Matt Minard’s purpose is to help people. With a passion for human movement and fitness, he is driven to help others learn how to move their bodies strategically and efficiently to reduce the risk of injury and increase longevity.
Matt was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio after earning his Doctorate of Physical Therapy in 2013 from the University of Dayton he moved to Charlotte, NC to complete a year long clinical residency program to specialize in orthopedics. He was then presented the opportunity to open a small outpatient hospital-based physical therapy practice at the Harris YMCA. He spent the next 7 years there, building the program.
When the pandemic hit Matt saw a need for helping people run safer as it was the only form of exercise with gyms closed.
He is now the small business owner of Human Movement Optimization (HMO), LLC, which encompasses his Learn 2 Run brand and continuing education courses.
Aside from building his new business and consistently striving to better himself to better help others, Matt loves exercising and spending quality time with his fiance (Alex) and dog (Moxie). You can see what he’s up to on his Learn 2 Run social media platforms and website.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Matt Minard about the physics of proper running.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How you should reverse engineer the mechanics of running to achieve efficient movement.
– Why runners should lean their bodies forward and swing their arms with their legs when they run.
– How running with minimal vertical displacement is ideal, as it reduces strain and stress on the body.
– How running on a treadmill activates different muscles than running on the ground.
– How it’s important to land with your foot beneath your center of mass while walking or running.
Connect with Matt:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@learn.2.run
Links Mentioned:
learn2run101.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
I did a call, some of you may have seen. If you didn’t, I’m going to point to it. You’re going to want to see it. There’s a guy who calls himself Chase Mountains. He did a video about how basically barefoot shoes are bad or how, no, actually, sorry, how the barefoot industry is lying to you. And I called him out on that and happily he took me up on the offer to have a conversation rather than doing what people do on YouTube of just like reaction videos back and forth and back and forth and it’s just whiny and bitchy. He had a conversation that was really, really interesting and what I really love is that conversation led to this conversation. More about that when we get started 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.
And we are breaking down the propaganda and the mythology and sometimes the straight out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to walk or run or play or do yoga or CrossFit, whatever you like to do. And to do it enjoyably, effectively, efficiently. Wait, it’s the Friday, I said enjoyably, right? Of course I did. I knew I did because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep doing it. So make sure you’re finding something that you like to do. I’m Steven Sashen, co-founder, CO-CEO of Xero Shoes. Here’s the T-shirt to prove it. And we call it the Movement Movement because that includes you, more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. The you part, simple. Feel free to go to our website, it’s at www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
There’s nothing you need to do to join, but you can subscribe to hear about future episodes, you can see all the previous episodes, you’re can listen to the previous episodes. Find us on social media and find other places where you might want to get this podcast if you don’t like the one you’re getting it from now. And if you want to help move the movement, then like, share, review, thumbs up, bell icon on YouTube, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. All right, let us jump in. Matt, do me a favor, tell people who you are and what you’re doing here.
Matt Minard:
My name is Matt Minard, technically Dr. Matt Minard and it’s pronounced “my nerd.” It’s easier to remember I was made fun of it when I was younger, but I’m trying to use it for my advantage in marketing. “My nerd”, I’m a huge nerd, but basically I’m on a mission as well to just help the world run safer and I think movement is so much a part of life and when we don’t have movement from a mental and a physical standpoint, everything goes downhill and I’m just really passionate about helping people move smarter, safer, and faster. Mainly with running, but also with walking and standing and squatting. I just want people to be able to enjoy and have an outlet of movement. So that’s my mission.
Steven Sashen:
Can I thank you for saying I’m passionate about instead of saying, my passion is. I don’t know why, but that just gets on my nerves.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I can see that.
Steven Sashen:
It seems a little too pretentious in my brain. It’s like, my passion, yeah, I don’t really care. I’m passionate about, I’m interested in that. That works for me.
Matt Minard:
I like that. Yeah, I never thought about it that way. Now I’m never going to be able to hear that again. Thank you for ruining that for me.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a handful of those. I also, I’m not a fan of certain nouns that have become verbs. I don’t like when someone says I was tasked with or gifted by both of those make my head explode. I don’t know why.
Matt Minard:
Well, now they’re going to make my head explode.
Steven Sashen:
Also. Oh, the one that really gets me, very unique. It’s either unique or it’s not. You can’t be more one of a kind.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, good. I’m glad that’s not in my vernacular. Don’t worry, I won’t be saying that.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I refuse to use their vernacular. No, that’s not true. Also, just because, and hopefully people will chime in with their verbal pet peeves, myriad of. That one gets to me, it’s like myriad is much, many, you don’t have much. It doesn’t work that way. Anyway, all right. I think those are all my verbal pet peeves of the day. So back to you.
Matt Minard:
Also real quick, I want to give you and Chase Mountain credit because the fact that he posted that interview with you guys afterwards I thought was courageous because you did such a good job of explaining and breaking down what he said and got him to really admit that it was clickbait for the title and I thought it made him look kind of not great and the fact that he still posted that I thought was really courageous because you did a great job.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I think the thing that I was most grateful for is that he cut it in a way that worked because we talked for two and a half hours.
Matt Minard:
Oh really?
Steven Sashen:
He cut it down to an hour, which was great. And I think he came out looking good because he was willing to investigate his own thinking and go, oh, okay, here’s why. I get it. I get your point right now. Because many people aren’t. Most people when you confront them with a… Well, I’ll tell the story this way. My best friend calls me like 20 something years ago and he starts the conversation by saying, “You know what your biggest problem is?” And I went, “Oh, this is going to be fun.”
And he says, “You like to tell people when they’re factually inaccurate or logically inconsistent or in some cognitive bias or just wrong about something, because you like to hear things like that. It makes you go, oh, and then you think about what’s going on. But I’m here to warn you, most people just think you’re an asshole.” And I said, “Oh my God, you just explained the last 30 something years of my life. I never put it together. You’re totally right.” He goes, “See, you just did it.”
Matt Minard:
Did that change anything for you going forward or no?
Steven Sashen:
No, I still can’t help myself when I hear it. I mean, the best I can do on a good day is I can walk away. But if I can’t walk away, I just can’t stop myself and I try to find ways of highlighting these things in a way this is as un-obnoxious as I can where it almost sounds like I’m agreeing, but I’m kind of putting a few question marks in there. This happened recently with someone close to the family and what they believed was completely not true, but there was just no way I was going to get them over the fence. So I just threw in a couple of things to inquire about or through an alternative explanation that was simpler and let them do with it what they will. But it’s almost impossible for me to not say something.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I feel like if you can keep the emotions out, you can have a really productive conversation and learn and see from both sides and just not get too worked up or take it personally.
Steven Sashen:
Look, speaking of taking it personally, this is going to get crazily personal. Something that’s been happening in my relationship with my wife who I adore. We’re having our 20th anniversary coming up in a couple of weeks. We knew each other and been together, we were together for almost four years before that, knew each other for about four years before that and only now coming up on our 20th anniversary, we started exploring our relationship in different ways where I’ve discovered things that I thought she did or thought and found out I was completely wrong, which was just wonderful.
But the biggest thing is I now have, and I will admit I got this from a psychologist, I think it’s a psychologist named John Gottman who’s done a lot of research on relationships. When my wife has some issues, some problems, some complaint about anything, including me, and this is where it gets more challenging, I literally grab a piece of paper and a pen and my entire job, the moment she says, “Can I talk to you about something?” Is my entire job is to understand what she’s saying from her perspective so that I can say it back to her.
I’m writing down every feeling that she says and what’s going on and my entire job is to be able to say back to her, “Okay, here’s what it sounds like.” And it makes total sense to me that if A then B and I’m not allowed to then correct it or do anything with it. It’s like, just understand it. And having that job is great. In normal conversations, I don’t have that job and it takes effort and I want to do it with someone who I love. To do it with some rando who is just telling me that what we do for a business here is bullshit, I’m just not there.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I’m with you. Yeah, there’s the time and a place for sure.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So all right, but to the fact that you brought up Chase and well, I want to ask two things and you can start with either one of those. One, given all the things that you’re doing with people, I want to know how that happened, how that started, what you were doing before, what led to that? But also… Yeah, just do that. Screw the Chase thing for now. Maybe we’ll come back to that.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, so I’ve known I’ve wanted to be a physical therapist since I was in high school. Like a lot of people that are physical therapists, I had an injury and that’s kind of what led me down. I was a baseball pitcher, had physical therapy for my elbow, always knew I wanted to do something in the medical field and I just love helping people and I’ve always been into exercise and working out. So I’m grateful that I found physical therapy in high school and knew what I wanted to do. So went to physical therapy school afterwards. I wanted to keep learning. I’m a lifelong learner. I came down to Charlotte, North Carolina and did a one year orthopedic residency just to specialize. Because in school you get a lot of the books and the anecdotal stuff, but not the clinical aspect. So I did a year of a residency to specialize and then fast forward the last 10 years, I’m always trying to improve in some aspect of my life.
And when the pandemic hit, I went from working two jobs. I was still doing outpatient orthopedic physical therapy full-time and coaching at Orangetheory in addition, and then the world shut down and I didn’t then realize how much of my self-identity I put into my job and just helping people and everybody was running outside because all the gyms and everything were closed down. So I took to Instagram and started just putting out free educational information about hey, how can you run? How do you get started running? Mechanics, some more simple stuff, but try to say it in such a way that’s more relatable. And over the last three years it just kept growing organically and I took the leap about a year and a half ago, I took one year off from corporate physical therapy and I just built programs for military members that training for races, for running training plans, education information.
And I’ve really spent a lot of time reverse engineering the mechanics of running an efficient movement and then how can I teach this and describe this in such a way that I can get this to the masses and teach the teachers? And just how we can all be on the same page a little bit more from just movement and movement standpoint. So that’s kind of where I’m at. I’ve got a podcast, I’ve got Instagram, I’m back to treating patients in person, because I missed that aspect, but I’m just really passionate about helping runners. Because a lot of times runners have a lot of anxiety, they have a lot of stress. Running is like their outlet, mental and physical, and when that’s taken away, things get ugly real quick. So I love empowering people to just be able to, if you don’t want to run, that’s fine, it doesn’t bother me at all, but if you do want to, I want to help you to do it smarter, safer, and faster.
Steven Sashen:
Well, so I’m going to go back to the reverse engineering part. So talk to me about what you did there and if there was anybody that you were reading, studying, looking at in that process or if you were just doing your own analysis.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, so I went a lot with just biomechanics, anatomy, and physics in reverse engineering the goal of running at the end of the day, it’s moving forward and so then we can ask, is what we’re doing going towards the goal or the principle of moving forward? And if it’s not, then it’s not efficient. So I’ve kind of reverse engineered three aspects of moving forward to try to pay on the principle, so to speak. The first one is leaning forward and we talked about this a little bit, how you’ll go in front of somebody, put your hands on their chest, have them lean forward and what that does, it helps to shift their base support and their center of mass a little bit closer so they don’t break or slow down as much. So leaning to help maximize momentum and then gliding, propelling, how they move their body forward is pushing the ground backwards instead of down and backwards.
So we should see this more when they leave the ground, moving purely horizontal, not moving up and forward. And the third aspect of, okay, is this helping towards moving forward or not was the arm swing. The arms should help work with the legs reciprocally forward and back, but some people don’t use their arms at all and then the legs have to work a little bit harder or they’re moving their arms, but they’re doing what I call an axing motion where they’re going up and down and up and down. If their arms are going up and down, up and down, their legs are going up and down, up and down. So teaching more of movement from the shoulders, like a hand saw forward and back forward and back. So from a biomechanics and anatomy standpoint, thinking which muscles are responsible for pushing backwards, extending backwards, and every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction pushing the ground backwards.
The result is my body’s moving forward. Then I can say, well, if I’m on a flat surface, do I need to use my calves to propel? What do my calves do? My calves plantar flex, I push down and as a result is going up and kind of separating out the propulsion piece of running versus the landing and the shock absorption and the eccentric component. But that’s kind of what I’ve done is just whittle down of like is it necessary? And then tying it to different analogies like a canoe and a paddle. Just trying to conceptualize, if I’m in a canoe, how I move forward, if all I have is a paddle, I put the paddle in the water and I push the water backwards and that’s the same analogy of my body and my leg. Same with a skateboard, pushing the ground backwards.
Then I can think, well, it’s not super efficient then for me to push the water back with a paddle and then take the paddle up, up out of the water, maybe even go around in kind of a circumduction motion and then put it back in. We can start to conceptualize, is that helping with the goal of moving forward, yes or no? If it’s not, let’s get rid of it and just how to kind of focus.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, so I’m going to ask people to rewind and listen to that like 10 times. So there was a whole lot packed in there, which is really good. Now I want to throw a few things in there. So I’m about to go to an event, this called the Mountain Land Running Summit where they have three or four, actually more than that, a number of people presenting information about running form and about running injuries and the cause and cure thereof. And if you look at most, especially treadmill data, but you can see this out in the wild too if you film somebody on a track, there is about a three to five centimeter up and down thing of your center of mass.
So you land, it drops a little bit at toe off. I don’t want to use toe off. Once your foot’s leaving the ground, I don’t want to imply that you’re pulling your toes off the ground or pushing off the ground to get there. Then you start to rise again. So even when you see sprinters and it looks like their head is just on a plate moving flat, if you look at their center of mass, it’s bouncing, going on a nice sine wave, about three to five centimeter difference. Are you suggesting that that should not be happening?
Matt Minard:
No. So you’re bringing up a really good point. That vertical displacement that happens ideally is happening lower than their height, lower than their vertical height. And like you said, when they land there’s that eccentric, that shock absorption where they start to come down, but then they come back up to their starting point. But what I’m not insinuating is they then go up above their height. Ideally they could run in a room, I’m six foot one, I could run in a room that has a ceiling height of six foot one because I have that softening in the knees because I have that lean forward and all that up and down that’s occurring is occurring closer to the ground. But yeah, if there is no movement at all, then there wouldn’t be any shock absorption. It’d be a very stiff, hard landing. But yeah, I’m definitely saying less is more from a vertical displacement standpoint and just making sure that it’s occurring lower to the ground.
Steven Sashen:
I think that we just came up with a new biofeedback running training device. So something that just rolls along with you that’s maybe a half an inch taller than you are and if you’re smacking your head on it then-
Matt Minard:
So I’ve had fun ways of trying to how can I… And it is hard too on a treadmill, because I’m trying to teach people to push the ground backwards.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s just make this short. Treadmills suck.
Matt Minard:
They’re very challenging for working on mechanics, but what I have done though is I’ve made that ceiling where I have, kind of like at the doctor’s office where they measure your height, I put that on the wall and I have a cardboard ceiling and I’ll have them stand up vertically and I’ll measure it to their height and then at least if it’s cold or whatever out, if we don’t have the ability to go overground, just show them what that feels like and say, “Hey, don’t bonk your head.” Or, “Hey, can you move in such a way that minimizes the up and down?” And this more gliding and translating the body forward versus up.
Steven Sashen:
Well there’s two things. So I say treadmills suck mostly because I keep thinking about, some people have done research and they go, “Hey, the kinematic of how you move, basically the way your body is actually moving is the same on a treadmill versus on the ground.” I go, “Yeah, but the muscle activation is completely different.” I mean, when I’m on a treadmill at full speed, I start to over stride because I just want to catch the front and not fall on my face. And I know that all I need to do is catch it and the treadmill’s going to get me to mid-stance and I’m fine after that. But on a track, I don’t do that. On a treadmill I do because it’s a whole different game and it looks the same. It’s just not. But the… Oh crap, what was the thought that went along with that?
Oh, but here’s my question for you. If you give people this idea of thinking about moving forward and about pulling or pushing the ground behind you, and pushing is the operative word, and I’m going to be addressing that here. Actually let me say it this way. So Dr. Irene Davis, when she was at Harvard, I don’t know if she’s doing it at the lab she has now at the University of Southern Florida would use a force plate treadmill and there’d be a screen in front of the treadmill and she shows you how much force you’re hitting the ground with and she would put a line on that screen and say keep the force under that level. I don’t remember if it was 13 newtons, 16 newtons. It was some interesting number, but I can’t remember.
Anyway, I said to her, “How many people start running and when they do, they look like they’re walking like Groucho Marx really fast?” They’re putting their foot way out in front of them, they’re catching the ground, they’re pulling it behind them, barely pushing behind them, but pulling it towards them and then a little behind them and she said, “Yeah, I see that happen.” I go, “Yeah, because you get people the idea of, one idea moving forward for example, and there’s so many different ways of doing that, especially if you want to keep the same height.” You can literally Groucho Marx it, bend your knees and just walk really fast with a big, long, crazy, crazy stride. Did you see people doing that when you first started thinking of this?
Matt Minard:
The difference of walking versus running is just there’s that period of flight time where both feet are off the ground.
Steven Sashen:
Oh no, they’re still both feet off the ground. But again, the key thing they were doing was reaching way out in front of them, plantar flexing so they’re landing basically flatfooted, and then pulling the ground underneath them.
Matt Minard:
What I found is instead of focusing on the landing, the foot that’s coming to the ground, focusing on the foot or the leg that’s on the ground and pushing the ground back and kind of separating out the front of the stride so to speak, and the back of the stride, and it does require some patience to land, have that forward momentum, my body’s translating forward and then push the ground back. Versus if someone’s doing that, they’re kind of shuffling, they’re not actually opening up their hip, they’re just quickly moving their feet forward and back. So it is, and that’s what is cool, that some people that we’ve talked on my podcast about the tennis ball necklace where I take a tennis ball, fill it with pennies, put it around a shoelace and teach people to run using the queue, keep the ball as quiet and still as possible and it’s so cool.
Steven Sashen:
Pause it. Because I want to describe that a little differently, because you went really fast on that. So you put some number of pennies in a tennis ball, which you can’t do by magic. You need to put a slit in the tennis ball and then thread a shoelace through that, put it around your neck. So the thing is like, what? Sternum height or-
Matt Minard:
No actually, near the belly button, the navel closer to the center of mass.
Steven Sashen:
So I did that on purpose. I knew the answer. And then again, keep the tennis ball from making a bunch of noise. So continue.
Matt Minard:
What’s cool though is some people with that will immediately get it and some people, it has absolutely no effect or it can make things worse. And like you’ve talked before about different types of learners and how people process feedback, but that’s what’s cool is that’s just one option. So how can I give feedback to the runner? Some people are visual learners, some are auditory learners, some are tactile and just using different forms of feedback to try to enhance the learning or quickly learn that. But to your point, yes, some people will, they’ll do more shuffling. And the key is too with the lean. If you’re looking at somebody run and you’re looking at them from the side, I talk about their torso being like the hour hand of a clock. If somebody’s at a 12 o’clock posture, meaning they’re straight vertical, they’re actually leaning back. If they’re not having that slight forward lean, it’s usually in their low back that they’re arched.
And what that does is that keeps their center mass back so they’re landing and loading in front. The other that people will do is they’ll be that one o’clock posture, well, they’ll lean forward, but they’re hinging at the hips and that also is keeping their hips and their center of mass back, which again, breaks or slows down. It ideally is that 12:30 posture where there is that slight forward lean of the center of mass, but still keeping the head, the shoulders, the hips, and the ankles kind of vertically stacked but not vertically perpendicular to the ground.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t know what you just said in all of that that made my phone start dialing someone’s number, but Siri heard you and started calling somebody.
Matt Minard:
Maybe it’s Irene.
Steven Sashen:
No it wasn’t. It was somebody in Colorado. If it happens to anybody else, I want to hear about it, because that was pretty funny. So no, that’s really, really good. What I like about this also, and let’s talk about walking briefly, because this is the instruction I give for walking. I say, and if people haven’t heard it, cool. And if you have, my apologies for the next minute. So I say, stand up, lift your left foot half an inch off the ground. Don’t do anything with it. Just let it hang there. With your right leg that’s on the ground. Push the ground behind you like you’re a skater, and use your left leg just to keep you from falling on your face. Don’t try to walk, just push that foot behind you until your left foot just naturally touches the ground, because you’re not doing anything with it.
And then it’ll keep you from falling on your face. Then bring your right leg forward just even with your left leg, keep it a half an inch off the ground and push your left leg back like you’re pushing the ground behind you like you’re a figure skater or a speed skater. And if you do this, you’re going to look like a bad version of Frankenstein’s monster. Because you’re going to go like… One step at a time and then slowly just try to find a way to even that out. And the next thing you know, the fun part is you’re using your glutes and hamstrings. You’re not using your hip flexors overly much and you’re just kind of gliding across the ground just like you were describing. You’re not going up and down, you’re not doing any of these extraneous motions. And the one place where I do it differently that’s really fun, it’s actually the exact same thing in a weird way, is going uphill.
I add one other twist, literally I add a twist to it. So if my right leg is going back, I twist my body to the left because then as I’m going to lift my right leg off the ground, by twisting back the stretch in the hip flexor makes that right leg spring and come forward. Because I’m going uphill, it’s just going to hit the ground right underneath my center of mass as I’m twisting now towards the right because my left leg is behind me. And it’s a really cool way of just using the hip flexors and just that twisting motion to make it so you don’t even have to push the ground behind you. That’s just happening naturally as you sort of twist your way uphill. You look like a complete dork, but it’s super fun, because it takes no effort.
Matt Minard:
I love what you said about the walking. That’s exactly what… I had this aha moment. It’s like we separate out walking, running, jogging, sprinting, but the direction is still the same. It’s still forward, so we shouldn’t do something different. So exactly what you just said for walking, same rules apply for running. It’s just the three F’s more force pushing the ground back further and at a faster rate. But that’s ideally, if we were to watch you walk in the sand and as you go faster and there’s that point where it’s more efficient to leave the ground to move further forward, we should see an incremental increase in the distance of your step length between each step. But yeah, exactly the same thing with running. Push the ground back. The front leg is just catching you. You don’t want to kick stand and land too far out in front. And you also made the reference before of the Flintstones. I like that, of just how they move the vehicle forward is their feet. They go backwards, they push the ground backwards.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, their feet are behind them spinning. They never catch up. Yeah. Well, you just raised another point that’s fun, which is that you, in a weird way, you kind of alluded to it, but we never brought up the question of where you’re supposed to land on your foot. And this came up in a conversation about walking. I think I didn’t ask me anything on Facebook the other night and someone asked me something about where are you supposed to land on your foot? And I kind of lost it and I said, “Who gives a shit?”
The answer is, for running and walking. It’s the same thing. You want your foot to be underneath your center of mass as much as you can. And then where it lands, whether you roll over your heel, whether you’re landing on your midfoot, whether you’re landing on your forefoot, it’s going to vary based on whether you’re going uphill, downhill, fast, slow, accelerating, decelerating. Don’t worry about that. It’s like one of these things about running and walking, especially in the barefoot world that’s just become mythologized and misunderstood by people who don’t have eyes to see in my opinion.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I have a somewhat controversial statement, but you probably will agree with it. To land on anything other than your heel is not efficient. If someone’s landing on the ball of their foot, they’re jumping or they’re breaking. If somebody’s landing on the midfoot, they’re shortening up their strides so much or they’re also jumping. But same with walking. If you try to walk and land on something other than your heel, it’s slow, it’s awkward. Same with running and it’s more about the relationship to your center of mass than it is what part of your foot. But that does make a difference. If you’re making contact to the ground with the front part of your foot, the ball of your foot, that’s further away from your center of mass, which also is going to break and slow you down as well.
Steven Sashen:
So I will disagree and here we go. Well, first of all, if you watch any sprinter, no sprinter ever lands on their heel and their foot is at best a few maybe a foot length ahead of their center of mass only because there’s no way to do it otherwise. But there’s no sprinter ever who lands on their heel, nor do they ever land midfoot. You’re landing on the ball of your foot for a number of reasons and it’s actually faster because if you’re doing anything else, if you’re trying to land on your heel and roll forward, there’s no way, if you’re sprinting, you can’t spend much time on the ground. A good sprinter, your foot’s on the ground for less than a 10th of a second, and there’s no way to roll across your foot in less than a 10th of a second.
Matt Minard:
And that’s good. But remember, it’s sprinting, it’s high, high power output, short period of time.
Steven Sashen:
True, but… So yes. Well, and it’s that combination. Part of the high power output is because of the short period of time and because you’re trying to maximize that tight springness of your body that does start with your foot. Walking, what I found or my thing there is it’s totally… Well, how do I want to say it? If you are leaning forward even a tiny bit and starting to run even a tiny bit and you’re landing with your foot underneath your center of mass as much as possible, your heel is already, it’s just not going to get there. So the only way you can heel strike is with a little bit of over striding. So it’s sort of like, how do I want to say this? Actually, here’s the thing I’ll say, if you stand, we talked about this three to five centimeter thing that you’re doing with your body, stand on something that’s like three centimeters high. And for people who don’t know what a centimeter is, that’s a little over an inch.
So stand on something that’s an inch high and step off of it and see how you land. And you’re never going to land on your heel. You’re always going to use the whole spring mechanism. You’re going to engage the arch, you’re going to use the ankle, you’re going to bend your knees, you’re going to bend your hip that little bit.
Matt Minard:
You made a good point though. But that’s above or higher than the ground. If you just take a step and we’re running on a level surface, there isn’t that upwards part.
Steven Sashen:
True.
Matt Minard:
And with sprinting too, like you said, the ones that it is efficient, if they land on the ball of their foot, they pretty much stay on the ball of their foot the whole time. The heel usually doesn’t even hit the ground.
Steven Sashen:
It’ll come down, it’ll come down. It may.
Matt Minard:
But they’re doing more of a high cadence or high frequency. There’s different ways to increase your speed. You can increase your cadence or the frequency, or you can increase the power output and increasing the power output, pushing the ground back with more force and further, which does increase your contact time on the ground. And that’s like with that paddle analogy. To go faster, if I told you how do we go faster, you would put the paddle in the water and you would push with more force and further back. So there’s going to be more ground contact time. But some people will choose to not do that part. They’ll just increase their frequency because depends on their muscle fiber orientation, fast versus slow. So there’s kind of different schools of thought of how genetically or how people will choose to run really, really, really fast.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s an interesting question. Again, with sprinting, you’re not going to see increased ground contact time at all. In fact, quite the opposite. It depends on where… Well, let me say that with a qualification, there are three different phases of the race. There’s the drive phase, there’s actually four if you think of it this way, the drive phase where you’re getting out of the blocks, you’re trying to get to speed, the transition when you’re going from basically leaning forward to getting more upright, maximum velocity phase where you’re practically just bouncing, because it’s mostly vertical force you’re applying to the ground. And then that last phase of the race where you’re just holding on and trying not to fall apart, because you always slow down at the end of the race. The question for what makes a better sprinter is how far you go until you’re in that slowing down phase, and then how slowly you slow down.
But if you look at ground contact time among sprinters, and there’s sort of two points to this. The first, if you look at ground contact time among sprinters, it’s pretty consistent and there’s no one who’s really pushing the ground behind them. It’s really, especially in max velocity in that from 50 meters on, it’s very, very vertical. But the second thing is that the example that I just gave is a bit of a problem because this is an idea that I first heard from Nicholas Romanov who came up with what he calls Pose Method. And is that the better you get at anything, the more the people who do that, that what they’re doing starts to converge into a few very common factors that are practically identical, small bits of idiosyncratic difference, but very, very small that don’t impact those key things that people are doing.
So I want to be clear, some of the things I’m talking about, it’s a bit of a rarefied world to a certain extent, but I would contend that, I mean, when I’m running and not sprinting, if I’m even running in super slow mo for me, whatever that is, I literally can’t get my heel on the ground first because of where my foot is hitting the ground. I would have to have so much dorsiflexion to pull that off that I’d be sort of stomping the ground with my heel instead of using my foot by landing sort of midfoot ball on my foot.
Matt Minard:
And that kind of depends on your lean too. If we were to look from the side, where’s your center mass? Where’s your posture? A lot of times with barefoot or getting that feedback where it doesn’t feel good if you hit the ground really hard, we’ll naturally tend to adjust our center mass and our posture such that it’s less stress through the foot. But there’s another point I wanted to make too about when you talked about the sprinters and the pushing. Imagine my goal is to jump as high as I possibly can. How do I do that? I squat down.
Steven Sashen:
We’re starting from stand. Okay, got it.
Matt Minard:
Yep. And how do I go higher? I push with vertical force straight down through the ground and I go up. To move forward, there has to be some component of also pushing back, otherwise we’d just be going vertical.
Steven Sashen:
Well, kind of. Again, this is one of these things. I mean, Peter Weyand has taken a look at this. Again, just using sprinters as an example for the fun of it. At max velocity, and they’re only doing this for between 10 and 20 meters tops. And that’s elite sprinters. People at my age, 10 meters on a good day. But when you’re at max velocity, it’s literally just bouncing up and down because you’ve already built the speed. It’s just momentum and you’re trying just not to slow. You’re not trying to keep that momentum and you don’t need to do anything other than that little bit of bouncing off the ground and then it starts to slow down. And things are a little different because the other research is, the people who are faster do have a slightly greater horizontal component when they’re doing pretty much everything.
But it’s very, very tiny at that point. And because again, you’ve built up this crazy momentum. A fun example is, I have two videos on our website about this. One is I think I might have two runners where I’m showing this. I know there’s at least one running across a skating rink. It’s fully iced and they’re running full speed across it. Now, they use carpeting to get to full speed and then they just run across the ice after that. And the reason they can do that without a problem is that it’s almost all vertical force. There is nothing horizontal and it’s happening quickly enough that they’re not creating that horizontal force that turns ice into water and then they fall in their face. But then the other one that I find really interesting is the Boston Dynamics robots, where if you watch what they’re doing, it’s mostly, again, predominantly vertical.
Now, again, I’m not saying this is what humans do, but it’s interesting to see the way they’ve made robots run is it’s mostly bouncing. It’s mostly vertical with a tiny bit of horizontal. But to a point that you just made though is, and I’m just asking this to hear what your opinion is. So clearly if you take off your shoes, you’re not going to overstride for, well, you can overstride and land on the ball of your foot or midfoot, you’re not going to overstride and heel strike because that just hurts like there’s no tomorrow. And that’s usually the thing that we’re teaching people is that, hey, take off your shoes or wear something where you’re going to get that feedback that’s showing you, you’ve been over striding, you’re landing on your heel way too far back, et cetera. So are you suggesting that the form you would adopt from running barefoot, because it hurts to land on your heel, is not what you should be doing even if you’re in a flat shoe?
Matt Minard:
No. What that I said that would lead you to think that?
Steven Sashen:
Something about, well, just the whole idea of landing on your heel. You were saying that if you’re just landing on the ball of your foot or midfoot than you, whatever you said before, like four minutes ago.
Matt Minard:
But what you said, what’s most important is where in relationship to your center of mass.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Matt Minard:
That’s the most important part of it is we’re in relationship. But yeah, I think I just always root back into the physics and Newton’s third law of every action equal and opposite reaction. In order to move up, there has to be a downwards force in order to move forward. There has to be some bit of backwards force. And yeah, there could be a lean and gravity can help create some of that fall, but it’s really more about your momentum and trying to slow yourself down, less breaking when it comes to that.
Steven Sashen:
To be clear, and Danny Dreyer’s a dear friend, so Chi Running is where they talk about more than anywhere else about this using the lean to let gravity pull you forward. Let’s be clear, gravity only pulls you down. But what’s happening when gravity is pulling you down to prevent yourself from falling on your face and just going down, you do something to move yourself forward at the same… Basically in a similar way to the speed that you’re moving down, you just have to move forward a little faster than that or you’ll fall on your face.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I mean it is, I’m with you and it is like if I’m a normal standing, kind of stable stack position, that center, that line of gravity is going through my shoulders, through my hips to my arches. When we do kind of shift the weight forward, it does create some of an external moment where if the muscles aren’t on, then you will fall on your face. But you’re right, it’s not a lot of speed. It’s pulling you down towards the ground, but it’s not like a… And it’s crazy, the Pose Method they talk about, it’s not the muscles that move you, it’s just the lean and gravity.
Steven Sashen:
No, no, I don’t think… I’ve actually-
Matt Minard:
I’ve talked to a lot of them about that and gotten into about that. There’s a guy named Dex that is-
Steven Sashen:
I’ve talked to Romanov sitting two seats down for me for three hours, and he never said that. What Nick said and Pose Method, I’m not suggesting that everyone get into Pose Method or not. I mean, either way. But what’s interesting about Pose Method is that where it came from was he was working with ballet dancers in Russia where he was born and seeing that it’s all about here’s these postures. Every movement has specific postures that you go through to do the movement correctly. And it occurred to him that people aren’t doing that with other sports. So he was curious, what are the poses, what are the positions that you have to hit to run effectively?
And in fact, one of the things that I really like-ish, is if Nick saw your logo behind you where it’s showing where the runner’s knees are in relation to each other, when that person, they’re not quite at mid-stance, but they aren’t ground contact is, he would say that ideally you want that back knee, that trailing knee just a little further forward so that your knees are almost in line with each other. If you’re a sprinter, possibly even having your back knee becoming your front knee. So it’s a little ahead of the knee of the foot that’s on the ground.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I went through all the pose courses back in 2014. I went through all of it and I used to until I started actually asking some of the questions about that. But anyways, the big thing with them is they’re more about pulling, they talk about pulling the feet up and yes, with dancers, their base support, they’re kind of staying still. Where it just completely changes is if we’re moving forward, if we’re moving forward versus just standing still and staying within that base support.
Steven Sashen:
Well, again, I’m not trying to be a defender of pose, but I’m going to be a defender of what happens once you start getting other people teaching what you say. So they do have this thing of getting your foot off the ground and flexing your hamstring, et cetera. Only because someone came up with that as a cue, not Nick. Someone came up with that as a cue for how to get that back leg, that recovery leg moving forward faster. And so it was misunderstood. Because if you’re just lifting your foot off the ground, you’re not doing anything, obviously.
And here’s my big complaint with Pose. So what Nick did when he was here, he took a video of me running in the street and he said, “Now let’s take a look at that.” This is at 240 frames a second, “And let’s compare you to Usain Bolt. Not saying you’re going to be as fast as Usain Bolt, but we’re going to use him as an example of great form.” Now the joke is when you look at a video of Usain Bolt in slow motion, he’s got great form, and then you look at the other seven guys in that race, they do too. It looks exactly the same. So what you see is when his foot hits the ground, his knees are practically lined up with each other perfectly. When my front foot hit the ground, I got three frames worth of video before my knees catch up.
And he goes, “You got to get there. You got to get that knee forward faster.” Which could mean that the front leg is coming back faster as well, so it could be more scissor-like. But either way, here’s my complaint. My complaint is I said to him, “Well, how do I do that?” And he said, “It’s about awareness.” And I said, “That can’t be the answer because I’m really aware of what’s going on, but I can’t seem to be doing it differently, so I need something else to cue on to figure out how to get there and I haven’t found that yet.” And I think that a bunch of people came up with cues like that whole thing of lift your heel up, it’s like a bad cue that can be helpful, but is not really. But to your point, yeah, the physics of it’s out of whack, but it could be a queue that for some people gets them to do the right thing, even if the queue was the wrong idea.
Matt Minard:
And to compare you running at your speed to Usain Bolt, it’s like comparing apples to oranges. At that speed-
Steven Sashen:
It’s not.
Matt Minard:
He’s going like 15 or 16 miles per hour.
Steven Sashen:
No, no, no, no, no. So I was in Berlin at the World Championships when he set the world record. At the 70 meter mark, few rows off the track with a free beer in my hand. I was in the VIP section because my wife’s best… One of her good friends, her husband was the head of Berlin Tourism. That’s just the fun part. Anyway, he’s running by me at just shy of 29 miles an hour, which by the way, when you see a human being running by you fast enough to get a ticket in my neighborhood, here’s what your brain does. It goes, what? But here’s the kicker, if you took Usain Bolt, so my top speed, I haven’t measured it in a while, it’s somewhere around 21 miles an hour.
Matt Minard:
I’m sorry, were talking, you were sprinting when he videoed you.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Matt Minard:
Okay. I thought you were just going like a normal pace, like slower. So yeah, then what I said has no relevance. If you’re looking at sprinting and sprinting, that’s fine. Where I get into problems is when people will do that though, they’ll compare Usain Bolt to someone running at a gear one or a base pace of a nine minute mile. That’s what I thought you were talking about. But yeah, with sprinting, yeah, that’s comparable.
Steven Sashen:
I’ll tell you what is funny, but you look at Usain Bolt and you look at Eliud Kipchoge, fastest marathoner and their form is so close to identical. It’s crazy. And this is a thing, again, first of all different shoes. And that does make a difference because if Kipchoge’s got a shoe with a two inch heel, you’re going to land on the heel. You basically can almost not avoid it. Actually, wait I take it back. Hold on, I’m being full of shit for a second. You look at Kipchoge in the beginning of his races, total four foot midfoot guy, I mean like 100%. When he gets tired and he’s still going crazy fast, totally heel striking, but the guy’s doing what he has to do to get to the end of a race in two hours and a few seconds. But fundamentally though, it’s still the same.
He’s still getting his foot underneath the center of mass. He’s got more backside mechanic than front side mechanics. His stride is behind him. He’s pushing the ground behind him, and I want to come back to that in a second. So it is interesting that basically what we’re… And I’ve had arguments, I haven’t had them in a while, thank God, but used to have arguments with people online where they say, “Well, how fast do you think Kipchoge could run 100 meters?” And I say, “I don’t know, like 13.5.” And they go, “But he runs 15 second hundreds for 26 miles.” I went, “Right, he can’t run much faster. And you’re forgetting that you have to accelerate to get to that to whatever your top speed is. That takes a bunch of time. So he can run about a 13.5, trust me.”
And people go crazy about that, they lose their minds. But I want to highlight something from a biomechanical standpoint. We’ve said this, and I think we touched on it a little more before, the idea of pushing the ground behind you rather than pulling, which again, if you’re over striding, you’re always pulling that first phase talk. I’ve said this, but I want to hear it from your voice. Why is that a bad thing? Pulling the ground towards you?
Matt Minard:
So I think just being sure we’re clear on the terminology too. Pushing is moving away from the body versus pulling is moving towards. A row is pulling, a bench press is more pushing and it changes when the perspective is when your feet are in front of you versus behind you, the body is still the reference point. But when it comes to the pull, that’s that analogy I use of the paddle in the water. If I’m focusing on, and like we’ve talked before about driving your knees, if we’re focusing on pulling up, that’s not where we get a whole lot of that power from.
It’s more the paddle in the water and pushing back, going away from your body versus if we’re bringing that paddle all the way up out of the water, it’s not necessary and there will be some passive, organic, the faster we go, you will see the heel and the foot come up higher off the ground, but they’re not trying to do that. It’s just happening as a result of running faster. But to focus on pulling up, that’s the key is just reverse engineering forward. Going up, there’s creating some vertical movement with it.
Steven Sashen:
I’m thinking more about this phenomenon where people are typically over striding and they’re pulling the ground towards them. That part of the pulling, because for some reason it comes along with this idea of being taught, you’re supposed to land on your heel, roll onto your foot and then pull the ground behind you and then push your toe off at the end. Out of those five things I said four of them are way out of whack. But I’ll poison the well and just tell you what I was thinking, because many people, when they think about pushing the ground behind them, they are going to think that it may start with their foot in front of them where they’re doing this initial thing that’s a pull before they get to the hip extension and start pushing.
Matt Minard:
And what I find is it’s all about the lean, all about the lean over striding, just where the lean is just the definition of just where’s my weight, my center of mass in relationship to my base support. If someone’s able to even pull the ground when their feet are in front of them, usually they’re going to be a little bit more upright or not leaning. Because if you have that appropriate leaning forward, hinging at the ankles, the ankle, it’s impossible almost to pull the ground back. But I like just what you said even before about walking, just pick one foot barely off the ground and just focus on the foot and the leg that’s on the ground. The other leg is just kind of catching you, but that’s it. It’s just catching you.
Because if you’re trying to meet the ground sooner or faster, muscles are good at absorbing shock and force when they’re relaxed. If you hit something when the muscles are already in a shortened position and already contracted, they’re not going to do a great job of dissipating forces. So to have that much of an active response when your feet are coming down to the ground, it just won’t be as effective for shock absorption, force dissipation. Yeah, I kind of think once you’re… You could call it that pose position or that position where the body is at the lowest vertical point, arms are even, thighs are even. That’s that moment where things are balanced. It’s the moment after that, the frame after that where the body goes forward, the foot starts going behind.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I agree. And in fact, my suspicion, and I could be completely wrong, but it’d be fun to check, is that if you looked at the total amount of horizontal force that a sprinter is applying and you take the time out of it, just literally just the amount, because… Well, force is a function of time, but regardless, but you know where I’m going. And you compare that to even someone running slowly, you might find that it’s basically the same kind of thing. Or more accurately, I’ll say it this way, for two people of identical mass to move forward some amount of distance, the amount of horizontal force you have to generate has to be the same. But the amount of force you’re applying to the ground and the angle you’re applying will be different based on how short or long your ground contact time is. That was physics 101.
Matt Minard:
Yeah. It kind of depends on how fast they’re trying to move their body, how quickly they’re trying to translate their body.
Steven Sashen:
How quickly they want to get there. But in terms of the actual, just the amount of distance, two people of equal mass, it would have to be the same amount of horizontal force fundamentally. Unless, yeah, now that I-
Matt Minard:
I think that’s more like kinematic versus kinetics. The kinematics should be the same. But kinetics, when it comes to more like the amount of force, I think in order… I mean, if we were just to measure somebody’s posterior backwards force to the ground to get that forward movement at slower speeds, if they had that amount of force production at a slower speed, it would be like they’re hopping or skipping. But I think the direction is still more the same, the kinematics of it, but the kinetics of just how we create more force, how we move faster is more force.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I’m just thinking about, just again, trying to, in terms of reverse engineering, what are the common factors? And clearly to move forward, you got to be pushing something backward. And if you’re going to move faster, you get to a certain point where you don’t have the luxury of keeping your foot on the ground that far or that long because you won’t be able to move faster with that same ground contact time. And then you start. So it’s kind of like, I remember, God, organization is not my skillset. So one of the things that I have lost over the years is a study that I saw that was showing what happens to the amount of apply to the ground when you increase your cadence. So for people just to be clear, the number of steps per minute. Without running faster, just changing the number of steps per minute and it was a U-shaped curve.
So the faster your cadence was going, the less force you were hitting the ground with until you get to a certain point at the bottom where it reverses very quickly, because when you start sprinting and then it goes through the roof really fast. So it was a fascinating thing because first of all, in the barefoot world, there’s this idea that 180 steps per minute is some magic number, which is not true. It depends on lots of things like your limb length and weight, et cetera. But regardless, it was a really interesting thing to seeing that dip in force as cadence went up and then the reverse of that. And so basically in my little thinking experiment that we just went through for no real good reason about horizontal force moving forward, that was partly in my brain. That’s what that was.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I think in the cadence like 10, 15 years ago, that was the main thing that people were doing was manipulating cadence. And there is some good research showing a 10% increase in their self-selected step rate can result in a 10 to 15 decrease in vertical ground reaction forces. And I think subconsciously why it happens, if someone has that metronome and they’re trying to increase the number of steps, they tend to stay lower to the ground, they don’t really have as much time to go up in the air. They’re trying to stay lower. And the other thing is their foot’s not going to keep going out in front. We talk about if they’re reaching in the front, if they have less time or they’re trying to increase-
They’ll land closer to underneath them. But I can show some people it can, just increasing their step rate can make those changes, but a lot of times it doesn’t. And that’s why I work on other ways to try to do that without just burning them out with increasing their step rate.
Steven Sashen:
Well, you’ll be happy to know that at another event that I go to called The Science of Running Medicine, which is a couple people, again presenting their stories on what causes and cures running injuries. When it was Irene Davis and Dr. Bryan Heiderscheit and Dr., oh gosh, Powers, I’m blank on his first name. I always do.
Matt Minard:
Mike, is it Mike Powers? Chris Powers.
Steven Sashen:
Chris, thank you. So Chris, his whole thing was about lean Bryan, his whole thing was about cadence. Not entirely, but that was like their focus. So what you’ve just described is putting them together. And when you put that together, it leads to Irene in an interesting way, which is just saying, yeah, just get your feet underneath you and stop doing stupid things, which is a gross oversimplification. And apologies to Irene if she by chance ever hears this, I’m going to see her next week. But the thing, in fact, what’s interesting with Irene’s research, the biggest thing that was showing is another thing we talked about is, once you get out of regular shoes, that clears up many, many things, because you can’t do things that hurt and that cause problems when you’re out of shoes. You can’t have certain kind of form issues that you can have when you can’t feel the ground or when something’s getting in the way of what your normal kinematics would be. And so-
Matt Minard:
You get that immediate feedback.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. I mean, she’s got videos of people who had massive, massive problems, who the moment they took off their shoes, instantly gone. And I saw that when I was in the lab with Bill Sands too. We took a bunch of runners and just getting them out of their shoes for 90% changed their gate entirely into ways that were all beneficial. We could see with all the research that we were doing, and for those 10% that it didn’t change immediately, you just had to say things to them like, “Hey, stop doing that.”
Matt Minard:
It’s usually just one piece. Whether it’s one misconception or one piece that once they can address that, everything kind of smoothly falls together. But I’m a huge fan of Bryan Heiderscheit. I’ve taken a course in person with him. I think I mentioned before, Irene Davis, my professor at University of Dayton got his PhD with her, from her. And I’m doing research at the University of Dayton on my tennis ball necklace theory, and there’s going to be collaboration with Irene. She’s been a great force in the running research world for a long time.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, she’s the godmother of it and is just one of my favorite people for so many reasons. It occurs to me, when are you going to market your tennis ball thing? You can’t use an actual tennis ball. You have to have something made especially for you.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I don’t know. That’s more your expertise. I could pick your brain about it. I do sell them and I have a course where I pretty much teach you those three skills of swinging your arms, leaning, and gliding of what the ball should do and what the ball shouldn’t do and how to interpret what the ball is doing from an auditory standpoint or a tactile standpoint and how to self-correct. And then take the tennis ball, necklace off and mimic the mechanics. But I’ve had people all over the world just making them, and most people just want to buy one though. Here’s free, here’s how you do it.
Steven Sashen:
This is how my business started. So I started, I made videos saying, “Here’s how to go make your own barefoot sandals. Here’s where to get the materials, here’s whatever. Or you can just buy it from us, because we already got it.” And people were like, “I’m just going to buy it from you.” So all right, we’ll have a licensing conversation later. There’s another one that’s really fun. I have a video about this on our website too. Did you see the guys from Stanford what they did with a rubber tube to teach proper running?
Matt Minard:
I don’t think so.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, this one’s brilliant. These guys were working on exoskeleton stuff with some people from Harvard and for some reason that joint venture fell apart. But the PhDs and postdocs in Stanford wanted to see if they could prove their theory was correct about maximizing or minimizing the amount of energy used when you’re moving quickly, whether you’re walking or running, with an exoskeleton. Well, the gist of what they came up with was they took a short piece of surgical tubing and tied it to their shoelaces, one shoe to the next. And on the one hand, it makes you run with good form because you can’t over stride, because your back leg is pulling your front leg backwards when it lands.
And I said, “Oh, it’s just about good form.” They went, “No, because we took someone who already had good form and it actually reduces the amount of energy you’re expending to run.” Because when your leg is coming forward and your knee is opening up, your foot is coming forward before it starts going down to the ground, your hamstringing has to slow your leg down from opening and that’s wasted energy. What’s happening now with the rubber tubing is as your hamstringing is opening, it’s pulling your back leg towards you. So it’s saving, it’s recycling energy was their term.
Matt Minard:
Yeah, interesting.
Steven Sashen:
And it was totally brilliant and it’s still on my list to actually commercialize that product. They went, “We’re academics, we don’t give a shit. Go ahead.”
Matt Minard:
Yeah, I like that. I think there’s so much room, the whole running mechanics and form, I think a lot of people just either we make it too complicated, but it’s such an untapped potential of, how can you move faster now? How can you pay more on the principle? How can you move in such a way that it’s safer and which can be faster, but people like more the performance. They don’t care about safety until they’re injured. Then they value safety a lot more once they get injured and they can’t do whatever it is they’re trying to do.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and that’s a whole other thing. And look, I’m going to put a pitch in now for something. If people go to footweartruth.com/250, 250, it’s an ebook that I helped put together. Pardon me, I got the hiccups all of a sudden. That’s combining two pieces of research. The first is from Dr. Isabel Sacco where she took runners in regular shoes, split them up into two groups, and one group did an eight week foot exercise program that I redeveloped actually. And then the other group didn’t. The group that did the exercise program over the course of the year long study had 250% fewer injuries than those who didn’t do the exercise program. Hence, footweartruth.com/250. Then I say, I added this part in the ebook research from Dr. Sarah Ridge showing that you don’t need to do the exercise program even though it takes a couple minutes a day, because you can just walk around in a pair of minimalist shoes like ours and build foot strength as much as the exercise program.
So the injury thing is very interesting. I remember when I got into sprinting or got back into it and I talked to this one coach, I was getting injured a lot. He goes, “How much can you deadlift?” And at the time, I’d never deadlifted before. So I went and tried it and it was like 250 felt okay. He goes, “Call me when you’re over 300. Because once you get to about double your body weight, a lot of things get better.” And it’s true for all runners. And so few runners actually do anything to make their body strong enough to be resilient enough to be resistant to injuries. So that’s a whole other thing that we could talk for hours about.
Matt Minard:
And the foot is the first connection between the ground and your body. And if you don’t have a stable foundation underneath you, it’s hard to build a house on sand. You have to have… There’s a point in diminishing return where once you have so much stability, but having too little can be a nightmare as far as… So yeah, I like that. People should like that better. Instead of doing all these exercises every day for a while, just put the minimalist ones on like you have and just walk and just move.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, run in whatever the hell you want. And this is what ebook says, run whatever the hell you want. Just wear these as soon as you’re done running. And by the way, it’ll make your shoes last longer. All right, well we’ve given people a whole bunch of things, including the idea that they’re going to come buy a tennis ball filled with pennies from you and hopefully not count the number of pennies. You should put a dime in there every now and then.
Matt Minard:
Little golden ticket.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, exactly. Definitely have a golden ticket. That’ll be a blast. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about what you’re doing, which I utterly adore?
Matt Minard:
Instagram is my main thing. Learn.2, the number two, .Run on Instagram. Learn.2.Run as well on YouTube. I’ve got a podcast, Learn 2 Run with Dr. Matt minard. And for more the training plans and programs, learntorun101.com, spelled L-E-A-R-N, two, the number two, run and then one, zero, one .com where I have options for clinicians, military members for training and all things running.
Steven Sashen:
Matt, as always, a total, total pleasure and I do hope people take you up on checking out what you’re doing. It’s delightful finding anyone who’s willing to look at something from the ground up, pun intended, rather than just regurgitate things that you may have heard from somebody else, which often is cues that work for some human being, but never anybody other than that human being. So I love the thought you’re putting into it and the work you’re doing and whatever we can do to be helpful, obviously, let me know.
Matt Minard:
Well, thank you, Steve. I really appreciate you and your passion and we both have just different ways, but we have the same mission of just trying to help people, help people move, and it’s a rewarding thing to be able to help people. So thanks for the work that you’re doing and you bring quality and education, which I think is probably the most important. And you do all that and you really put yourself out there and educate the masses. So it’s been an honor to be on here and to get to meet you and to get to know you. So thank you for having me on.
Steven Sashen:
Well, you’ll get over that part soon I hope. Every now and then I’ll meet someone and they act a little starstruck and I have to say, I got to say a dick joke or something, just to snap them out.
Matt Minard:
Snap them out of it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, just don’t do that. So anyway, for everybody else, thank you all for being here. And just a reminder, feel free to go over to www.jointhemovementmovement.com and check out all of Matt’s stuff. Find the previous episodes, find the ways you can subscribe to hear about new ones, find the ways you can find us on social media and engage with us there. And of course, leave us reviews and thumbs ups and five stars and hit the bell icon on YouTube and the whole thing. And if you have any suggestions, recommendations, requests, complaints, whatever, I’m open, just drop me an email, move, M-O-V-E @jointhemovementmovement.com. And until then, go out, have fun. Live life feet first.