Geoffrey Gray is the founder and President of Heeluxe who started the company by building custom high heels in a garage. He is the driving force behind Heeluxe’s mission to “Make Better Shoes.” Dr. Gray is inspired by the works of Salvatore Ferragamo and Bill Bowerman and their efforts to create footwear that is inspired by the human body. His background in Physical Therapy, professional athlete rehabilitation, woodworking, and classic car building give him a unique skill set to progress the research and design of all styles of footwear. As a speaker Dr Gray makes shoes science easy to understand which is why he is selected to speak at footwear brands, conferences, and television shoes all over the world.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Geoffrey Gray about what researchers say about comfortable shoes.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How the scientific community doesn’t know everything there is to know about feet.
– Why the traditional way to deal to deal with bunions doesn’t fix the problem they cause.
– How it’s easy to become myopic and blame one issue for the entire problem.
– Why running shoes are the most studied shoes on the planet.
– How researchers should be looking at the shoes people wear to work every day.
Connect with Geoffrey:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@heeluxe
Facebook
facebook.com/Heeluxe
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/geoffreygray
Links Mentioned:
heeluxe.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Steven Sashen:
A recent scientific discovery shocked me and probably will shock you as well, women have no feet. Yes, you heard me right. Women have no feet. At least that seems to be the way big footwear companies treat women and their feet and we’re going to find out more about that on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting with the feet first because those things are your foundation. We’re going to be breaking through the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the lies that people have told you about what it takes to run, to walk, to hike, to do yoga, CrossFit, whatever it is that you do on your feet and to do it healthily, enjoyably, efficiently. I’m Steven Sashen, your host and the CEO of Xero Shoes at xeroshoes.com
We call this The MOVEMENT Movement Podcast, because it’s a movement, that means it involves you, and I’ll say more about that in a second, and it’s about movement because, well, bodies are made to move. Here’s the part that’s about you. If you like what you’re hearing, then please share and like and review and give us a thumbs up and hit the subscribe button and the bell on YouTube, all those things you know how to do. If you don’t know how to find all those things, just go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com and you’ll find all the previous episodes as well as all the places you can interact with his content, etcetera, etcetera. You know how to do it. The simplest thing I can say is if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s talk about women who have no feet. I am joined by someone who I’ve known for a number of years and really, really admired and I’m really thrilled to have him on and it’s Geoffrey Gray. Geoffrey has a company called Heeluxe. Geoffrey, why don’t you say who the hell you are, what the hell you do and then let’s talk about women with no feet?
Geoffrey Gray:
Thank you so much, Steven. It’s a pleasure being here. It’s been great chatting with you over the years. Man, I don’t even know how many years that we’ve known each other now, but-
Steven Sashen:
It’s been more than either of us like to admit.
Geoffrey Gray:
I think both of us have a pretty young company still in our eyes, but we’ve been around for many, many years now. My name is Geoffrey Gray. I have a doctorate in physical therapy. That was really my intro into the world is I had a great physical therapy practice for over a decade, worked with everything from athletes to everyday people focused on how to keep their feet healthy. I was fortunate to be trained by some great mentors, some of the people that pioneered orthotic therapy and arthroscopic surgery of the foot. I just got to learn a lot about feet.
One of the things that really struck me through that whole time was that I still think to this day, the scientific community doesn’t know everything we need to know about feet. That means that there’s a lot of stuff that we can still explore.
Steven Sashen:
Let’s pause there. What are some of the things that you think they haven’t looked into? Look, it’s an interesting phenomenon that obviously a lot of research really kicked in around the time that people were developing modern athletic shoes, padded motion control, higher heel, etcetera, etcetera. A lot of the research has been slanted in that direction in large part because it’s been sponsored by the companies promoting those products. What do you think hasn’t been explored?
Geoffrey Gray:
Again, with feet, there’s so much stuff, but maybe if I give you guys an example of something that really changed how people understand feet, there’s a really great surgeon named Allen Selner out of Los Angeles, wonderful guy and very talented. Bunions are a huge problem. We don’t really need to get into the etiology of where they come from right now, but he was looking at … The normal bunion surgery is you have this big bony deformity on the inside part of ball of your foot. It grows out. It’s a big hard bony lump and the joints all stiff. The way to fix it is that they would just go hack off some of that bone, take a pin and shove it straight and force it to be there. The failure rate on these surgeries was horrible.
Steven Sashen:
I’m sure.
Geoffrey Gray:
The activity afterwards was terrible. I always knew that it wasn’t a problem. I just used to tell my patients, “That’s our last course. Let’s try and do everything else we can to get you asymptomatic or at least tolerably symptomatic before you to have that surgery because it sucks and most people have to have that surgery done.” Well, Allen Selner took a look at it and he’s like, “The problem isn’t the joint. The problem is how when the foot drops and the first ray starts to rotate, it changes the angle of the joint. Our body is smart and realizes that now that joint isn’t aligned how it used to, so it’s going to lay up more bony tissue to try and support that new orientation, but while that does protect it in the short term, it creates a longer term problems of a progressively stiffening bunion.”
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Geoffrey Gray:
The idea is rather than pin it straight, he’s like, “Well, let’s un-rotate that bone, take away the joint capsule that’s gotten like really thickened, so now the joint can flex again. We’re Good.” The very first patient I saw with this was somebody whose foot was so deformed, I couldn’t get them into a shoe when I was doing a shoe-fitting clinic at a store. She was on the elliptical two weeks post and training for a half marathon six weeks post. I was just blown away. Her joint function normally. It’s a little bit more of an example story of, there’s people out there that are thinking about the human foot in new ways and exploring and trying to understand what happens and it creates a major impact into all of our lives.
Steven Sashen:
It’s interesting, there’s variation. One of the things that I run into all the time is people saying, “Hey, I have plantar fasciitis.” Nine times out of 10, I look at them, and I say, “No, you don’t.” They say, “What? My super expensive doctor told me that I did and I’m going to get plantar fasciitis surgery.” I said, “Yeah, so your doctor and I say this with,” how do I well put it, “with all due respect, which means you have none, your doctor is a moron.” I say, “So here’s what’s going on. Let me just show you something.” You can see these things. I will stick my thumb at the spot in their calf that is clearly super tight and I’ll just dig in there for a while. Then I say, “Now, go walk around and see how it feels.” They walk around, they go, “Oh, my God, it feels 90% better.”
I go, “Yeah, you didn’t have plantar fasciitis. You have tight calves, pulling on the Achilles, pulling on the plantar fascia, etcetera, etcetera,” or I have people … I did this with a guy. I think he was a venture capitalist. He said, “I love what you’re doing, but I can’t wear your shoes because I have plantar fasciitis.” I said, “So can you just stand on your toes just to elevate your heels and stand on your toes?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Does that hurt?” He says, “No.” I said, “Okay, can you just run in place a little while staying on your toes, just really a little bit, just bounce back and forth?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Does that hurt?” He goes, “No.” I said, “You know why?” He said, “No.” I said, “Well, you’re keeping your plantar fascia in a strong position while you’re just bouncing back and forth. Can you just keep bouncing back and forth and lean forward and see what happens?”
Then of course, he starts running and just start … As he’s running, he’s screaming, “Holy crap,” and so I said, “So clearly, you don’t have plantar fasciitis or you wouldn’t be able to do that.” He still wouldn’t have the surgery. This is the thing that amazes me is that I guess it’s a case of, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, that there’s so much of that going on when it comes to lower extremities, especially feet and away.
Geoffrey Gray:
I think that circles back to everything we could talk about shoes or foot and ankle injuries is that it’s very easy to get really myopic and look at one feature of a shoe or one part of the body and say that, “This is the problem,” but really everything is connected. It’s a lot more difficult to look at the body that way, but when you do, you get these really great outcomes. It’s like that cause and effect like, “What are the things that influence all of this?” and trying to bring it down scientifically is a challenge.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s more to it than that. So your point of everything is connected, analyzing things that way is more complicated, this is I think the one of the real challenges and it goes in two directions. The first is I’m going to say from the consumer and I don’t mean someone buying a product. I’m like the consumer of physical therapy for example. They expect that there’s a simple, easy, quick answer for whatever they walk in with. Of course, as a medical practitioner, you want to provide some benefit. You want to provide what they want. You want to give them something so that, frankly, even if it’s a long course of action, you’re giving them something, so they get the hint that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, so they keep coming back and they’re compliant with what you’re recommending.
Then there’s the second part which is that most practitioners, and I’m going to upset a few people right now … No, actually, I won’t. I’ll say most practitioners don’t have the eyes to see. Seeing that complicated thing and trying to work and figure it out on the fly because you’re not going to just get it immediately and have an instant prescription, and when I said, “This is going to piss some people off,” I realized it was because everyone who’s listening to this is going to think, “Well, I’m doing great,” but Irene Davis does this event with Bryan Heiderscheit, and oh, gosh, I just blanked on a name. So embarrassing. Anyway, it’s called the Science of Running Medicine. His name will pop into my head in a second.
The two other people Bryan and the guy, whose name I’m blanking on right now, they present a relatively simple intervention for running injuries. Irene presents this whole very linear but complex thing for how to diagnose and treat running injuries that I would argue is probably more valuable in the long run but takes good eyes to see and people who are patient and willing to put in the work. When you go to the event, most people gravitate towards the other two because it’s the simpler solution. It’s easier to implement and easier for people to understand, even if it’s not the ultimate solution. Anyway, my point being-
Geoffrey Gray:
To making the complex simple, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yes, exactly. I love that you’re doing all the research you’re doing and we’re about to jump into that, but then there’s that other part before we get into the research of getting it out into the public. By public, I mean, both practitioners and consumers in a way that gets adopted and gets used. You’re doing all this stuff. Talk about the phenomenon of getting people to go, “Oh,” and then put it into practice.
Geoffrey Gray:
That ties into where I’m at now, right? After my PT career or not after, it started in my PT career, I started testing shoes, working with some new equipment that hadn’t existed before, but we had it at the pro athlete testing facility that we worked out of and finding out how shoes influenced first these athletes, both from an injury perspective and a performance perspective which I think is often ignored outside of running and just started studying things. Then footwear brands started asking you to test their product with a few goals. That was really the start of Heeluxe was footwear brands wanted to have access to independent lab testing that was unbiased. They wanted it to have testing done on actual people, doing the activity that they were normally doing in those shoes.
Steven Sashen:
I love that.
Geoffrey Gray:
Then they wanted the reports to be something that not only made the science easy for them to understand but also gave them recommendations on how to make their shoes better. Really, if I summarize what my life is about now is how do we help footwear brands make shoes better for everyone in the world and that can obviously be better as a lot of different things, but we’ve been boiling down for the last 10 years now. Next month is our 10 year anniversary.
Steven Sashen:
Congrats. We had ours four or five months ago.
Geoffrey Gray:
See, I knew it. We’re like on the same timelines on business side, right? It’s crazy. Congrats, man. It’s a huge landmark to make it this far.
Steven Sashen:
Thanks and ditto, it’s funny, I had in a previous company that I had, at one point, I was visiting my parents. They were having some sort of party. I don’t know what’s going on. One of their friends is the guy who had been the CEO and cofounder of some multibillion dollar brands. He came up to me literally crying and he said, “How long has your business been around?” I said, “Five years.” He goes, “Do you have any idea how rare that is?” It was like the first time that I took a moment to go, “Oh, wow,” and same thing where we are now. It’s 10 years.” I don’t want to go too far on this tangent yet. How often did you see that companies that were coming to you for research were actually hoping for some confirmation bias?” That’s a weird way of putting it, but-
Geoffrey Gray:
No, that’s a great question, man. I will tell you because when I started doing all this testing, luckily, it was almost like a side hustle at the beginning. I was still treating patients full time and I was doing the testing because I believed in it, but I was just doing it on the side and fitting it in where I could. It was just me. I didn’t have support staff or anything like. It was just me grinding this out because I thought it was important to do. A lot of the brands at first were coming to me didn’t want us to test their existing product. They wanted to test product that was in development.
That I was really great because that’s where I saw that we can make the biggest change and that’s what made me feel the best. To your point about, “How do we get this message out into the world?” rather than making published research papers that only other scientists were going to read, I realized that if we made the reports really easy that it would spread like a wildfire through the brand. Everybody would want to see it and then I would get asked to go to sales meetings. Then, there I could talk about what we did to make the shoe better and how it actually worked. Then now the sales people brought it to the stores and then the stores brought it to the customers and we created this loop on how to get the data out there.
There was a few studies early on that people contacted us and said, “Hey, we have this product. Here’s what we know it does. We just need to prove it so that we can market it.” I did not do very many of those studies before. I realized that we weren’t actually making those shoes better. It was, to your point, trying to reinforce their bias, and in doing that, usually those studies actually didn’t show what those brands would believe about their shoes. A lot of times, the products did do things well, or maybe if it did something well, there was a huge detriment that in my opinion really was not an advantage.
As a quick story, this is a quick example, because Heeluxe started in 2010, and as you know, that was a down economy, but we’re also in the midst of one of the fastest growing segments of the shoe industry ever which was the toning shoe market. The very first big brand who will remain nameless, but the very first big brand that I ever tested for came to me and said, “Hey, we have these toning shoes. There’s everybody”-
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, just to pause there. For people who don’t know, toning shoes, the idea was that by wearing these things, it was going to increase muscle activation. Particularly, it’s going to give you a butt like Kim Kardashian. That was one of the ads of the companies, and so yes, just by wearing them, you get toning. Now my contention was any toning benefits you would get were simply because these things typically weighed a ton, so it’s like having ankle weights on.
Geoffrey Gray:
You had an 18-ounce shoe, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, exactly. All right, so now that people have a context for what toning shoes are, please continue.
Geoffrey Gray:
Here’s the thing, some of the brands that were first out there did look like they had marketing campaigns based on science. It was hard numbers. It said, “38% more butt muscle.” This brand came to me and said, “Hey, this is the fastest growing new segment of the shoe industry ever. We want a part of it. Here’s our shoe. Can you test it? Find out calorie burn and muscle activation and all these things.” I was like, “Yeah, I can do that.” We went, tested their shoe, tested a bunch of the other products and tested against controls. Found nothing. To your point, there was only one shoe that showed any sort of difference, but it literally was a 20-ounce shoe, so like a quarter and these other ones that are half a pound.
Anyway, we didn’t find anything, and me, being the honest scientists, I was concerned. I talked to my mentors. I was like, “Well, what do I do? They’re counting on this. They have these marketing campaigns. They spent all this money.” He’s like, “Dude, you’re a scientist. You have to hold true to what you know is right with the data.” I went to them. Obviously, it’s a big deal for me. It’s a big company. I remember being on a phone call, presenting the data to them. We didn’t have Zoom at that time, so we couldn’t be face to face. Thank God. They yelled at me so bad. They were screaming, cursing. They’re like, “How the F did we waste all this money with you? Your lab is a piece of S. We could have gone to somebody else that has a better lab.”
That hurts when you’re a small company. I’m like, “I’m losing this as a potential client and they’re saying that I suck. That doesn’t feel good.” Fast forward six months later, I’m still in the PT clinic working part time at this point. Usually what I would do is I’d take my business calls before patients, lunchtime and at the end of the day. Lunchtime comes and I get a call and I look at the ID and it’s them. I’m like, “I want to talk to them. Last time I talked to them six months ago, they yelled at me. They told me I suck.” I didn’t take the call, but they left me a message and I didn’t listen to it, but I called my mentor. I was like, “Hey, Ian, what do I do, man?” He said, “Dude, we live in Santa Barbara. It’s beautiful. Your business is doing fine, you’re growing, you don’t need them right now. Just drive to the beach after work and if they start yelling at you, you just put the phone down and let them yell and get it out because it’s like you don’t need them.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize everything that had happened that day, but that was the day that the big lawsuits hit, $20 to $30 million lawsuits against these companies, bankrupted countless companies. 10 of the companies bankrupt and they called me to say, “Thank you because of the report that we gave them, they ended up killing that product line.”
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Geoffrey Gray:
That money that they lost, that they were able to save face and avoid all of these big lawsuits that had hit, so they were grateful. If anything, we’ve been rewarded for holding true to the science and moving against bias, but yeah, it’s a funny story to look back. I’m glad we did what we did at that time.
Steven Sashen:
That’s great. Well, look, the other part though, and to your point, about making it accessible to people so that it can arguably go viral, this is something that I’ve said to Irene and Sarah Ridge and a number of people who’ve done research on natural movement. I said, “The problem is when you publish this stuff, it’s just not sexy. It’s just not something that makes people go, ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah,’ and more, there’s not a billion dollar companies who are behind what you’re doing who have access to the media where they can just send a press release and it gets printed almost verbatim.”
Steven Sashen:
What I’ve been talking about lately is Nike, they sponsored a study that they say is independent which is a very interesting thing. They created the training plan again, for the independent study. I’m using air quotes a lot today. Now what they’re advertising is, “Hey, this product was, ‘designed to reduce injury.'” Well, that was the design. According to the study, it did reduce injury, except that what you don’t see until you really dig in and I did and I contacted the person who did this study is that they compared the new shoe to the old shoe and the new shoe was 50% fewer injuries. Except for the old shoe, their bestselling motion control shoe, during the course of the study, over 30% of the people got injured.
In the new shoe, “Only 15% got injured and this is supposed to be good.” The way it’s published in the media is, “Reduced injury by 15%,” didn’t say, “One out of seven people are still getting injured in a 10 to 12-week period,” which is mind numbing. There’s a thing I wanted to say about that independent study. Look, you know that my particular, and I’ll use the word bias for the fun of it, is that natural movement is the most important thing, that letting your feet do what they can is the most important thing and the design of almost every shoe that doesn’t allow that which is most footwear is getting in the way.
I love that one that you’d described before is how you were researching how the footwear was affecting people and performance because the way it’s typically presented, first of all, is that the footwear doesn’t have a negative impact on performance in any way, and in fact, it’s all sold with the idea that it’s going to improve performance and reduce injuries, the way that like the all the new Nike stuff, all the super thick, super lightweight stuff is now and this is something … Did you know Bill Sands?
Geoffrey Gray:
No.
Steven Sashen:
Bill was the head of biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee. He had a lab at what’s now Colorado Mesa University that was a million dollar lab, is super fun. People used to call him to have him research stuff. Same thing, they wanted to prove the point that they were trying to sell. I said, “How many times have you been able to demonstrate that the point they wanted to make was actually validity?” It’s pretty much none. What he would do when he got it in his lab, he’d put you in your favorite shoe and have you run on a giant treadmill, five feet wide, 10 feet long, in a Mission Impossible harness, so if you face planted, you’re going to just float over the ground which is super fun.
Then he’d filmed me at 500 frames a second which is critical. He said, “Anything under 250, you don’t get the data you need,” which seemed crazy to me until we discovered that when he analyzed me, in the last frame at 500 frames a second, my right foot was turning out slightly averting just before it hit the ground and that pointed us to a hamstring issue. It’s like, “Oh,” but anyway, so then he’d have you run your favorite shoes, then run barefoot, then just try every other shoe that you ever wore like doing an eye test, better, worse, better, worse, better, worse.
He found almost without question, 90% of the people without any intervention, without any instruction were better barefoot, and by better, it was meaning just looking at how their hips were moving, if there was vastus valgus, if their knees were caving in, how much vibration there was in their calf, how they were applying force in throughout, et cetera.
Every other shoe, he was then comparing to what was that now standard and very rarely did he ever … In fact, I don’t think he ever found anything that ended up being better than that. It was a question of, “How close can we get to that?” That was his thing. That’s the long prelude to, “You know my bias,” so I’m curious in terms of making shoes better, when I think the only way to make them better is to rip them apart and get rid of almost all the design features that makes them familiar. Talk to me about that whole thing that I just said that was going to turn into a question, but I got lost in it.
Geoffrey Gray:
It’s okay. This is what I like to do all day is talk about what is better. To me, the one thing that is really apparent in a lot of what we “know,” I’ll use air quotes too, what we know about shoes is really we know about running shoes. Running shoes have been the most studied thing on the planet. If you look at any of the footwear journals or any of the footwear research, it’s going to be over 90% running shoes. There are so many other important categories of footwear out there. Heeluxe, we’re really fortunate to test everything from high heels to hiking boots. We will test a sandal, a sneaker, a lifestyle shoe, a kid shoe, all these things, basketball, soccer, you name it, we’re testing everything.
That’s really opened our minds to the two things that we need to keep in mind when we’re looking at what makes a shoe better is, “Who is the individual? Then what is the specifics of the activity that they are doing?” We can say like, “Let’s go out of running for a second. Let’s look at the work and occupational category.” It’s one based on our database has the biggest opportunity for improvement because most of the shoes sucked. There are a few that are really good and that gap is massive. That’s how we know there’s massive room for the average to improve.
If we look at, say, a restaurant worker, a restaurant worker, they’re going to be moving in multiple directions over multiple surfaces with multiple contaminants. They’re going to be on their feet all day. They’re going to need something that is going to be dramatically different than somebody that’s working in a warehouse where they’re maybe working on solid concrete all day, probably not being exposed to as many things that can cause slip hazards, but there’s going to maybe be a lot more trip hazards. They’re maybe going to have a lot heavier things that they can drop on their feet, so they’re going to need protection there.
If we look at this, traction, some fatigue reducing elements is going to be really important for the restaurant worker. When we look at the occupational worker, things may be like an impact protection from dropping things on their toes like a toe guard and a met guard, those things are going to be more important or a trip guard so they don’t stumble over the electrical cable that was going across the walkway. If we look at these things, these are both categorized as occupational shoes, totally different needs. Same thing if we look at outdoor footwear right now which somehow gets grouped together, that could be trail running and hiking and even hiking can be light hiking where you go for a couple hours to a multi-day backpacking trip where you are going to be eight to 10 hours a day with a 60-pound pack on your back and exposed to different temperatures and snakes that invite your feet and all this-
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Geoffrey Gray:
We really need to look at, “Who is the individual and the activity that they’re doing?” This is what I love about all this is this gives us free rein to say, “There’s room for a lot of different shoes to exist on the shoe wall because not everybody’s the same.” We need to build lots of different shoes to meet these different categorical needs that also do change over time. The way people run now isn’t the way people were running 10 years ago. Nobody was doing ultramarathons 10 years ago and now it’s relatively commonplace. We do you need to change and constantly make things better.
Steven Sashen:
For some of the examples you just gave, there’s obviously usage-specific issues for something better, but what are some of the things that you’ve seen that are, say, common factors among better versus worse?
Geoffrey Gray:
A lot of things that we analyze in the lab, but the big ones that we really boil down to is comfort, function which is going to be more the flex and the torsion of the shoe and the impact protection, then we’re going to look at durability and traction. Those are the big four things that Heeluxe focuses on and there’s little subgroups in each one of those. If I look at comfort, I think comfort is the one thing that we all agree is important. I don’t talk to anybody that says, “I wish my shoes were less comfortable.”
Steven Sashen:
It’s a thing. When people ask me what I do for a living, I answer by saying, “Let me ask you a weird question. Do your feet feel better at the end of the day than they did at the beginning of the day?” and invariably they say no and from there.
Geoffrey Gray:
We’ve got to make them comfortable. Anyway, science, I think, is generally done a pretty bad job at making understanding what is comfort. We tried to set out and figure out like, “Let’s try and find new measurement systems that can help analyze like when somebody says, ‘This shoe is more comfortable,’ what is it?” The three things that we commonly test for in comfort is going to be the fit, which fit is our number one requested test. We use sensors to quantify shoe fit, underfoot cushioning and then temperature management. Now, here’s some of the things …
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting.
Geoffrey Gray:
… that’s pretty exciting for you because I think if we look back to that original Xero Shoe, right? The sandal, if we look at that, it was very thin. I had a pair of them. You have traction on the bottom, very thin amount of rubber or foam to distribute some pressure and then a really minimal upper, not to the use of cliched word, but if we think about this, two of the three things that influence comfort for us are going to be fit and temperature management. Now fit, it’s mainly around the ball of the foot. An original Xero Shoe, there wasn’t anything that was going to constrict the ball of the foot or the toes, particularly the pinky and the fourth toe. There’s a good chance that that’s going to be comfortable.
The other one that surprises a lot of people including myself when we first started observing it is temperature. Temperature, the bottom of our feet are going to be pretty much the same temperature regardless because the skin is really thick, there’s not a lot of sweat glands and it’s always in contact with something. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a sandal or a work boot, it’s full contact, and those little peripherals that people put in, total waste of time, but the top of the foot is really where we see temperature differences. One of the things that influenced that is in a normal shoe, we have a thick padded tongue that’s overlapped by two sidewalls of the vamp and then we’re going to have lacing going across it too, so there’s no place for that heat to vent out.
What we find is that in the first 90 seconds that somebody wears a shoe, if their foot temperature heats up beyond a certain amount which is usually around like one and a half degrees centigrade, if their foot increases by that amount, they’re going to say that shoe is less comfortable, but they won’t say that because their foot feels hot which is crazy.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Geoffrey Gray:
Their brain realizes that, “Ooh, my foot is getting hot in this thing. That sucks.” I’m going to tell the brain that I don’t like it as much. You’re going to say, “Ooh, I don’t like that one,” but we won’t know why. We’ll just say it’s less comfortable.
Steven Sashen:
What if my feet are imperials-
Geoffrey Gray:
Really powerful here.
Steven Sashen:
Sorry, I cut you. What if my feet are imperial and not metric? How much do they have-
Geoffrey Gray:
I know, right? I know. We struggle so often with … I love standard, but changing temperature is based on who we’re talking to this stuff.
Steven Sashen:
Right. That’s super, super interesting. I love the fact that people misrepresent what the cause of an experience is. I’ll tell you a funny story. This is again totally tangential about that. Way back when, it started when I was 12 until I was about 20, I made a living doing magic. One of the tricks, it was my favorite trick, the way it looked is you would take a pen. You’d see somebody at a pen, you take the pen from them, they go, “Oh, there’s one of those radio pens,” and you click it and suddenly music starts coming out of the pen. You click it, then the music stops. You can just keep doing this. People are freaking out. Then you hand them their pen back.
Well, the way the trick works is that you had a radio shoved into your pants with a switch that you had behind your belt. Basically, it was just two pieces of metal that were separated by some foam, and if you expand your belly, then the switch would hit and then the radio-
Geoffrey Gray:
That’s so funny.
Steven Sashen:
Now, here’s the kicker. The radio is two feet from where the thing is, but people’s brain, as soon as you say there’s sound coming out of this and they hear the sound, their brain makes the sound come out of that. We’re constantly doing these weird things where we’re misrepresenting our own experience because we don’t know. One of the craziest things about our own experience, check this one out, is a thing called binding. If I touch your nose at the same time I touch your toe, you experience it as happening simultaneously, except that it doesn’t happen simultaneously because the nerves from your nose to your brain are shorter than from your toe to your brain. These things happen at a different time in your brain, but your brain binds them together to make it feel like they happen at the same time. We have no way of experiencing this as other than simultaneous, but that’s not what happens.
Steven Sashen:
Anyway, I love the temperature thing which is really, really interesting and actually makes me think about an argument I’ve been having about some designs lately, but the other one-
Geoffrey Gray:
Hopefully making them better, right?
Steven Sashen:
Well, yeah, actually, but I want to get into the part that you mentioned the middle one which is cushioning because this is one of those things that as far as I can tell get so massively misunderstood. The way we like to say it is, “Look, if you lie down on a Tempur-Pedic bed, it’s going to feel great, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you or will feel good over time” Especially as it slowly breaks down, that’s going to change things over time as well and it’s going to be so slow as to be imperceptible. By the time you notice it, it’s too late and your body’s all out of whack and all the rest. Talk to me about that cushioning thing from what you see and how that relates to comfort in more than just putting it on your foot and feeling, “Hey, it’s like a great bed.”
Geoffrey Gray:
Yeah, this is one of the big things that we have is our big missions right now is what we call the memory foam myth, because like he said, the Tempur-Pedic thing has gotten everybody thinking, “Memory foam is great,” but it really does not cushion well for shoes because it cushions great for one or two steps and then after that, it just doesn’t respond enough before you take your next step in. After 10 steps, it’s really bad. This is where … The important thing for us is that the cushioning has to be appropriate to the individual and the activity. Recently, we’ve been doing a lot of studies on work boots and cowboy boots, big work boots meant for people trekking around like a 40-pound toolbelt plus carrying heavy equipment and things like that.
A lot of times, if you look at the product, it’s a really hard polyurethane sole and maybe they have three to five millimeters of foam inside of the shoe and the insole that they think is going to cushion it. That material might be great if you looked at 150-pound person that was just in a lifestyle shoe that had a nice soft EVA soul that that might actually cushion. These people that we’re testing, it completely bottoms out.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Geoffrey Gray:
It’s really not doing anything. We’re testing maybe different foam compounds trying to find a difference and all of them suck.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Of course.
Geoffrey Gray:
The best of nothing. They just don’t work for that individual and the activity. We need to change the habits of these footwear brands to say, “Hey, let’s rethink how we’re getting comfort in work boots because this is your customer and this is the amount of force they’re putting on it.” I think that’s where things get really interesting. Another one that I’ll say, it’s just a common issue that we face, is a lot of the big athletic brands want people to be able to purchase the same shoe on the shoe wall that the pro athlete-
Steven Sashen:
Don’t even get started.
Geoffrey Gray:
That sounds great in theory …
Steven Sashen:
Oh, my God.
Geoffrey Gray:
I’m just going to take a big athlete. He’s one of the most famous athletes, plus he plays for my LA Lakers when they’re not on the coronavirus hold is LeBron James. LeBron James is a massive individual, right? I am a very slight individual. I love to wear LeBron James shoes because I love LeBron. I want to be like him, right? I want to feel like him, but if he’s wearing the shoe that cushions him and gives his, whatever, 270-pound body that’s coming down on massive jump impacts, when I’m walking around that, that stuff is going to be hard as a brick to me. My body’s not going to deflect it for me as the individual and the ability level that I have playing my terrible basketball. I think that this is where things have to be really, really specific.
If we put it in the context of your shoe, one thing is volume doesn’t always indicate more cushion, that nature of “What type of material are you using? What are the specifics of the activity, the individual and then what type of sensation do you want?” I think, Steven, and I know you do a lot of fast track work and things like that. I’m not a long distance guy. I like running fast miles. A lot of this-
Steven Sashen:
Mile. Hold on, you’re telling me it’s possible to run an entire mile in a row?
Geoffrey Gray:
Yeah, right. It’s crazy.
Steven Sashen:
That’s insane. Who would do that?
Geoffrey Gray:
Well, yeah, I got to tune my own horn here because I do the Dog Mile every year. Last year, my dog and I ran a 422, so I like running fast.
Steven Sashen:
Nice.
Geoffrey Gray:
A lot of the normal running shoes aren’t good for that, especially now as it’s gotten a lot softer and a lot of higher volume to run a fast mile on that.
Steven Sashen:
Excuse me. Hold on. I don’t know if you see it. Look, I’m going to go back to me as 100-meter runner. Nike just announced, and it’s not that I want to pick on them, but my God, it’s easy to, Nike just announced their new sprinting spike and it has a big cushioning thing in the forefoot. Wait, you’re telling me that reducing impact forces, if it does that which arguably it doesn’t, it probably just slows them down or changes occur, but suffice it to say, you’re going to be putting less force in the ground or putting force into the ground slower and that’s going to make faster, how? When we know-
Geoffrey Gray:
Can I tell you something that maybe somebody in your audience has started to test this? I have been wanting to test this theory for a while now, for the last two years for sure, especially when the Vaporfly came out, right? If we look at the Vaporfly, let’s assume all other features being equal, right? Weight is equal. Stiffness and the rocker shape are equal, right? If we take a shoe that has a thicker stack height, that’s going to lengthen out somebody’s stride length by a small amount.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Geoffrey Gray:
Over the course of a marathon, does that mean that they would actually be taking fewer steps over a mile in the higher stack height shoe, again all of the features being equal than the lower stack height shoe? I don’t know the answer to this. It’s just something …
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting.
Geoffrey Gray:
… pondered and it’s hard because there are a lot of things like … I think the Vaporfly actually is a great shoe. We’ve done independent testing on it and gotten the same exact results that they have. I know that there’s some truth there for elite level marathoners.
Steven Sashen:
I want to pause for a second. First of all, it’s really an interesting question, but all I could think of is, I was at the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus sitting in the very back row with a couple of people. As they’re doing the initial parade, there’s a guy walking by in 20 foot stills. I said, “You want to see the guy in the stills fall down.” He’s like, “What? What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m not going to leave my seat. You want to see him fall down.” He said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Nothing. I’m literally not going to leave my seat.” He went, “Okay.” As he walks by, I yell, “Hey, Nick,” and he turns around and almost stumbles and he doesn’t fall down, but I recognized the guy threw his makeup as someone I’ve known but of course, it’s so interesting. He’s taking these giant long strides, but it’s slow because it’s a lot of weight that he’s trying to move.
In this comment that I made, the biggest thing about the Vaporfly is that it’s lightweight, that’s a big deal, and then yeah, if it’s possibly going to increase your stride length and without increasing the amount of effort it takes to do that, there may be a there-there for that. Everything else that I’ve heard, it’s like nonsense. Someone whose name will remain nameless because I don’t want to get them to mad at me until I get him on this podcast and then start yelling at him talks about how the carbon fiber is acting like a lever. It’s like, “No, a lever needs a fulcrum and there’s no fulcrum.” They talked about the rocker bottom and then you look at the close up video of Kipchoge when he’s doing the two hour marathon and every one of the runners that him and all the people that are pacing him, they’re all forefoot, midfoot strikers. They never touched the heel. They never used the rocker bottom at all.
The whole idea of that is complete nonsense also. There’s people who are making up all these stories and what you came up with is the only logical one that I’ve ever heard.
Geoffrey Gray:
Again, I don’t know, but maybe with their sprint spikes, that’s going to be doing something.
Steven Sashen:
No, it’s only four millimeters higher. Actually what they did is they took the cushioning that they were putting on the inside of the shoe and they put it on the outside of the shoe.
Geoffrey Gray:
Well, the other thing I will say, and this is something that I’ve been saying for a long time and I’ve never been proven wrong on it, is little things make a huge difference in footwear. Hopefully, there is something that they’ve been able to find out with that, and hopefully, it makes our athletes better.
Steven Sashen:
We’ll see. Well, two things, one he did something great. He took a pair of Vaporfly and he ran. I don’t know if it was a 400 or a mile. No, sorry. He’d been running in those, but what he did, he said, “Let’s see how they work short distance.” He did 100 meters in those and then 100 meters in is sprinting spikes, and in his spikes, he was significantly faster. He said, “Same thing. These are cushiony. The Vaporflies are really cushiony, so they’re really slowing me down on the ground and it seems likely,” but those little things are interesting, but just there’s so many ideas that someone comes up with and then someone wins a race with that product and then everyone assumes that that product must be better even though on any given Sunday, someone else could have won that race.
There’s so many design elements that I see, especially in sprinting spikes actually, where there’s clearly no research proving that that thing is better, but it’s become the ubiquitous design element because someone won a race in it or to your point about looking at professional athletes. I say this all the time. It’s like, “What do you care what Kipchoge ran in? You’re not 105-pound Kenyan who runs at 30 miles an hour?”
Geoffrey Gray:
Exactly, that gets the train all day every day.
Steven Sashen:
Right, who gets paid to do it. I won’t even get into the fact that he did these world record-setting things without any blood testing at all. I’m not making any guesses. I’m not saying, I’m not making any assertions. I’m just saying it’s interesting. All right-
Geoffrey Gray:
I want to talk about some more little things and this goes in we’re talking about with comfort is women’s shoes, right? This is a big thing for me and I will tell you if there’s one number to take away from what is important about women’s shoes is Heeluxe tests a lot of product, right? We’ve already tested over 130 styles to date this year and we’re just through the first three months. Our data is over 2,000 shoes, everything from high heels to hiking to running boot. Running though is one of our bigger database categories. If you look at our running shoe database, we test a woman shoe, one woman shoe for every 7.8 men’s shoes.
Steven Sashen:
First of all, who’s sending you 0.8 of a shoe? That’s ridiculous. That’s insane for the simplest reason is that women buy more shoes than men.
Geoffrey Gray:
Right. I know. There’s no logic that makes any sense with this, except for a few things that we’ll talk about in a second, but it’s not limited to running. It’s also in basketball we’re testing, about three and a half men’s shoes to one women’s shoe, outdoors about three to one. Occupational is just under three to one. For almost every category that we have with two exceptions, we are testing dramatically more men’s shoes than women’s shoes. If you think about like, “So what is the impact of this?” Well, number one, we’ve already talked about the shoe needs to be specific to the individual and the activity that they’re doing. We’re assuming that women are equal to men and not in the women’s equality way. Women are the same as a man and that the activity that they’re doing is the same as a man. These are terrible assumptions.
Then if you look at the other outcome that I think is really the most important thing, if we look at one of the things that we talked about is important is comfort, right? Comfort is huge for all categories. Overall comfort scores that our women give us are lower for each category than what men give us. We can on these almost 2,000 shoes that women’s shoes are less comfortable than men’s and we can relate this directly to the fact that we aren’t testing and analyzing women’s shoes enough.
Steven Sashen:
When they report less comfort, is it for similar reasons that anybody else would report discomfort but they’re just having more of it or for different reasons?
Geoffrey Gray:
Yeah, it’s really interesting on that one. Fit is the one where most women complain and that is consistent across all categories, except for women’s sandals because usually a lot of, say, thong sandals because they’re so visible, they actually shape them differently for women and they use thinner straps and they just women and they have a different one for men. That’s not a factor. Then also for dress shoes again because there aren’t as many men wearing high-heeled shoes as women. A lot of those are fit more to women and tested more. That’s what our database backs up as well.
If we look at it for fit, in general, and I hope a lot of your women viewers are going to nod their head when I say this, the majority of women’s shoes are going to fit loose in the heel and tight around the ball of the foot. That’s going to be something that has to do what you see. Small numbers, small is important in footwear. It’s small differences in the proportion of the heel shape and the forefoot shape in women versus men.
Steven Sashen:
I love that you have science to back that up because this is an argument that I get into not infrequently where people complain that we sell men’s shoes and women’s shoes. They go, but I’m a woman and I have a wider foot. I go, “Well, then by the ‘men’s shoe.'” “I’m a man. I have a narrow foot.” “Buy the ‘women shoe.'” The problem is this is how people shop and there are statistical differences. People like to pretend that either they’re not or that you could make shoes and describe them in some other way that would be more useful. I go, “It’s possibly true, but because people are so attuned to buying this way, we can’t be the company that creates this whole new way of thinking about how to get shoes.”
I was at an event for Footwear CEOs a while ago where there was some apparel company, women’s apparel company, who had just gotten into footwear. It’s a big deal apparently. I will tell you candidly that at these events for Footwear CEOs, people take this stuff way too seriously. Look, it’d be better if we were all malice and we all had the same uniform and we didn’t have to pay so much attention to filling our closet with new clothes and trying to express our personality. We can actually. I’ll be nice, but since that’s not going to happen, but the kicker on this, they had all these new shoes. They were all high-heeled something or other, but as they were showing photos, there wasn’t one photo where the person who was in the shoe fit the shoe. It’s like, “These are your new shoes. You picked the models and you couldn’t pick people who even fit the shoe, that ain’t good.” The number one thing that I saw people spilling out over the edges because the toe box is way too small.
This goes to the thing we lead in with of women having no feet. Do you have any thoughts about why people are ignoring women and their feet when it’s obviously more important because of their buying habits and the number of things they do and the number of different types of shoes they typically have? I’m not saying more shoes, but-
Geoffrey Gray:
It’s fun because we didn’t really structure a lot of this conversation, but a lot of the topics that we’ve gone into already are going to feed into this. Number one is that running shoes are the most researched footwear that we are aware of. You will get study volume, the number of shoes that have been tested, all that stuff. For that, most running shoes are actually pretty good now, but so running is very-
Steven Sashen:
Don’t get me started on that one
Geoffrey Gray:
Let me say, compared to other categories that we–
Steven Sashen:
All right.
Geoffrey Gray:
There’s a lot of craftful product out there, so mine-
Steven Sashen:
I’ll give you that.
Geoffrey Gray:
… it’s so very, very big in front of me, but if we look at that, if you look at the makeup of most running shoe brands, and again, there are going to be some exceptions, but on average, there are more men that are designing and developing the shoes. At that end, most of the time when we’re designing products, we want to make product that works for us. When these shoes are coming in and they want to get feedback, they’re mainly testing it on the guys that are designing and developing it or if samples are expensive, if they’re only going to get one sample, they’re going to get men’s size nine. Now that’s trickled into this idea that like, “Okay, if we do that, then we’ll just scale it out to all the other sizes and for women, we’ll shrink it and pink it.
It’s just become this idea that it started out with a lot of men that were making the product, they made it for themselves and now we just have this pattern that we do. We’ve been, again I want to try and make the entire thing about shoes better, trying to challenge brands to say, “Let’s do one-to-one testing men’s and women’s,” and we’re trying to take off any barrier that we can for that time, cost, all that stuff. We’re trying to remove it just because we know it’s important. Last year, we worked with over 50 different footwear brands. I’m very happy to say we have five that for 2020 have already committed to doing one-to-one men’s to women’s, but again, if you look at it on a percent side, that’s only 10% of the companies that we work with which is of all the companies in the world.
There’s still a lot of work to do with this to get to where we can test women’s product better and there’s certain categories that I think also we marginalize women like work boots. There’s a lot of women that wear work boots and very rarely our work boots being tested on women. Another one is basketball. I will tell you the two categories of testers that come into Heeluxe that absolutely hate their product is … Remember you talked about your running tests where you wear the shoe that you like and then you go test the other shoes and go barefoot. We’ll ask women in those two categories to tell us what product they like and they’re like, “I don’t like any of it. I hate them, but these are just the best that I found.”
Basketball and work boots are just atrocious because it’s a high activity with multidirectional stuff. There’s a lot of demands being placed on the shoes and they just don’t fit very well. This goes into another thing is it’s not just women that are being ignored. Generally a lot of shoes are just made for North American and European feet …
Steven Sashen:
Totally.
Geoffrey Gray:
… and this conversation, we can also say that Asian people don’t have feet and South American people and Pacific Islanders, they don’t have feet. It’s not just women. There are other groups, but as far as the size, women is the one that is the biggest group that we see being ignored.
Steven Sashen:
It’s really interesting. I’ll confess, we ignored women for something. We actually … Let’s see. Can I say this legally? We developed a shoe for a particular sport and we made a men’s version simply because we knew more men who were in that sport. We got approached by a woman who was in that sport. We gave her the shoe. It didn’t fit perfectly. She had a great response though. She said, “I could sprain my ankle in these if you paid me to,” which was nice because that’s the number one injury in this particular sport. Frankly, we’re a really small company. We didn’t have the cash to make something specific for her because just making the molds for the outsole is going to be dollars and it’s going to cost us $5,000 just to make one product to test and we’re not quite there yet.
That’s our excuse, but everything else we do, we’re very attentive to the differences in foot shape. When we first started the business, we were doing custom-made sandals for people where they would trace their foot, send us a tracing and we’d make a shoe.
Geoffrey Gray:
I remember this.
Steven Sashen:
We have 6,000 tracings which gave us a really interesting database once we started doing closed toe shoes. That formed how we made those and they’re never going to be perfect for everyone. There’s always a bell curve and there’s going to be people at either end, although the people at either end get mad at you for not accommodating them no matter … I had one person get really mad. Our shoes didn’t fit them and I said, “I’ve got to ask you. I’m not trying to be obnoxious, but what shoes have you found that do fit you?” They said, “None.” I said, “Well, I don’t know what you’re asking me to do then.” It’s painful for me because I want to be accommodating for everyone, but-
Geoffrey Gray:
We want people to be happy, but it’s hard to make everybody happy.
Steven Sashen:
It’s impossible unfortunately, but I want to back up to something that I’m really curious about. We know people who work on factory floors, who are on their feet all day, who are in our shoes and who report that they’re pain-free for the first time ever. I’m not saying, I’m not making medical claims or anything like that. I’m not saying anecdotes equal data, but when you have a ponderance of anecdotal data, you can’t ignore it. What occurs to me and I think about this with basketball too or soccer for example where there are people who are growing up in places where they don’t have shoes to begin with. This is all leading into the same idea which is, when you’re doing testing, is there a way to account for one of two things, either the person’s natural gait and/or anything about what’s going on with their foot structurally or the condition of their foot?
Steven Sashen:
Because if you get someone habituated to wearing big thick-padded motion control shoes and they overstride and heel strike no matter what they do, that’s going to be a different experience than after they’re used to getting their foot underneath their body when it lands and using their muscles, ligaments and tendons, the shock absorbers instead of trying to rely on the foam, or similarly, anyone who has stronger feet, independent of arch height, is going to be different than someone who has weaker feet because they’ve been in shoes that don’t let their feet move. I’m just really curious about how one would factor those things into research to determine what kind of information you’re then getting about things like comfort fit, etcetera, etcetera.
Geoffrey Gray:
That’s a great question, Steven. One of the things that we like to do at Heeluxe and I think something that’s made us really special is we like testing to be done really fast. As you know, footwear industry moves really quickly, so we do everything in two weeks. We have to be able to test a large enough amount of people in those two weeks to be able to be representative of the widest part of the population that a shoe is going to be targeted towards.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Geoffrey Gray:
Unlike this golden foot theory of, “Oh, this is the one foot that we’re going to put it on. If it works for them, it always works,” we have over 300 people in our tester database that represent different activities, different body weights, different foot structures. We have wide and narrows. We have flexible and inflexible. We have people that are under 30. We have people that are over 60. We have all these different things because people are going to change. One thing that’s just a really fun case study example of this is we’ve been doing, like I said, occupational is a big one for us right now and we were doing some boots that were meant for people that are in high flexible position like gardeners and landscapers that are or roofers that are leaning up on these roofs or HVAC people that are on their hands and knees crawling.
The idea was a lot of these boots are really stiff, so if you look at numbers, human ball foot joint, if you look at the medical texts, it’s supposed to flex about 45 degrees. The average foot when walking or running flexes about 25 degrees. We know that most shoes should have at least 20 to 25 degrees of flex without restriction, right? Now there’s certain people that have a lot more flex like offensive lineman in football. They flex a lot more. We know that, but a lot of work boots, they really only flex about five or 10 degrees because they have to be so durable, but we wanted to see what did these workers who are on their knees, kneeling and squatting all day, what do they do?
We actually did a motion capture study in our lab. We found that their feet flex when they squat or kneel 75 to 80 degrees on average which is bananas. We don’t think that the human body can do that. Remember, think, this is their activity. This is what they do. Their body, it’s easier if they’re limber into that position and they do it so much that they get strong into that position, so they don’t get a lot of injuries, but now this is an even bigger problem that the boot that they’re putting on when it’s new only flexes like 10% of the reigns that they needed to flex to, so that’s why it takes them so long to break it in. This is when we go into these things, you really have to study the target population group of who’s going to be wearing that product to really boil down how it’s going to work in the real world.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to harp on this for a bit more. I’m thinking about the study that Dan Lieberman published in, I can’t remember if it’s Nature or Science, I always forget, that was comparing habitually barefoot populations to populations or taking habitually barefoot people and putting them in shoes and watching how quickly their gait changed. I also think about how you spot someone 50 yards away, you see they take two steps, you know who they are and they often are walking away one of their parents did. The way we move is so central to in many ways our identity that when people get into different footwear. This is the thing that Bill Sands saw in his lab, every different shoe in gender to different gait, unless you’re a super super elite runner where you can put bricks-
Geoffrey Gray:
I was going to say the elite knows how to adapt to anything to be able to produce an outcome, right? That’s the mind blowing things. I think they’re going to kick ass.
Steven Sashen:
We could literally practically put bricks on their feet and they would still be running sub-four miles. It was fascinating to see, but normal people don’t have that. Now, the interesting thing about that is some of the footwear companies are trying to take advantage of this in ways that are insane. I won’t mention this one by name, but if they could, they would make a shoe that was the thing you wore when you walked into the bathroom and a different shoe for when you walked out of the bathroom, but you’re now a little lighter. They’re trying to find every possible permutation of, “Here’s why you need something unique for this particular activity,” but the biggest thing I think of is how the footwear affects your gait and how what we keep seeing over and over and over for the last 10 years is when you start doing things where you’re having to rely on using in your body the way it’s designed, then it tends to have beneficial results and everything else.
There’s a guy that I know who was at Nike for 30 years. He said, “I worked with for 30 years to try to make shoes that improve performance. We couldn’t do it.” That information doesn’t come out. No one thinks of it that way because we’ve been sold on this idea for so long, not just in footwear, in all categories, that there is a simple easy solution and technology is always going to be better than what you’re built with. I don’t know where the hell I’m going with this thought.
Geoffrey Gray:
Wait, let me riff on that a little bit just to be a little contrarian here because this is something fun that my good friend, Joe Rubio, who’s a great runner and coach and owns a running warehouse, he and I just like to talk about stuff because we just think it’s fun to experiment and do different things, right? The other week, we were having lunch and we were talking about those Brush Spikes. Remember those?
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah. Wait, for people who don’t know, it was a Puma sprinting spike and instead of having just five to eight actual metal spikes, it had 500 tiny little spikes. Think about taking a hairbrush and sticking that on the bottom of your foot.
Geoffrey Gray:
Yep, yep. Everybody that was an elite runner that ran in those set world records.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Geoffrey Gray:
To your point, we like to think of like, “Oh hey, there’s the person that won the race did this or whatever,” those shoes had some magic to them so much that they got banned before we could really test it.
Steven Sashen:
Actually, hold, I want to jump on that. I don’t know if they set world records. They definitely set personal bests. There was only two guys I think, but-
Geoffrey Gray:
I have an article. I’ll send it to you.
Steven Sashen:
Do.
Geoffrey Gray:
I think there was three people and races.
Steven Sashen:
No, real races.
Geoffrey Gray:
Leave it with three or four different runners that ran, one of them set world records twice and had them outlawed and the other two set the world’s fastest for the year way better, all of them were personal bests as well. It’s already taking on an elite level guy making it better, but here’s the problem. We never got to fully vetted out because they wanted to kill the technology for being unfair.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly where I was going. It’s very interesting except that, of course, there’s no controls because we don’t have an identical twin. We’re not in the multiverse where we get that same sprinter, and before he puts on the shoe, he splits into two people and one wears the regular shoe and the other wears the new shoe. Are iffy at best, but at the same time, there are reasons that I can think of for … Well, there’s two reasons I can think of for what might have happened as well. One is totally psychological because we know that there’s a massive brain function that has to do with how well you perform. Essentially, your brain is always trying to limit you to a certain extent.
Geoffrey Gray:
Totally.
Steven Sashen:
People get hurt. There’s a placebo effect is what I’m saying. If you think these things are going to be better, your brain may not respond to the same signals that it usually uses to slow you down. There may be a placebo effect there. It’s something I’ve argued about the Vaporfly is there’s definitely some placebo effects involved because not everyone runs better in the shoe. Certainly, Kipchoge didn’t run 4% better in the shoe or he would have run something like 156, not 159, 40. Again, be that as it may, but the second thing is … There’s two parts.
The second thing is that the brush spike may have been interesting because the two biggest things that are going to affect your speed in 100 meters is your dry phase and the traction you need for the dry phase and maybe metal spikes are not the best way to get traction on a modern track surface and then how well you’re performing in the maximum velocity phase, basically how slow you slowdown is the other part. Again, spikes might not be the best thing for that. Now, but here’s the other part that’s crazy. Puma was going to be able to patent that. The reason they got banned was because everyone else suddenly went, instead of doing the normal thing of, “Let’s copy this,” they knew they couldn’t copy this, and so suddenly, it was banned because of all the other companies going, “Well, this can’t be fair.”
Now what’s happening with the maximalist shoes is instead of trying to ban the Nike Vaporfly, Nike is using this as a PR play going, “Let’s see if you can ban us.” That’s instant press and everyone else is just doing their version of the same thing. If there was a way of banning a shit ton of foam with carbon fiber in the middle or patenting that, then I guarantee these shoes would have been banned because everyone else would have said, “We have no way of doing our version of the same thing.” As a master sprinter, I’m, of course, very interested in things like the brush spike.
I’m not suggesting we may be working on something that could upend sprinting spikes forever. I would never say anything like that in advance and thus releasing something that we may or may not be working on, but there are a lot of interesting things about … I guess this is where I’m going with this. Little things make a big difference. Sometimes the littlest things are just basic physics. If you understand physics, then a bunch of hand waving about extra padding, extra control, blah, blah, blah, makes no sense and then you just get down to the bare essentials of what makes something fast. It’s the right amount of force applied to the ground and the right amount of time at the right angle. That’s the basics when we’re talking about running. Everything else, we have to look at everything else in relation to, “Is this improving the way we’re applying force, the speed we’re applying the force and the angle we’re applying force?” If not, then it’s bullshit because you’re not going to-
Geoffrey Gray:
We’ll prove it. We’ll prove if that’s bullshit or not. How about that?
Steven Sashen:
Well, but to that point, one of the things that you and I had both talked about is this whole idea of energy return which is just a marketing jargon for how badly some amount of cushioning suck. Again, all you have to do is look at it from the basic idea of physics that we know anything that slows the force production down, reduces the amount of force or spreads out the force is going to make things not faster and all foam does that. What more do you need to say?
Geoffrey Gray:
That’s true.
Steven Sashen:
All right, we can keep doing this all day long and maybe-
Geoffrey Gray:
We’ll find a part two at some point.
Steven Sashen:
I was going to say, we’ll find part two when someone comes out with something that we know is complete nonsense and that they asked you to prove that it’s true and then we’ll-
Geoffrey Gray:
Let’s be positive and maybe we can do a part two 12 months from now and I can say like, “Hey, you know what? In 2020, we did one-to-one testing on men’s and women’s shoes across the board and we’re seeing improvements in the product that’s out there for women.”
Steven Sashen:
I’m all for it. I think that’s a good way.
Geoffrey Gray:
Make huge accomplishment.
Steven Sashen:
I think that would be a very big deal. I’m sitting here looking at both men’s and women’s versions of … Actually, the shoe that I’m wearing right now and they’re very different shoes, but anyway-
Geoffrey Gray:
Nice.
Steven Sashen:
All right, you got to run, I got to run. Geoffrey, as always, total pleasure. I’m really looking forward to seeing what else comes out of your lab and your head because it’s always provocative, sometimes more than it gets credit for being and I would like that to see that change too.
Geoffrey Gray:
Well, thanks, Steven. It’s been a pleasure hanging out with you, man, and my best to you.
Steven Sashen:
Thank you. Thank you. Let me wrap it up. First of all, once again, thank you. Secondly, for everyone else who has been listening or watching, thank you. You know what to do. Go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com where you’ll find all the previous episodes and all the different ways you can engage with us. If you have any questions or have any recommendations or suggestions, anyone you think should be on the podcast, just drop me an email, [email protected]. Again, as I like to say, if you want to be part of the tribe and make the movement of MOVEMENT happen, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe but more importantly, live life feet first and have fun. Take care.