoe laces.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. Well here’s one that you probably never thought of. You take each lace independently and make two loops, separate loops and then tie those in a knot.
Sarah Ridge:
Isn’t that the bunny thing, when you’re teaching a kid and like you make bunny ears and then the bunny goes… I think that’s, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Oh yeah. Yeah, that probably is.
Sarah Ridge:
I don’t do it, because I think that’s more complicated. But I feel like that’s-
Steven Sashen:
I think you’re right. I think that is the bunny ear method.
Sarah Ridge:
Then the normal way. My normal way.
Steven Sashen:
That’s right.
Sarah Ridge:
It’s not really, “the” normal way.
Steven Sashen:
Well and here’s another one. Look at how you tie your shoes in the same way with crossing your arms, look and see which lace you put over the other and switch it and see if you can do it. That’ll mess you up. I want to hear from people who try this and whose lives I’ve ruined by just pointing out that there is another way. If you’re a Republican, you definitely do it right over left. If you’re a Democrat, you do left over right.
Sarah Ridge:
Now, I’m afraid to cross my arms again.
Steven Sashen:
I’ll send you, we can start on which leg we cross. I want to jump in and talk about your stupid research.
Sarah Ridge:
Great.
Steven Sashen:
Here’s why I call it your stupid research. This will not be surprising to you. One of the things that made you well known in the natural movement community, was the research that I’m going to ask you to talk about, about foot strengthening and natural movement, or just minimal issues, truly minimal issues versus a foot strengthening exercise. The reason that I call this, the stupidest research ever done, is because it’s amazing that we have to try to do research to demonstrate something like, if you use your feet, they can get stronger. If you don’t use them, not so much. In fact, I asked Irene Davis about this, someone’s got some research coming out where they took normal people, put them an orthotic in their shoe and saw the exact opposite of strengthening AKA weakening. Do you know who I’m talking about?
Sarah Ridge:
I cannot remember who. I should be able to remember the author, but I don’t. But I know the paper you’re talking about.
Steven Sashen:
And the gist is not surprising, you don’t let your foot move, it gets weaker. Quite a shock. But we have to prove this for incredible reasons. Talk about what your research was and what you discovered. Then I just want to hear like, how the hell it you got into all of this and why are you doing this? Who are you Sarah?
Sarah Ridge:
I often think, do I really even have a story to tell about this research? Because it seems so obvious. Why you think that your feet would get stronger if you allow yourself to use them? But what we did was we took about 60 healthy runners and-
Steven Sashen:
I want to pause right there. I just love that you had a cohort, a sample size, that was something decent. Most of the research that I’ve seen that sort of anti natural movement, “We took six people who are habitual, barefoot runners,” and they weren’t. They’re people who’ve done some barefoot training, but they’re not anybody that I’ve ever met and that barefoot world. I love that you’ve got like a real group of human beings.
Sarah Ridge:
Thank you. It took a long time.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, really?
Sarah Ridge:
It did. It took us probably let me say, it took us a couple of years, I think, to get everybody. We had an eight week training protocol. Well, maybe I’ll step back and like outline the study and then I’ll tell you part of the reasons that it took us so long. We had 60 healthy runners. We split them into three groups. We had a group that just did their normal running, wore their normal shoes and really was not bothered by the study whatsoever, other than coming in and checking in with us, weekly. Then at the beginning of the end of the study, doing our testing and measurements. Then we had another group that did specific, progressive, foot strengthening exercises. They started a foot strengthening program that was developed by Irene Davis in their lab.
Steven Sashen:
We’ll get into that in the later and probably in the show notes, put a link to what that is.
Sarah Ridge:
Perfect. Over eight weeks, they did more difficult exercises that were targeted specifically to the feet.
Steven Sashen:
Is it hard to find tiny little barbells to use with your toes?
Sarah Ridge:
It is. It’s really hard. But they’re really cute when you get them. Then our third group was the minimalist sportswear group. What we did with that group was we just had them replace a certain number of steps that they would normally take in their regular shoes, with steps in minimalist shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Just walking?
Sarah Ridge:
Just walking. Yep. Nobody ever ran in minimalist footwear, and nobody changed anything about their running over that eight week protocol. Because we actually were not interested in the running part at all, we just used healthy runners, because relatively easy population to get around here, and because the study that had led to this was in runners. We kind of kept with that population, thinking we may go to figuring out a transition protocol to running in minimalist footwear. But then we decided that… Well, we’ll get to that.
Steven Sashen:
Something is happening.
Sarah Ridge:
Yes. It’s very exciting. Okay. This is Wayne Johnson.
Steven Sashen:
Hi, Wayne.
Wayne Johnson:
Hello.
Sarah Ridge:
Another author on this paper. That we were just discussing.
Steven Sashen:
Ah, so there’s a reason for your existence.
Wayne Johnson:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Well, hey, welcome Wayne. Do you want to do a quick intro of who the hell you are?
Wayne Johnson:
Okay. I’m Wayne Johnson. I’m a professor here at Brigham Young University. My background is in physical therapy and rehabilitation. I’ve been doing research with Dr. Ridge on the foot for the last number of years. Do you make everyone call your doctor Ridge?
Sarah Ridge:
Yes. Very nice, respectful. Not like some people.
Steven Sashen:
I actually do the opposite. My dad was a medical professional so everyone I knew who were doctors, we never called them doctor anything. When I deal with all of my doctors, I refer to them the way I would refer to anybody who’s roughly my age and call them by their name. Which makes their employees very uncomfortable.
Sarah Ridge:
That’s true.
Steven Sashen:
Which is another reason that I do it. It’s very entertaining. Okay, backing up then, and you can jump in, whoever wants to talk about it. We’ve got three groups of runners, one group who just did whatever the hell they were doing. Did they get paid the same as the people who are actually in the interventions?
Sarah Ridge:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
I want to be getting paid to do nothing different.
Sarah Ridge:
I know, right.
Steven Sashen:
People who di nothing-
Sarah Ridge:
People waling in minimalist shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah. People who did the foot strengthening program, people who just spent some time walking in minimal shoes. Then what happened? What did you discover?
Sarah Ridge:
What we were testing was, we wanted to see, we looked at foot muscle size and foot muscle strength from baseline, before they started the study until they were done, the eight week of the intervention or not as the control group. We found that both the minimalist footwear group and the exercise group increased the muscle size and foot muscle strength, just about the same amount, in fact. And then the control group, there was no change in the control group. Either intervention resulted in increases in muscle size and strength.
Steven Sashen:
This is something that I love. Some people misinterpret that and say, “Well then clearly there’s no benefit in wearing minimal shoes.” No, no, no. It’s the other way around. Is that by wearing a minimalist shoe and just walking, you’re getting as strong as you can get with a concentrated exercise program. Did you think in advance to do a fourth cohort, that was the combo?
Sarah Ridge:
No.
Steven Sashen:
What the hell? Wayne, why didn’t you help him with that?
Sarah Ridge:
We would’ve had to get 20 more people.
Steven Sashen:
So talk to me about how difficult it is to get 60 people for a study.
Sarah Ridge:
It was not easy. We had a lot of dropout. I guess our dropout rates probably weren’t that much higher than most other studies, 10%, 15%.
Wayne Johnson:
For an intervention study for two months.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. People would drop out, like they would get injured for other reasons. Then obviously, that means they have to drop out of this study. We are at a university, we use a lot of college students and they got really busy or something and like, this was not a priority anymore.
Steven Sashen:
At BYU, there’s not going to be a lot of college students who dropped out because they were just drunk or-
Sarah Ridge:
No, not very many of those. I’m trying to think of other reasons. I feel like we lost people to unrelated injury. That makes sense too, they’re healthy, active people.
Steven Sashen:
I’m sure you don’t have the data on this or I imagine you don’t. But was it the control group and the non minimalist group? Was any group getting injured more often than nother?
Sarah Ridge:
No.
Wayne Johnson:
We don’t have that in the study.
Steven Sashen:
I didn’t think you were looking at that. I was wondering anecdotally.
Sarah Ridge:
Of the people who withdrew from the study, we know what groups those people were in. I don’t think there was anything really different about the groups.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Let’s talk about, again, I find it utterly amazing that we have to [prove 00:15:32] this in some way.
Sarah Ridge:
Do research to tell you that you’re going to get stronger?
Steven Sashen:
TO let people know, how did you measure both the muscle size and muscle strength?
Sarah Ridge:
I’ll let you do the size.
Wayne Johnson:
Muscle size, we measured with ultrasound imaging. We have a protocol that we’ve developed. We also did some MRI, but that was for another reason. We measured that with ultrasound imaging, with the cross-sectional area changing most of those muscles. And then strain testing-
Steven Sashen:
I just want to pause there. Basically, I’m doing the English to English translation. The gist is, what you’re seeing, the cross sectional, imagine just a tube and now the tube just got wider.
Wayne Johnson:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Bigger diameter, bigger circumference. Okay.
Wayne Johnson:
Then strength wise, we have a device that we developed that measures toe flection strength and the doming or short foot action.
Steven Sashen:
I’m dying to know what this seeming… In my head, this is a torture device. What do you do? How does it work?
Wayne Johnson:
GO ahead.
Sarah Ridge:
With the toe flection, you put your foot… Let’s see, we just have a foot in, it’s kind of a wood device. I could show you a picture if you want to link that somehow or whatever.
Steven Sashen:
Sure.
Sarah Ridge:
Anyway, you put your foot in kind of this wood-frame and then we have a force transducer on one end, and then we use various devices to connect that to a carabiner, which then you grip with your big toe and then tighten it enough-
Steven Sashen:
You’re gripping, you’re holding the biner with your toe?
Sarah Ridge:
Yes. We do one that’s great toe flection only. Then we do another one where we do the same thing, but we have a different connection. That one is like a bar. Then that one goes between your second and third toes. Then you’re pulling on that bar. Generally two, three, four, the pinky toe, doesn’t usually get over that. Ever.
Steven Sashen:
Not so much. Who was the crazy person who thought these cool device up?
Wayne Johnson:
The bar goes horizontal, across your fingers. You’re pulling just on the bar fingers. Like that. We did that-
Steven Sashen:
Love it.
Wayne Johnson:
It seems to work.
Sarah Ridge:
We have a couple of papers. I don’t remember what the other ones are. Anyway the reliability of those. Then the doming one, it’s another device, where they put their foot in like a Brannock device, like the shoe sizer. They put their foot in there and then we have-
Wayne Johnson:
A strap that goes over the top of that. They lift up and that strap then pulls on the load cell.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Basically, just to again, describe it. You’re contracting your arch and short foot is something that we’ve shared with people, a number of times on this podcast. But if you haven’t heard it, it’s like an isometric thing in a way where you’re trying to pull like the ball of your big toe towards your heel, but you’re not actually moving anything. But when you do that and engages your arch makes the top of your foot lift up. And it’s a great exercise to do if you haven’t done it. You can do it everywhere, sitting, standing, et cetera. I’m dying to know if anyone has tried to commercialize either of these devices.
Very small market. Very small, but very committed market of people who want their feet to get stronger and people who just like feet.
Sarah Ridge:
Yes. We have been working with a company in New Jersey to have them make this device and like take it over. Because we actually made one for Irene for their lab. It’s hard to standardize. That’s not our thing. We’re not engineers, we’re not salespeople, whatever. So, I’d love for this company to take over creating them and standardizing them and selling them to whoever it is that wants them.
Steven Sashen:
There was one of the early barefoot running pioneers whose name is escaping me right now. He was running barefoot in Boulder, in the ’70s, physical therapist. He developed a device that basically just wraps around your entire foot and ankle and has like four places where you can hook bungee cords that you then attach to the door, basically. An inversion, eversion and flection. It’s a really clever thing. But it really is like a weird medieval torture device. So there’s that issue. Let me just throw it out this way. W after you published a study, what happened?
Sarah Ridge:
There’s definitely been interest in the results. I think that, to me, the biggest thing is that we really started looking… When we started the study, our intention was to look at the transition to running in minimalist footwear. But I think over the course of the time that we were doing this study, and then after the study, we’ve really been more now looking at, “Hey, clearly just walking in these shoes, changes your foot. What is that going to do for normal, healthy people or not healthy people, but what can walking do in strengthening the foot?” Period. What will that do to hopefully prevent foot pathologies and things from developing?
Steven Sashen:
This is the magic question and this is the thing that people… It’s funny. First they want you to prove anything. Now, of course, the elephant in the room, if you will, is that had your study been done a couple of years earlier, there would have been no lawsuit against Brigham.
Sarah Ridge:
Well at that time that there was a lawsuit against Vibram and we were doing our first study where we’ve actually had people transitioning to the Vibrams, just the way that we didn’t actually really prescribe too much for transition.
It was there 10% for a couple of weeks and then as comfortable kind of thing. That study, we found bone stress injuries in the feet of people who were transitioning. It was about half of the group that transitioned to the Vibrams.
Steven Sashen:
It’s an interesting thing.
Wayne Johnson:
The majority of women that got the injury.
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting. I don’t remember that protocol very clearly, other than when I first looked at it, I remember thinking, “Well, that’s not good.”
Sarah Ridge:
It’s funny because we looked at the bone stress stuff using MRI, and then a few years later, we published the muscle size changes from that study. Because we did see that, the minimalist footwear group increased muscle sites.
Wayne Johnson:
10% to 15%.
Sarah Ridge:
When that one went to review, one of the reviewers was like, “How can you do this to people? You shouldn’t put people through this protocol.” We were like, “Okay, we didn’t. It is the exact same study. It’s just a different dataset from this previous study.
We’re like, “Nobody would do that.” Even within that span of those like two years. As we were doing the first study, that’s when the Vibram lawsuit was happening. A couple of years later, nobody would have done it, yes.
Steven Sashen:
No. It really is outrageous. The first thing is, okay, is there any value? And the second thing people want to know is, is there going to be any value in terms of injury prevention and or recovery? People don’t realize, you had such a hard time just getting 60 people for this study. People don’t realize how hard it would be to put together a good study, that’s long enough to really determine what the story is about injury prevention.
But of course, the thing that people are overlooking is, again, it’s not our job. We’re not the intervention. For the first 9,950 years, the human beings were making footwear, it looked like something minimalist. Something to protect your foot, something to hold that on your foot. I always say, when I was at the American College of Sports Medicine, I kept asking the guys from Brooks and Adidas like, “Well, where’s your proof for anything you just said?” That’s when the topic changes.
It’s amazing that again, we’re having to prove things about what bodies do naturally, when the companies that do unnatural things are not held to the same standards. When they are, the research does not land in their favor, and somehow people just don’t hear about it. I don’t know if you saw it, but at that ACSM thing, the guys from Brooks and Adidas both made some comment about, “Well we don’t have research that backs up some of the things we’re saying, but I’ve got a slide.”
It’s like, “Well, here’s 40 studies about natural movement that show the value of that. Studies that show that extra padding does not actually reduce impact forces or all the various things that are against what modern shoe companies say. It’s like, “I don’t know why you’re not quoting this stuff.”
Sarah Ridge:
I think that there’s so many different that people are testing in. One of the things with the footwear for companies is, everything’s proprietary. Whatever research they are doing, they do share very little of their own research. It’s interesting, when you look at how running footwear developed. In the ’60s and ’70s, how it kind of developed, which is a little bit of happenstance in many ways.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know the story of how we ended up with elevated padded heels?
Sarah Ridge:
Cushioned heels?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Do you know how that happened?
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. I feel like it was something kind of random, wasn’t it? I can’t remember now.
Steven Sashen:
It’s actually better/worse. Nike was in a building that they shared with some, I think orthopedic podiatrist or sports podiatrist. And Bowman was getting runners with Achilles tendonitis, and he said, “What do we do?” They said, “Oh, well, clearly their Achilles have shortened from wearing high-heeled dress shoes, just in their daily life. We need to elevate the heel and put some padding under there to protect their heel and their Achilles.”
Of course once you do that, you can’t avoid landing on your heel, your calcaneus, your heels are balls, so now you’re unstable. Now you need motion control. By the time your foot hits the ground, it’s fully extended, so your plantar fascia in a weak position when you need them to be strong. Basically, that one intervention was sort of the cause of everything.
Now the footwear industry I can tell you, is just a bunch of copycats. Something starts to sell, everybody tries to rush, to make money off that same idea, because they don’t want all the money to go to that guy. Really, if you look in the last 50 years, the only things that people have been changing, is the type and amount of cushioning. It’s still the same basic idea, elevate your heel, cushioning, motion control, et cetera.
There’s a guy that I know who was at Nike for a long time, who was at a track meet with one of these podiatrists, and said, “Your idea has become the de facto standard for footwear. What do you think?” His response was, “Biggest mistake we ever made.” It’s a smoking gun. And people don’t know this. At again, this ACSM thing, one of the questions was, “What’s in the future?” Both the guys from Adidas and Brooks had the same basic idea, which is, “Everybody’s a unique, special snowflake, so we’re making something just for them.”
Adidas was, they want to do their 3D printed, mid sole, some form of cushioning. Then Brooks was, some special L-sole, where they practically admitted that their goal is to give you a different shoe for everything you’re doing.
Sarah Ridge:
Oh, interesting.
Steven Sashen:
You need a special shoe for walking into the bathroom, a different shoe for walking out of the bathroom. Probably a different shoe for taking a dump. I think one of them even said, it’s kind of a marketing thing. Total shock. It’s kind of like Benno Nigg, they both quoted him at the very beginning saying, “Well, everyone has a preferred movement pattern and it’s really impossible to change that.”
I spoke to Benno’s son, Sandro, and I was about to kind of rip him, “What about this ridiculous idea?” He said, “Well, what my dad would meant was, if you’re in the same basic shoe, you’re going to move the same basic way. Being in something that’s a 12 millimeter heel drop versus eight millimeters is not a big difference. But my dad would be the first one to admit that if you just switched to barefoot, something’s going to change.” These guys, it’s just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and wondering why nothing has really changed.
And the biggest one that amazes me, and I don’t know how this one happened is pointy toes. What the hell? Who thought that idea up?
Sarah Ridge:
Right? Clearly it became fashionable somewhere, at some time. I don’t know why.
Steven Sashen:
That one’s a mystery. Did you get any feedback from big shoe people or any anyone who’s sort of anti natural movement?
Sarah Ridge:
Not really.
Wayne Johnson:
Not that I know of.
Sarah Ridge:
I feel like it’s been pretty… Maybe people approach it as the stupidest research ever. I don’t know. I think it’s been pretty like, “Okay. Yeah.”
Steven Sashen:
I think it’s actually the opposite. I think that sadly, that when there’s any research that somehow comes out, seemingly in favor of let’s call them modern athletic shoes, it is put up by companies who have a lot of money who can push it through. There was something in the, in the paper today in or on cnn.com that I think is Papa John’s, has a new dough recipe. Really? This is news? Who gives a crap?
But in the same vein, any big national or multinational company, when they have some new product, suddenly that’s news for some reason, because there’s enough people using the product that it’s a thing. But on the minimal side, there are no companies that are big enough that we have enough sway with the media to make something newsworthy. When something comes out like your research or Irene’s research on partial minimalist shoes, the stuff that big companies call minimalists that really aren’t, or Christine Pollard, showing that more cushioning is actually worse for you, these things don’t get any attention, because there’s no money behind it to get the word out.
Of course, many places that you’d want to get that published are getting advertising dollars from big shoe companies.
Sarah Ridge:
Interesting. I will say like, the Vibram study, when we did that one, the running transition-
Steven Sashen:
That got attention.
Sarah Ridge:
That got a ton of attention. This one really didn’t.
Wayne Johnson:
It’s still relatively.
Sarah Ridge:
It is, but like that other one, it hit and like…
Steven Sashen:
It hit and again, correct me if I’m wrong, did it matter which Vibram shoe they were wearing?
Sarah Ridge:
We had them mostly in the same style.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know which?
Sarah Ridge:
It was the lowest end one. Those had like a big opening. Some people did have one that covered top of the foot-
Wayne Johnson:
…with the Velcro strap.
Sarah Ridge:
… with a Velcro strap. Yeah. But I don’t-
Steven Sashen:
I’ve noticed some interesting things in that product, more than any other that I’ve seen. And this is the thing that I got in an argument where someone said, “Well, your argument is going to be that it was about their form, not their footwear.” I said, “Yeah.” Like, “What?” I said, “That’s definitely my argument.” Because I saw so many people who would get in that shoe and do one of two things.
Either continue running the same way they were in regular shoes, or worse, where they would still overstride their foot’s about to land way in front of their body, then they would point their toes plantar flex, thinking that you’re supposed to land on the ball of your foot. So they’re landing with all this massive force on those metatarsals, which is not the way you’re supposed to run. Unless you’re controlling for form, what you’re pointing out really, is that this transition program sucks. Not necessarily that the shoes suck.
Sarah Ridge:
Right. Exactly. That was really our take home from that. Was like, we can’t even tell you if it’s good or bad to run a minimalist footwear, because the transition is so important and that was not defined at the time. One of the other things that came out-
Wayne Johnson:
Like increase the muscle size.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, you did?
Wayne Johnson:
The muscle is more.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Sarah Ridge:
One of the other things with that study-
Steven Sashen:
Okay, hold on. Wait, let me ask.
Sarah Ridge:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know if the incidents of stress fractures or stress related events, was higher than it would be in a control group, in a normal population?
Wayne Johnson:
We had a control. They had one injury and the other group had nine or 10 injuries.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. Okay.
Sarah Ridge:
The other thing is these injuries are stress injuries. There were two stress fractures. Some of them were injuries where the runners didn’t feel them, but because we were doing MRIs-
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Sarah Ridge:
… we saw them. We had three radiologists, three read them. They all said that if they had seen that on an image of a patient, they would have told the patient they needed to alter their training or alter activity somehow. That’s what we qualified as an injury.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Sarah Ridge:
There’s a scale from zero to five and anything… Was it two, three?
Wayne Johnson:
I think it was zero to four.
Sarah Ridge:
Zero to four that’s right.
Wayne Johnson:
Five levels.
Sarah Ridge:
Five levels, right. Two, three, and four were considered injury, even if the subject would not have said it was an injury.
Steven Sashen:
That’s fascinating. I wonder if those subjects who weren’t having a personal experience of any problem, if they’ve adapted over let’s say another eight weeks, and actually that stress incident would have vanished, basically.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah, exactly. That was one of the things that we really don’t know, especially in that two level. Was that the good response that was going to lead to the strengthening? The three level, they said they would have told the person just stop what they were doing. I think at the two level, they said they would modify activity. At the three level, they would’ve told the person to stop activity. Four was the stress fracture.
Steven Sashen:
Stress is such an interesting thing, especially muscle stress or bone stress. Because like you were just alluding to, there is a kind of… Can’t think of the word I’m looking for.
Well there’s a hormetic response. Basically, there’s a response. You get a certain amount of stress and your body responds to that. I had a DEXA scan a while ago and my bone density from the pelvis down is just through the roof, because I’m a sprinter. I’m just applying tons and tons of force. But I’m sure at a certain point, when I was just getting started, it would’ve looked like I was going to end up osteoporotic or out of shape. But now it’s the exact opposite. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
I want to jump ahead to the other thing that I alluded to, which is, what can we learn from people who are not doing anything resembling natural movement? This is something that you’ve been wanting to study for a while and are now, and that is figure skaters. Which could not be further away from minimalist footwear wares. Unless you took like one of our shoes and stuck razorblades on it, and that would be kind of close.
Sarah Ridge:
Unique.
Steven Sashen:
Has anyone ever tried to make an ice skating shoe or something that would allow you to skate that was in any way flexible?
Sarah Ridge:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Really?
Sarah Ridge:
In fact, that colleague is not here today. I would call him down the hall.
Steven Sashen:
How? That’s really cool.
Sarah Ridge:
Our colleague, Dustin Burning, who also… Actually might not have been on that paper. Anyway, Dustin’s master’s thesis was, developing an articulated figure, skating boot. Like ski boots have the hinge at the ankle, theoretically. He and our old advisor, Jim Richards, went through and figured out sort of axis of rotation of the ankle and then told this boot company, where they should place the articulation.
A number of issues because it’s not an easy axis, come in and built a bunch of these articulated skates. They had skaters train in them and skate in them for a little bit. They did see a lot of the skaters decreased their landing forces in the articulated boot, which makes sense. You now have an actual lection range of motion. But it still had support on the sides, so that you wouldn’t have medial lateral motion.
But, there were some interesting things with that. They used experienced skaters mostly. A lot of them had a really, really hard time transitioning. I skated in them. I was a figure skater way back in the day. I skated them a couple of times. It was weird. Because you’re used to being able to support yourself by pushing against the boot.
Exactly. Now I couldn’t. There was definitely some issues with that. The other thing was, one of the national champions were them. She had been getting injured a lot and then she wore these articulated boots and she did really well. But I think there was also some, as I said, design issues and difficulty with placing the ankle joint axis right, where it really should be, so the boots would break. Because you’re using so much torque that they would pop out and things. Eventually, think they sold them for about a year or two, and then they stopped selling them.
Steven Sashen:
I’m working with assumption, I remember with speed skaters, they were using this collapse skate so it was collapsing blades. But they’re not wearing anything that provides a bunch of ankle support. They’re wearing something that looks more like a spinning spike with a razor blade on the bottom. What people don’t really get, I have a couple of friends who are speed skaters. And every one of them has a story of, “I fell down, hit the pads and the skate hit my inner thigh and cut a femoral artery and I nearly bled out.” It’s like, “Oh my God.”
Sarah Ridge:
I know, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. That is like a whole different thing. They’re wearing skates that are not providing “ankle support.” Is there anyone who’s actually tried figure skating in a skate like that with a shorter blade, obviously?
Sarah Ridge:
Not that I’m aware of. Skating is such an old school, aesthetic sport, things have to look a certain way. That was actually one of the other reasons with the articulated boots, they were thicker than regular skates. Some people, especially with these like tiny, skinny little girls, their leg would be this big, then the foot is like twice as big. But changing the aesthetic, is something that’s always a challenge.
Sarah Ridge:
But the other thing is, you have so much rotational motion in figure skating that you don’t have in the same way in speed skating-
Steven Sashen:
Of course.
Sarah Ridge:
… with the rotations and the landings that I think people are a little more leery, probably. If they would strengthen-
Steven Sashen:
That’s it. That’s where I was going. Because speaking as a former gymnast, there’s a lot of times where you’re landing and rotating with some serious torque and there’s no gymnast who have any real ankle support.
Sarah Ridge:
We definitely thought that you’ve got to start this with the little kids. Because as the little kids train and they get stronger and whatever, they won’t even know the difference and their ankles will be fine. They will have lower leg muscles that can handle it. But the problem is again, in the skating community, getting buy in. Because first of all, you have to have somebody who’s competitive and gets results to be the example. The parents of all the little kids want whatever the champions have. You really need like a really influential coach to buy in and get all their kids going.
Steven Sashen:
I think you just nailed. I love when people say things like, “Well, how come “fill in the blank” professional athlete, is not wearing some minimalist shoe.” It’s like, “Because we’re not paying him a shit ton of money to do that.” But I think to your point though, at a certain point, there’s going to be an opportunity for some serious athlete in any sport we can think of golf, tennis, basketball, baseball, football, soccer, if I didn’t already say that one. I don’t think bowling so much, but miniature golf probably not so much.
Sarah Ridge:
I don’t know. What was the thing that summer, he miniature golf show?
Steven Sashen:
What?
Sarah Ridge:
Did you see the miniature golf show on ABC this summer?
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God. No. I would have loved it.
Sarah Ridge:
It’s on Hulu or something. It’s like extreme mini golf. It’s really weird. It’s crazy, anyway.
Steven Sashen:
I’m totally going to look that up. Wait, hold on. I have a Professional Putters Association ball that I won when I was 14, from winning a miniature golf championship. I still have that ball.
Sarah Ridge:
I’m telling you. You could have been on this show. It was awesome.
Steven Sashen:
If it wasn’t for miniature golf, I don’t think I’d be with my wife. A lot of our courting happened over miniature golf.
Sarah Ridge:
Nice.
Steven Sashen:
Miniature golf and hot tubs. Those were our two things and still are.
Wayne Johnson:
Awesome.
Steven Sashen:
But yeah, if some major sports personality has some and they all have a reason frankly, to make a change. But I say to professional athletes, I go, “Don’t go switching right away-”
Sarah Ridge:
Sorry, my son is here.
Steven Sashen:
Come on in.
Sarah Ridge:
We’re doing a video podcast.
Steven Sashen:
You’re on kind of television right now.
Sarah Ridge:
Take off your shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Oh yeah, let’s see what you’re wearing.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. Take your shoe off and show it to him.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, let’s see.
Sarah Ridge:
Because I’m going to show them what you’re wearing. See?
Steven Sashen:
Hey, check it out.
Sarah Ridge:
There you go. He is not big enough for your shoes yet.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, okay.
Sarah Ridge:
I know. What size they start at?
Steven Sashen:
11.
Sarah Ridge:
Oh 11?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Sarah Ridge:
Oh. Where’s the one?
Steven Sashen:
You didn’t know? Did you not know we had a kid shoe?
Sarah Ridge:
No.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, that’s why. It came out in the fall. I know a guy who knows a guy. We’ll see if we can hook you guys.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah, all right. Oh, good. Sorry.
Steven Sashen:
This is my favorite thing is we don’t have children, because it’d be dangerous if we did. Because I’d be the kind of person saying things like, “Hey, stop jumping on that couch, the Springs are better on this couch.”
Sarah Ridge:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Anyway, point being at some point, we’ll have some real athlete who, obviously has a reason to make the change. Once they do, it’s going to be all over. We have a bunch of professional golfers, who’ve been contacting us saying that they train in our shoes, but they’re not playing in them because they’re getting so much money from their shoe sponsors right now.
Sarah Ridge:
Oh, interesting.
Steven Sashen:
Someday we will hope that changes. Let’s see if I’m allowed to say this. We have a professional athlete in a sport that is well-known for ankle injuries, who emailed us about a shoe that we were testing with them. The word was, “I couldn’t spray my ankle on these, if you paid me to.”
Sarah Ridge:
Oh, nice.
Steven Sashen:
The issue is that people in this sport, if we’re going to try and break in, we need to custom make shoes for everybody who’s wearing them. Again, we don’t have that kind of cash yet. But at a certain point, I think we can change the world that way.
Sarah Ridge:
Cool.
Steven Sashen:
What did you discover in dealing with your… This is great.
Sarah Ridge:
I’m sorry.
Steven Sashen:
I love it.
Steven Sashen:
For people who are just listening, there’s a child who has taken over the entire podcast-
Sarah Ridge:
I’m sorry.
Steven Sashen:
… randomly walking around in front of the camera, playing with some sort of toy that I wish I had.
Sarah Ridge:
Okay, why don’t you go out and find the other?
Steven Sashen:
Now we’re trying to coax him away from the camera. The odds of that happening, are really slim. I feel like I’m David Attenborough.
Sarah Ridge:
Sorry. Okay, stop. Okay. All right, thank you.
Steven Sashen:
See you. That was awesome.
Sarah Ridge:
You never know what you’re going to find.
Steven Sashen:
Do you have any dogs? We have three office dogs who are here today. I’ll see if I can get one. But they were pretty low key. One of them, I don’t think knows that I live here at all. Been here for a year and still doesn’t know who I am. It’s just really chill.
Steven Sashen:
In dealing with skaters, talk about what you’ve researched, what you discovered and how that’s relevant for people in the whole natural movement world.
Sarah Ridge:
Well, some of the stuff that we’ve done with skaters… There’s not a whole lot of money in skating research. Talk about like another area that is into. The skating rinks-
Steven Sashen:
Pause for a second, you would think that you could… Well, again, hard to break in for the same reason professional sports, but you would think that hockey players would have some motivation to really look into how to stay alive and stay in the rink-
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. Concussion research is relatively popular. There’s a lot of people need concussion research. And there are some people doing hockey, biomechanics research. Canada, well you know. I want to say there’s two universities that have setups that really do the hockey stuff. With figure skating, there’s very, very little that’s been done. So for a while-
Steven Sashen:
You know, there’s tons of money for pairs, dance, skate, whatever the hell that’s called. Totally making that up. It’s all that money for synchronized swimming research.
Sarah Ridge:
Oh, right, exactly. It’s kind of like that.
Steven Sashen:
Dancing. That’s the phrase I couldn’t think of.
Sarah Ridge:
Yes, there you go. For a while, they were trying to figure out how to change the boots, because that really… I think everybody involved with skating and the care of the skaters as athletes, pretty much agrees that the boots are a problem. But there’s four or five boot companies in the world. They have a pretty small market as it is. They’re not rushing to try to change things. Then you have that one company that did change things with the articulated boot, but ran into problems. At some point they just, “We got to cut our losses and like go back to the standard.”
Sarah Ridge:
Changing the boots is really challenging. That is not something that anybody has really figured out an answer to yet. Other things that in conversation with some of the medical personnel that deal with like US Figure Skating team athletes, they do talk about weakness of foot muscles, weakness of hip muscles.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Sarah Ridge:
It’s really interesting. They’ll often do single leg landing tests, like in the office or something. And you can just see the knee collapsing in. It’s ridiculous. This is what you do. This is the move. That’s how you land everything and they can’t control it. So, that’s definitely something. And even, I would say, 30 years ago or so, there was no off ice training in figure skating. You just go skate and you just do your things over and over again. Now, at least there’s off ice training and dance and stuff like that. I think-
Steven Sashen:
Runners, of course, are very much the same way. Distance runners in particular, they want to run and don’t do anything else, despite the fact that doing that causes the problems that doing something else would cure.
Sarah Ridge:
Right.
Wayne Johnson:
Exactly. Including their feet.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah, exactly. Don’t even get started on sports specialization. What we’ve been doing recently with skating, there’s two projects that we’re working on now. One is instrumenting a figure skating blade, so that we can actually get measurements of their landing forces on the ice. Because we actually don’t even have that. Nobody actually knows any studies that have measured landing forces and figure skaters have done it off ice in a lab, having a skater jump like backwards from a box onto a force plate on artificial ice or something like that, which clearly it’s going to be very different.
We’ve been working on instrumenting a blade so that we can get on ice landing forces. It’s a long, it has been a long project and it’s been really challenging. But that’s one thing, because that’s really a starting point. We don’t even know we’re dealing with until we know what the impact force is, and what influences them specifically with skating. Then the other thing we’ve been working on is an activity monitor, sort of like a Fitbit for skating. But something that will count the number of jumps the skaters do, they will give them their rotation speed and time in the air or jump height or something along those lines. We’ve been working on developing that too, which maybe doesn’t have too much to do.
Steven Sashen:
I just like the idea. If anyone thinks that academia is somehow not connected to the real world, boy, you just proved it.
Sarah Ridge:
I know. It’s so fun.
Steven Sashen:
No, I’m jealous. No, I think that’s awesome. It is fascinating. I think the application to hot dog vendors might be really high in some way that we haven’t identified.
Sarah Ridge:
Right. Absolutely.
Steven Sashen:
Given that skaters are for all practical purposes, putting their feet in casts for hours a day, have you done anything about that or what do you see with that?
Sarah Ridge:
I would love to test skaters’ foot strength. Now we just like want to throw everybody into the foot strength device and see what happens. Get these measurements. But I think it would be interesting to get skaters, given how much time they spend doing activity, in basically a cast. Then really, I think they could do strengthening obviously, but also changing the boots. They probably do quite a bit of dance, so you can think that should hopefully strengthen. But I don’t know. We just don’t have the data. Like I it’s hard to say-
Steven Sashen:
I’m just going back to the whole speed skating, collapse skate thing. I’m just thinking if there were any opportunity to articulate the ankle or the foot in some way. I can’t imagine that wouldn’t be beneficial, if there was a way of figuring out the engineering of it.
Sarah Ridge:
I agree. It definitely makes sense. It’s logical, again breaking into this market and having somebody who has enough money to do something about it and and to do it well.
Steven Sashen:
It also occurs to me that if someone actually did make that, the odds are pretty high, that it would be banned immediately. Because they’d have a patent on it, they’d have the rights and everybody else would freak out. I don’t know, there was a thing, Puma made a spring spike, they called it a brush spike. Instead of big metal things, it had like a bunch of little things. Like literally imagine a whisk brush, just glued to your shoe. There were some runners who did really well wearing it, so of course probably inaccurately, people concluded that they did well because of the shoe. But then the shoe was suddenly magically banned and the argument was, “Well, it’s bad for the track.” It’s like, “Really?”
Sarah Ridge:
Interesting.
Steven Sashen:
Go take a look at a Mondo track after one year of people running on it, there’s nothing that’s good for that track. The idea that these little things are somehow worse for it, is ridiculous. But it’s funny. It really is interesting to me, how in the running world, if someone does well, the first thing people assume is, “Well, it’s got to be the shoes.”
Sarah Ridge:
That’s interesting.
Steven Sashen:
I did a podcast or more accurately a rant, like a week or two ago, about the sub two hour marathon. My basic position was look, Kipchoge running sub two hours, it’s amazing. But this guy was already the most amazing athlete that you could find for the marathon. He ran a two 2:1:38, that was his world record. Then he runs two minutes faster, under ideal circumstances. That’s less than five seconds per mile different, and you think it’s because of the shoes? Okay, fine.
I haven’t asked you this, and it occurred to me to do it. How do I want to put this? I don’t like using the word passionate, but I know people will. I’m very, very attached to the whole phenomenon of promoting natural movement. It made a big difference for me, it made a big difference my wife and now for hundreds of thousands of people, that have gotten into Xero Shoes and other truly minimalist footwear.
It also really motivates me because, there are big companies making a lot of money, doing things that are demonstrably, not good for people. That just infuriates me. And something that Irene Davis said to me early on, which is, “If we just get kids wearing shoes like yours, in 20 years, we won’t be treating adults for the problems that they currently have.” That’s also highly motivating even for someone who doesn’t have children.
It’s not just because we like the idea of changing the world. We like the idea of changing the world, I don’t care if anyone knows that I had anything to do with it, or my wife feels the same way. But it’s an important thing. This is my position. I have no idea what your fundamental, philosophical take is about the whole natural movement thing, given what you’ve done and what you might have in the works.
Sarah Ridge:
Well, my kids wear minimalist shoes, as you see.
Steven Sashen:
Says something.
Sarah Ridge:
I do feel like it makes so much sense. When we got into this, at least for me, when we started that first running transition study, I was interested because I’m interested in preventing overuse injuries, particularly in athletics and in these landings and things like that. So that’s how I got interested. As we’ve kind of gone down this route of, what is going on at the foot? What does the foot do?
Steven Sashen:
Why do we have one?
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. What’s the role in the force absorption and the protection of the impacts through the rest of the body? That’s kind of what has gotten me really interested and kept me kind of going on this route. And then the idea of being able to prevent foot problems. I don’t know, just as you age. We just tested a whole bunch of people down in the Huntsman World Senior Games in St. George. It was really cool. It’s fascinating to see, like 120 people speak on their daily variety of things over the years. Just getting a sense for what happens as you age too. Have you talked to [Bell Seiko 00:52:39] yet?
Steven Sashen:
I’ve talked to Bell at a couple of events, but we haven’t done this yet. Was that research with just women or was it mixed? I can’t remember.
Sarah Ridge:
It was women with-
Steven Sashen:
Osteoarthritis. And for people who don’t know, talked about it before, the short version is wearing minimal issues, not even ideal minimal issues, frankly, but wearing minimalist shoes, knee osteoarthritis one way, is the easiest way to put it. A little glib, but nonetheless, it’s something that most people would tell you, couldn’t happen. That was really fun.
Sarah Ridge:
They took less pain medication, they had lower joint loading. That does seem totally counter-intuitive, to put somebody who has osteoarthritis in minimalist shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Well, again, it seems counterintuitive, only because-
Sarah Ridge:
Because?
Steven Sashen:
Well, because it seems obvious for reasons that it shouldn’t, that cushioning must be good. If you get rid of it, that must be bad. I love to point out a couple of things. I go, “Well, first of all, foam, any kind of cushioning, it doesn’t matter what it is. Any kind of cushioning is basically tuned to a particular force, particular weight, particular speed. You are probably not hitting it with that force, or certainly not all the time. But almost always never. Secondly, it breaks down almost immediately.”
I saw some research, Brian showed this. I hadn’t seen it before. He had done some research on foam where they were just basically banging it over and over and over to see how fast it wears out. Shoe companies love to say, “Well, replace your shoes every three to 500 miles.” He saw how badly the foam had degraded, it was basically not at all different between 200 miles and 300 miles, and really not much different between 100 miles and 200 miles. It really turned into crap at about 60 miles.
Sarah Ridge:
Oh, man.
Steven Sashen:
That’s another thing. Oh my God, I took a video, I was in the airport. There’s a guy walking in front of me, in a pair of regular motion controlled, padded shoes, and he’s falling off the insides. Just completely falling off the insides. The padded foam had totally degraded. We posted this, this is going to say a lot about the world. We posted it on Facebook and people were making, I would call it the appropriate comments, about how the shoes are not great for you. We posted on Instagram and people accused us of body shaming. It’s like, “No.”
Sarah Ridge:
That’s not the point. No.
Steven Sashen:
It was shoe shaming. That’s what we’re doing. That was just incredible. The thing I say is, given all of these things about foam, which would you rather have? Some manmade thing that breaks down, is not tuned for you, or a almost instantaneously adjustable, not infinitely, but massively adjustable spring mechanism, that’s built into your body that just doesn’t really wear out? Everyone goes, “Well, yeah, that makes sense.”
But we’ve been so taught that, there’s a mechanical or product solution, to almost every problem. Again, cushioning feels good the moment you put it on. That doesn’t mean it’s good for you as all the research that Christine Power is doing, showing the more cushioning, the more impact forces you have. Or at least they don’t get reduced. It’s not really counterintuitive, but in a way it is. It’s kind of a goofy thing.
I think that people just need to have the experience. The number of people that I know who switched to something like a Hoka or some other maximally cushioned shoe, who for the first six months, first year, even, we’re going, “Oh my God, these are amazing. They’re allowing me to run.” At the two year mark going, “Oh my God, I can’t run. My knees are shot. It’s too high.” But again, that research is not going to get much attention, because there’s not hundreds of millions of dollars worth of product behind it.
Sarah Ridge:
Interesting.
Steven Sashen:
Anyway, what’s on the horizon? I’m going to ask a fun question. If you had unlimited resources, what would you want to study?
Sarah Ridge:
I’d love to do, follow-up like a long-term type study, starting with kids, different age groups and kind of following them along for a while and seeing how their feet… Well, kids with how their feet develop and then older people like changing their footwear and seeing what happens when you talk about blood flow stuff.
Wayne Johnson:
Yeah. We’re looking at blood flow and the effect of narrow toe box shoes. Going into the foot. We measured a 60% drop, just by taking the big toe and moving it over towards the other toes.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, my God.
Wayne Johnson:
Some people were able to come back up, but on average, they stay down 30%.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Wayne Johnson:
Now we want to keep working with that and to see what happens when you’re actually in a shoe and you do this. Is this leading to the development of plantar fascial apathy, and some of these other problems?
Steven Sashen:
I’m going sort of in the opposite direction because I’m not making any medical claims when I say this, but given what you just said, it’ll be intuitively obvious. The number of people who’ve told us that they had things like diabetic neuropathy or other foot related issues, who once they’re in something that lets their toes spread and bend and flex and move, they find some relief.
And I go, “Well, it’s not surprising,” and arthritis too, “you’re moving and improving circulation. That’s going to be a big deal.” Again, not really well researched at all at this point and something that most medical professionals will tell you the exact opposite. “You need to get in a big, thick…”
Jesus, there was a video that I saw, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, sponsored some research from a product called, I think Vibe Forward. Don’t hold me to it, but I think I’m right. It’s a vibrating thing, you put it on your ankle. They showed that when they use this thing, people with Parkinson’s symptoms, suddenly would walk better. You could see their mobility was way improved.
I immediately looked in our email database and on our website for people who left reviews with the words Parkinson’s and found all these people saying, “Oh wow, my Parkinson’s symptoms seem to go away or are reduced when I’m wearing a minimalist shoe.” My response is, “You don’t need a magic vibrator, you just need to use your feet.” When you look at the shoes that the people were wearing in this study, this five-four study, massively big, thick, stiff, ridiculous shoes, that you can’t move in. And these were shoes that were clearly recommended to these people.
It’s like, how does this make any sense? It just mystifies me. I wish we had the kind of resources where we could just start sponsoring the research and get the word out there. Even though, and I’m going to head into an entertaining direction, even though fundamentally all the work you’re doing is for nothing.
Sarah Ridge:
Thank you.
Steven Sashen:
I’ll tell you why I say that. I’m being facetious, but it’s something like when Irene has her Science of Running Medicine events and is presenting the physical therapist, her very, very lucid and clearly laid out, step-by-step, explanation of how modern athletic shoes caused the problems they claim to cure and how getting out of them and into something that actually lets your foot move naturally, can actually be a big part of the cure. For some people, the entire thing. Others, some gait retraining is involved as well.
I said to her, after you’re done talking, people should run out of the room, tackle me and steal all my shoes. But they don’t. What happens is, half the room will come out and check out what I’m doing and half of them, a quarter of the room total, will get really into what we’re doing. But 75% go back to what they were already doing. The question is why?
My proposal, my supposition, is that the people who are in that room, trained professionals that they are, they think that they made a rational choice for wearing the shoes they’re wearing. Even if that rational choice was listening to some 21 year old kid in a footwear store, who just repeated something that he was taught by a shoe sales person from a company. The thing that we know about human psychology, is that we don’t like to change our minds, that presenting new data, contradictory data to something we already believe, usually locks in the existing belief, instead of changes it in any way.
All the research is, at best, giving ammunition to the people who are already true believers. Actually, that’s good. At best taking the people who are maybe in the middle, who don’t know yet and giving them something. But there’s a big, giant swath that you can tell them, “If you wear those shoes, you will get cancer, your kids won’t get into college and you won’t be able to use the number three anymore.” And they’ll still go, “Yeah, but I like them.”
And this is the thing that I’m really curious about, is how do we take the information that we have and what makes things change? What makes people change? I don’t have the answer. But obviously, I want to have these conversations as part of the answer. Hopefully, it will be part of the answer. It’s a really tricky thing that I love the work that you guys are doing. I so want to try and figure out how to turn it into something that makes people go, “Oh, geez.” And try something different. That’s the magic question. That’s the holy grail.
Wayne Johnson:
Yeah. For sure.
Steven Sashen:
Come on, what do you recommend?
Sarah Ridge:
Wayne, any thoughts?
Wayne Johnson:
Just keep doing it, right? Get it out there and get feet stronger and get people moving and start spreading the word more. But it’s going to take a lot of time.
Sarah Ridge:
I think one of the things with academia is, we do a bit preach to the choir. We talk to each other at conferences. So kind of getting out of some of those, like when we have results that really are applicable to a pathology or something like with the blood flow stuff.
Steven Sashen:
Right, that.
Sarah Ridge:
That’s the point where we can really-
Steven Sashen:
Super cool.
Sarah Ridge:
… get a no-brainer like, “Here’s the connection.” Then going to places, conferences that physicians attend, maybe. That family physicians attend or something, to be able to try to get it to them. Physical therapists and trying to get it to those people who can get it to the general public. There’s a writer like the New York Times who does a lot of stories on running, like a lot of the opinion pieces and stuff on running. She wrote up the Vibram study, the first one did, Gretchen Reynolds.
That gets a lot of attention. Is that going to convince anybody? I don’t know. But at least it gets it out. Maybe somebody’s thinking about it. Yeah, I think you’re right, word of mouth-
Steven Sashen:
Word of mouth is definitely the big thing. When I think about it, I say, we’re trying to do two things. We’re trying to create a grassroots groundswell, because when people have the experience, when people put on a shoe that doesn’t squeeze your toes together, that lets you move, let you feel, it’s an eyeopening experience. The more people have that at a certain point, there’s a critical mass and things shift.
The other thing is doing the top down version that we talked about earlier, getting influential people who can tell a convincing and real story. The challenge of course, with those kinds of people, frankly, is that many of them are, I think the technical term is nuts.
Sarah Ridge:
They have to be, to be good at something.
Steven Sashen:
Oh yeah. I say that with nothing but respect. You know at any given point, someone who is your best spokesperson, could go off the rails and be doing something a little crazy. There’s a bit of a catch 22 there. Push and pull you, or something is tough.
Sarah Ridge:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
But yeah, the experience is definitely the thing that makes people get it. It’s funny. I’ll have that happen here where people will put on one of our shoes, they’ll go walking around, their eyes pop out and they go, “Well, wait, don’t I need arch support?” It’s like, “I don’t know. How you feel just now?” They go, “Fine.” I go, “Then you don’t. Take your time, let your foot build up some strength.”
Let me kind of jump into the end of this. If people want to find out more about what you’ve been up to, or just in general, where should they go? Other than stalking you, which we don’t want them to do?
Sarah Ridge:
We keep trying to get a website up, but we’re not very good at this. This is another issue with academics. We’re not salespeople. We’re wither not marketing of ourselves. We’re terrible at that kind of thing. Most of our stuff ends up at conferences and-
Steven Sashen:
Well, the simple thing, if someone goes to PubMed and they search for your names.
Sarah Ridge:
Google Scholar.
Steven Sashen:
Scholar? Because I do think it’s important for people to see this. I think it’s also important, and I wish there was something we could do about this, for people to learn how to read a study.
Sarah Ridge:
So much.
Steven Sashen:
Because man, some of the stuff that’s been “anti barefoot,” could not have been more poorly done, and people don’t know it. There’s a guy here, I won’t mention him by name, but his initials are Roger Crumb. I like Roger very much, but I said to him, when you put out a study and it’s got 10 people who you say are, we mentioned this earlier, habitual, barefoot runners, and I know those people and they are not, that’s a challenge. And people don’t know.
Or when you say that the Nike Vaporfly, everyone who wears it had a 4% improvement in VO2 Max, but there’s no real correlation between V02 Max and performance. Because otherwise, if Kipchoge put on the Vaporfly, he’d run 4% faster, which is way more than two minutes over the course of a marathon. People don’t know how to look at this stuff. And it’s hard because it’s written not for normal humans. wish there was some way of…
Maybe that’s actually the thing, is someone needs to do academic English translations.
Wayne Johnson:
Yeah, totally.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. I feel like there’s more open access journals these days and stuff too. I’m wondering how long it is before something like, Plus One says, “Okay, give a lay person summary of your article, in addition to your scientific article and abstract and all that kind of stuff. Do something that like anybody can read him and actually understand what you were doing.” There is a disconnect.
Steven Sashen:
The day that I started Xero Shoes, which was almost 10 years ago, and it was then Invisible Shoes, my first thought after I put up a website was, I’ve got to find a way to create some sort of umbrella organization to collect all this information, to put it in some usable format, to have some PR people who are talking to the press in a way on a regular basis so that when some news comes out, there’s a voice that’s not just shoes are awesome and anything else is going to kill you.
It’s not something that I have the ability to do now, but is way high on my fantasy, to-do list. Hopefully, we’ll be able to be part of making that happen at some point. In a way that doesn’t make it feel like it’s just propaganda.
Sarah Ridge:
More propaganda from this side, now.
Steven Sashen:
The joke there is, that when people say, “Well, there’s a debate about natural movement.” I say, “Well, no, there’s not. There’s people who say we’re wrong and they’re wrong. There’s no debate.” People go, “No, no. There’s a debate.” It’s like, “No. If you look at the research, there’s really no debate.” And people don’t want to go there.
Sarah Ridge:
Yeah. It’s true. It’s challenging.
Steven Sashen:
Well, on that note that makes us all want to cry.
Sarah Ridge:
I know, man.
Steven Sashen:
First of all, I just want to thank you both for being here. It’s been a total, total treat. I wish there was some way that we could… Another thing we could do is have, actually, I thought of this the other day. I wish we had some way of just collecting money from people to support research. If we had an app that every minimalist shoe company was able to put on the checkout page of their things saying, “Would you like to donate a dollar or 10% or whatever it is, to support research?” I don’t care. I’m research agnostic. I think that would be a really cool tool. Collect that somewhere and have it accounted for appropriately. So that we get research and Lamborghinis.
Sarah Ridge:
Exactly. We have to drive ourselves to places.
Steven Sashen:
And fast. And you got to get there quickly.
Sarah Ridge:
Right. Exactly. And in style.
Steven Sashen:
You got stuff to do. You got to collect another 60 people for a study.
Sarah Ridge:
Exactly. Well, thank you so much for having us.
Steven Sashen:
Total, total pleasure. Again, if you can send me so I can put it in the show notes, whatever you can about how people can actually do some foot strengthening. We’ve talked about it a little bit, but it would be really fun to post that for people and give them something they can do. Of course, we just want to hear what their experience is.
As my sign-off goes, for those of you listening, watching, et cetera, thank you so much for being here and putting up for my crazy hair day. And Sarah, just that one flyaway that you had.
Sarah Ridge:
All good now.
Steven Sashen:
Yours has calm down. Mine did not. Again, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them and all the various places you can. If you have some that you want to email us, drop an email to [email protected]. Again, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe and like, and share and review and do all those things that you know how to do. But most importantly, enjoy, have fun and live life feet first.