Skyler Tanner, MS is an exercise physiologist, President and co-founder of Smart Strength, and a lecturer with World Instructor Training Schools. He received his Master of Science in Exercise Science from Texas State University. Skyler has more than 18 years of one-on-one training experience, with clients as young as 10 and as old as 94. His goal is to help clients improve health, function, and longevity with minimal time investment.
Skyler has lectured at the 2011 Ancestral health Symposium in 2011 at the University of California Los Angeles and in 2014 at the University of California Berkley. His work has been featured on Fox and on the Prevention Magazine media network.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Skyler Tanner about building a foundation for natural movement.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How everything that is natural isn’t inherently good for you.
– Why you should be asking if something is helpful, not natural.
– How running at a faster cadence can solve many of your running issues.
– Why our brains don’t like to learn new ways to do things.
– How other people’s running forms may not be relevant to you.
Connect with Skyler:
Guest Contact Info
Twitter
@smart_strength
Instagram
@smartstrengthaustin
Facebook
facebook.com/SmartStrengthAustin
Links Mentioned:
smartstrengthaustin.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
We think natural movement is an important thing, we think it’s a natural thing. We think everyone should be doing it. But maybe not. Maybe you’re not ready to do what’s natural. Let’s find out 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, where we look at the mythology the propaganda, sometimes the outright lies about what it takes to run, to walk, to dance, the hike, to do CrossFit or yoga, or lift or whatever it is you’d like to do enjoyably, healthfully, efficiently.
I’m Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.com. I’m your host. You know the drill. We’re all about trying to make natural movement the obvious better healthy choice the way natural food currently is. And it is a movement, movement. Because it’s a movement, that means you’re involved. So, if you want to be involved then spread the word. Spread the word.
Skyler Tanner:
That’s right, that’s right. Spread the word.
Steven Sashen:
Spread the thing on the bagel and then say some words. You know what to do. Come to www.jointhemovementmovement.com where you’ll find previous episodes and how and all the ways that you can share and like and review and thumbs up on YouTube and all the things you know how to do. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe.
And what else did I want to say about that? Normally, you see me wearing a Xero Shoes T-shirt. Today, because it’s freezing cold, I’m wearing my Frozen Dead Guy Days T-shirt. If you get a chance to see, find the movie Grandpa’s Still in the Tuff Shed. It is a hysterical movie about the Boulder, Colorado, the area around here and a Norwegian immigrant who started his own do-it-yourself cryogenic business in the tuff shed.
Anyway, we’re here with Skyler Tanner. Skyler, welcome, welcome. How are you? Man?
Skyler Tanner:
I’m doing great man. Just living the dream.
Steven Sashen:
Awesome. Well, people hooked us up and said if we’re talking about natural movement, you are someone I need to talk to. We’ve had no conversation basically prior to this, which is my favorite way to do it. Let’s like jump in. And I don’t ask people for intro so that I can do their intros, because that’s always boring as crap. So, who the hell are you and what are you doing here?
Skyler Tanner:
The reason I’m here is because in 2011 we were both at the first Halo Effects conference and you told a great story about the only time you were in a fistfight and how it was the most ape-like thing possible. How this guy came at you like hand up.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. No, no. Hands up. No, it’s better. He was lifting his shirt up. He was like-
Skyler Tanner:
Oh, that’s right.
Steven Sashen:
It was like it something out of a David Attenborough flick.
Skyler Tanner:
And the moment he hit you, he was like, “All right, let’s go drink a beer.” That was it. That was the end of it. Crazy.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. No, as he was running towards me, this was at Atlantic City. I was doing standup comedy at the time, I’m on my way home from a gig and it was just like, it just seemed like this weird predestined thing where all I had to do is let him punch me once and get it over with and we’d be done. And that’s exactly what happened. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced. I don’t know if I would call that being in a fight because I didn’t do anything.
Skyler Tanner:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
Part of a fight, I guess.
Skyler Tanner:
Part of a fight. That was fight adjacent.
Steven Sashen:
That was fight adjacent.
Skyler Tanner:
And then you, at the time, you had just the sandals, it were like the at-home sandals and you the beads. You were running all the beads up and down. It was just a great kind of almost open conversation we’re talking about.
We were thrown together on a panel and worked really well.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, but we didn’t have this conversation. And the panel discussion about natural movement was really entertaining because at one point I remember saying, everyone’s talking about all the different things about natural movement and I said, and I remember actually we kind of bonded over this, I said, “Look, let’s not mince words, or let’s call a spade a spade. We can’t do what human beings evolved doing.” We’re not walking down to the river and collecting rocks to build a house, we’re not walking for 25 miles to get our meal once every other day, maybe. We’re just not doing those activities, and you can’t really fake it. It’s sort of like as a sprinter. I get out on the track, I run as hard as I can and maybe a little sore the next day. But I’m in a race. I run for 10 to 12 seconds and I am toast for a week. So, there’s a whole different biological thing going on when you’ve got different biology going on the way people did when they were either running to catch food or running away from being food.
Skyler Tanner:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
You can do all the functional movement you want. It’s not the same as doing any of those things. And that kind of put a crimp in the conversation for a little while, but I’m not going to go, “Yeah, yeah.”
Skyler Tanner:
And it’s true. I mean, all of this is kind of what we talked about. I mean, I orient my life around … I mean, these are clues at the end of the day, and we’re trying to do a clue based proxy of what we were forced to do in the past just to survive on the idea that the things that are killing us now were not prevalent or at least not based on what we … if we triangulate on X and hunter gatherer groups were not prevalent in what we do. How do they move? How do they behave? What do they eat? That clue, it’s almost like quoting chapter and verse for a lot of people. It’s like, well they did this thing. They climbed the tree, they did this and that’s what we must do.
Steven Sashen:
They only use their left arm.
Skyler Tanner:
That’s right, that’s right. What’s the tier, like lever increasing tool?
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Skyler Tanner:
There you go. And then, if that’s the case, then we should all ride bulls because if you look at the Cro-Magnon and the break marks in the skeletons resembles that of rodeo riders. If you’re trying as a group to bring down a large herd animal, somebody is getting thrown off and someone’s going to get broken real bad.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, that’s right. Wait. So, you’re also then suggesting that some of our Neanderthal ancestors were dressed as clowns running around and jumping into barrels?
Skyler Tanner:
Right. Yeah, that’s right. Right after they carved the wheel, they carved the barrel.
Steven Sashen:
That should have been hell.
Skyler Tanner:
There you go right there. There’s your punchline, after they carved the wheel. So, my background, clinical exercise physiologist by training. I mean, I’m a gym owner by trade. I’ve been in this business for 21 years and I certainly, if you want street cred first Paleo Effects, first Ancestral Health symposium, I don’t know how much that that 350 will buy me a cup of coffee.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, you’re optimistic. I think-
Skyler Tanner:
I’m optimistic.
Steven Sashen:
I think it would get you the ability to walk into a coffee shop and smell the coffee.
Skyler Tanner:
When we were there in Boulder, they have the boiler maker because of the altitude. It’s going to drive me crazy. You’re boiling coffee at like 200 degrees there.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Oh, right, right, right.
Skyler Tanner:
It’s driving me crazy, because it’s great. It’s all of these halogen bulbs with the cool flask and they drop in two ice cubes at the end and dump in your cup. It’s driving me crazy, but it’s…
Steven Sashen:
I’m not a coffee drinker so I don’t know it, except that I know of it.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, right. It’s a great visual, anyway. I have a cousin who lives in Boulder.
Steven Sashen:
I’m sorry.
Skyler Tanner:
She’s sorry too.
Steven Sashen:
Are you able to have a conversation without the use of the word chakra?
Skyler Tanner:
Yes, I am, actually. Well, my other cousin who used to live in Boulder and could not have the chakra conversation without chakra. Now, she’s somewhere off the grid in the Front Range as you do.
Steven Sashen:
As one does, yes.
Skyler Tanner:
As one does.
Steven Sashen:
It’s just inevitable. I mean, when you move to Boulder, you’re required by law within 60 days to either get a Subaru or a Golden Retriever. Labrador will get you a warning. Any sort of doodle now, actually, you get a bonus.
Skyler Tanner:
You get a bonus, right. You can’t have the purebred. You have to have the mix. So, anyway, the point is that, coming from rehab side but also working with real people side, I’m certainly inspired by the videos of people often single in the Pacific Northwest, in the wilderness, running around and just having a great time climbing trees, diving the water. It gives me a good feeling to see that. It’s like when I’m trail running in the green belt here in Austin, if somebody got a high def 4k camera on me, I could sell the same thing.
But I think, what ends up happening is that the populace at large is pretty sick, even those of us interested in natural movement and kind of curious about asking these next questions, where can we go? I see I’m movement deficient in my life, then what’s the next step? I think about this from a foundational perspective of do these people even have enough body awareness, which they’ll get with natural movement. Just like Xero Shoes. Your feet are incredibly sensitive, but they shouldn’t be painfully sensitive. They’re just that desensitize, initially. I mean, how many people have told you at trade shows, “I like what you’re doing, but my feet hurt when I’m walking barefoot.”
Steven Sashen:
Not a whole lot. But when people say to me I can’t walk barefoot, they usually say something like, “Oh, I have plantar fasciitis,” and I say, “So, first let me stick my thumb in your calf and see if I can find a spot that if I dig on that your ” plantar fasciitis” goes away,” which happens 90% of the time. Then, for the other 10%, they say they’ve been wearing orthotics or insoles and supporting their feet for some extended period of time. They’re not walking barefoot because, it’s not painful from a sensation level but it’s painful from what’s called a structural level. And I say, well, that’s because it’s sort of like if you’ve had your arm in a cast for a year and then you take it out of the cast and someone throws a weight at you. I mean, let your feet move and then start building up some strength again.
But to your point, though, I vividly remember when I first started going barefoot primarily, which is now about 12 years ago, it did feel like I was just over stimulating my brain. It didn’t feel like my feet were doing too much. It literally felt like my brain was getting overload. Since your brain’s primary function is to actually weed out information, because there’s way more coming in than we have any ability to process, it just felt like that was going on.
So, I see that with people where, at first it’s just too much. Then people have the mistaken idea that what happens over time is their feet get less sensitive. It’s just what happens, I think, and you can tell me what your take is, it seems that your brain just gets better at weeding out the information you don’t need and just paying attention to the sensational information that you do need. It’s useful.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, I think that. It’s actually funny because the first time I ever ran barefoot, like five miler, was because it was raining. I was wearing the non-padded version of your sandal that has the straps.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, the Huarache-style sandal, yeah.
Skyler Tanner:
Not the Huarache. The one that’s more like the … Why am I forgetting name?
Steven Sashen:
Oh, like the Z-Trek.
Skyler Tanner:
Z-Trek. I was wearing the Z-Trek and it was starting to rain. It was starting to rain so my foot was starting to slip around on the top of the this. I was like I’m going to hurt myself so I took them off and run the five miler. It was like a turkey truck. And my feet were fine because I’ve been barefoot for all of my life.
I was that weirdo who used to go to college, even in Phoenix, barefoot with the moccasins so that when it got too hot I put them on. I have a long history of training barefoot. I have a foundation of loading my feet in an unshod or unsupported way. And what do we do anyway when we tell people moving into barefoot? This is either we’re telling them to do it walking or just standing, often recommending things like your feet might have tight spots that you didn’t realize. Using a little bit lacrosse ball or tennis ball work. That rocky pebble platform that you all sold for a while or that compression kind of balancing for muscles of the foot. So, there’s often this idea of needing a little bit of rehab just to get us back up to baseline.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, let’s pause there because I want to do two things. First, we’re already kind of jumping into what I was teasing at the beginning, which is are people ready for natural, which seems like a crazy thing but it’s an interesting thing to investigate. We can talk about that from, I’ll mention what Irene, not argument but an ongoing conversation that I had with Irene Davis about this. Well, anyway, before we jump there, I want to put you on the spot a bit. Since this is The MOVEMENT Movement podcast, we like to share a movement thing for people to do. If they’re in their car, maybe they can do it, maybe not. Maybe they prefer to go home. If they’re out in public, hopefully they can do it and be embarrassed and we get video of that. Whatever you can think of. Can you think of some movement to share with human beings?
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I talk about, what we do here at Smart Strength is I talk about evidence based resistance training and we talk about joint friendly fitness. And what do we even mean by that is that-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, what the hell do you mean by that?
Skyler Tanner:
What the hell do I mean by that. Well, 90 to 95% of orthopedic surgeries are routine because we operate the same way. My biceps tendon is basically in the same place as your bicep tendon the same way.
Steven Sashen:
Not mine, though.
Skyler Tanner:
I believe it. But the point being is that your arm isn’t bending backwards with different anatomy. As a human being, things are generally the same. And so, if you know that, the reason why surgeries can be about 95% routine is because we know where the poor positions are, we know where the ligaments bind, we know where the tendons rub, we know where the tissues compress or impinge.
So, one of the things I tell everybody is, or a great example, a visual of this active insufficiency kind of thing going on, this is a classic martial arts joint lock, which is Brazilian jujitsu. It takes full advantage of poor biomechanical positions. What you often see in the gym, though, is that people, because you feel something in these poor biomechanical positions, they do these exercises because feel is a compelling argument even if that feeling is just because it’s a poor position not because you’re working more.
So, a classic joint lock is the wrist joint lock, right? So, the flexor muscles, the grippy muscles right here, they also move your wrist in the flexion. But as long as you’re holding a fist, the muscles on the backside, which come around over the top, they are stretched out over the wrists. It’s like a giant crane. So, the only way you’re getting the full anatomical flexion is to open your hand, to let it drop all the way down.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, interesting.
Skyler Tanner:
And you can’t hold a fully closed fist, it’s a classic joint lock, if someone’s got you, they will try to do this or break. It’s oftentimes in Krav Maga or self defense. If somebody comes out with a knife, they’re always trying to do this to open the hand because you can’t hold it shut because of the biomechanics of the wrist.
And so, the second order question you asked then is, knowing these poor joint positions, can we avoid them if we’re trying to load muscle tissue, or even second to that, if we are training to make ourselves robust knowing that we’re going to get hurt in real life, we can give ourselves injury resistance, can we avoid those positions in our training, accepting the risks of the real world?
Steven Sashen:
I want to back up just to do this wrist thing because this is a really interesting thing. Fold your arm-
Skyler Tanner:
Make a fist.
Steven Sashen:
As your forearm is perpendicular.
Skyler Tanner:
Your forearms perpendicular.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Right wrist, make a fist.
Skyler Tanner:
Make a fist-
Steven Sashen:
… as much as you can.
Skyler Tanner:
Flex, right.
Steven Sashen:
Right? Now, open your hands and watch how you can bend your hand more-
Skyler Tanner:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
… try to make a fist there, and you can’t.
Skyler Tanner:
You can’t close the fist.
Steven Sashen:
A whole bunch of tension in the front part of my forearm. It’s actually more in front, which is kind of funny because the back is getting more stretched. And it’s like a really weird thing.
Now, I did Aikido for yours. It’s the same thing. It’s like what you want to do is put joints in positions where they don’t want to move and then other positions they, so you’re mobilizing someone in kind of two dimensions.
Actually, I have a funny story of being in New York City at a concert in Central Park. Things were kind of muddy. We had our blanket down and people were walking all over our stuffs. It’s like, “Look, if you’re going to walk over our blanket, take off your shoes.” Some big guy just starts walking over our blanket in his muddy shoes and I reached up on him, sitting on the ground. I’m not a very big guy. I just reached up and I grab his wrist and one of these ways that you do this in Aikido, and I started turning his hand and his wrist and bring him slowly down to the ground. He was looking at me with this look that was kind two things, like, hey I would kill if you were standing up, and how are you doing that?
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
I felt kind of bad about it, but I was trying to make a point. Just take off your damn shoes, no big deal.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, that’s funny.
Steven Sashen:
But, yeah, it’s amazing. Especially those extreme positions like in the hand and the wrist, how quickly we respond to being in a bad position by going, “Whoa, whoa, whoa stop that,” or how wrong it feels when we’re one of those positions.
I had, pardon me again, a quick aside, we’re taking some photos to promote the Speed Force in the catalog and I found this cool bush to jump in front of to get this really cool look. And the bush was right in front of a sewer drain. So, I had to run up to jump on the sewer drain, or off the sewer drain in front of the bush, but I couldn’t run in a straight line because there was all this mud on the bush side of the street, like over the curb. So, I had to run on the street, jump onto the sewer drain, then do this leapy thing. And after 10 times of doing it right, the last time, I caught my foot in some weird ass way and when I rolled onto the ground, my foot felt really peculiar.
Like, is it wet? I mean, am I bleeding or something? I looked down, I didn’t see any blood on my shoe. It’s like, what the hell’s going on? I take off my shoe and my 4th toe doesn’t have the pad of the toe on the ground, it’s pointing up in the air. It dislocated and spun around 100 degrees. And yes, that look on your face. Was my face was like, it just was so wrong. It didn’t hurt. It was just like, oh that is just not supposed to be that way. I was surprised at how intense the oh my God reaction was considering there was no pain and when I just touched it, it snapped back in place like, oh yeah that’s probably not good.
Skyler Tanner:
And the pain probably came later. Your brain is almost going like, I don’t know what the hell happened there pain, don’t touch it.
Steven Sashen:
No, it actually never really hurt.
Skyler Tanner:
Wow.
Steven Sashen:
I got to the doctor and he said, “Well, I’m not going to bother taking an x-ray because if you broke, we do the same thing if you just dislocate it, which is just tape it up to the toe next to you. So, tape it up, leave it for a couple of weeks. You’ll be fine.” It’s exactly what happened. But, again, just like the effect of something at the extreme ends of our body just gives us so much information.
But anyway, all right, so there’s one, moving things. So, keep going about this whole phenomenon of joints in the wrong position.
Skyler Tanner:
When I talk to clients about, and we’ll bring this back to natural movement. The point I make here is somebody who likes to. I love the stuff but the idea that is natural, poison ivy is natural. Lots of things are natural. The question is whether or not they are helpful to us. And the opposite question or the backwards question is can something that is semi-constructed help us to live more naturally? I mean, yeah. Obviously. Or at least what we want from the natural living. I don’t want necessarily to sleep outside all the time, I don’t necessarily want to crush things with rocks. I want the things that came as a secondary consequence of natural foods or spacing-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, but, look, let’s all face facts, cloth.
Skyler Tanner:
Only because we’re in Austin, man. man. It’s cool. It’s fine. I love lots of things of modernity. So, we want the consequence that the natural movement gives us. And my whole thing, when I’m working with people I tell them is like I want you to go through things you value, things you’d rather be doing but you shouldn’t be getting hurt in here.
And so, I want to support people who are taking initiative to get themselves healthier. Whether it’s whether material I’m putting out or something like this, and that idea that sometimes something a little constructed to help build up your foundation can help more quickly get you to the thing you’d rather be doing, which is spending more time on your feet without pain and living in the world.
Steven Sashen:
So, two things. Thing number one, well, I’ll preface thing number two, which is let’s talk about things they could do. But first, I want you to give an example of something where people are doing or putting a joint in a wrong position or doing something out of whack that they think is good because they’re getting the unpleasant sensations that are giving them wrong information.
Skyler Tanner:
Sure. So, every human being on planet Earth is a function of actually the way, I wish I could give you this for show notes. I could probably find it. The way in which we became throwing creatures, this winding up of our pack over our shoulder, winding up to snap as a giant rubber band across our body, that, overtime, comes as a function of changing the orientation of our shoulder, our shoulder joint space is much more forward, while we still maintain the ability to hang, obviously, and to breaky-ache.
Our shoulder joints, compared to our ape cousins, their shoulder joints, the surface of the glenoid fossa, I’m sorry that’s not the right joint, but the shoulder joint itself is pointing up. It’s more vertically oriented. They have this large gap of non-impinged tissue going overhead. And so, what happens is yes we can breaky-ache, yes we can hang, but one of the interesting consequence is every human being on planet Earth, once their shoulder gets to 90 degrees of flexion going overhead, like reaching up, is impinged. That is to say, we are crushing the supraspinatus tendon and some other smaller tissues underneath your AC joint. Everyone is.
That is actually like a crowbar now because once you go above that, you can feel your collarbone tilting up and some of the muscles of your ribs pulling your shoulder blade forward to go overhead.
Okay, so what ends up happening is when people are doing kind of overhead press movements or they’re hoisting things overhead, it’s a little bit like negative compounding, because you’re just scrubbing these tendons underneath the AC joint. And it becomes a little bit like negative compounding, like I suffered it 1000 times and nothing happened, and then snap. All of a sudden, my mildly frayed tendon that was not really inflamed gives away. That doesn’t mean never go overhead. In fact, it’s kind of a reverse when you’re doing a pulling type motion. When you pull your lat, because it attaches to the front of your shoulder like giant slings around your back, pulls your sternum up, which opened some space at the shoulder. It decompresses that impingement a little bit. But what happens when people are reaching overhead with high effort is they’re often doing this, which is like a clamp.
Steven Sashen:
So basically like caving in your chest a little as you’re trying to push. So, what’s the signal that people are getting that’s making them think this is a good thing?
Skyler Tanner:
Well, they feel their shoulder. They’re deliberately like my shoulders are weak, or I suffered this so I’m going to go overhead. Or, there really is a classic kind of overhead press that a lot of, they’re told not to do anymore, be pressing behind the neck. Because they’re most externally rotated and that pack is compressed on the shoulder. And then, you’re going up overhead and your like, “Man, I really feel my shoulders.” The reason you really feel your shoulders is the same reason you really felt the forearm in this joint lock that we were talking about. Because it’s a poor mechanical position-
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Skyler Tanner:
… the muscles are as contracted as they can be. They cannot contract any further. We feel that is work though it’s just bad mechanics.
Steven Sashen:
This is an interesting thing. This is making me think of what people refer to, with the phrase that I hate, is the mind-muscle connection because your mind is connected. Well, that’s a whole other story. But anyway, but the point being is, it seems to me from what you’re saying is if you’re having the joints in the right position, the only place you’re going to be feeling the effort from doing some sort of exercise, I mean, assuming you’re not putting so much tension in the ligaments and tendons, but fundamentally is in the muscles themselves.
Not in the joints but in the actual muscle. If it doesn’t feel smooth, you’re not basically feeling like, well my muscles aren’t working, not like I’m being compromised and something is right.
Skyler Tanner:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
And the mind-muscle connection, the way people talk about that from my experience is when you’re really paying attention to the muscles, then you’re getting that kind of smooth effort, that smooth contraction. If you’re not paying attention, then you’re more likely to be doing one of these things that is impinging on a joint or putting your joint in a bad position, or you’re feeling something that’s effortful but not the thing that you really want to be feeling.
Skyler Tanner:
And think about when you, if you’ve ever taken … First of all, yes. And then think about whenever you’ve taken somebody who has been a short runner and try to get them down to more minimalist. Initially, it feels awkward to them and there’s almost an education process of saying, “Hey, this thing that you got away with previously and felt good to you and natural to you, we need to create new awareness.” And there’s a lot of very explicit coaching that you have to feel this, feel this, pay attention to how this is moving.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the simplest one is not even that. The simplest one is just about cadence.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
People used to running at a certain cadence, their feet moving at a certain number of steps per minute, that just starts to feel normal. Even if it’s not good, it just feels normal. And to get people to start running at a slightly faster cadence, which actually solves many problems right off the bat because you can’t do what you do when you’re running at a slower cadence, it just feels wrong for a while. And “feeling wrong” is just a neurological phenomenon. It’s like it’s just breaking out of a neural habit and laying down neural pathways feels “wrong” or awkward, until we lay down the new neural pathways and leave the old ones away, and then it’s the other way around.
Skyler Tanner:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
That’s the place. It’s very, very interesting to watch people who, yeah, when you’re trying to do just a new thing, your brain doesn’t want you to. Because it’s not energy efficient to learn to do a new thing.
Here’s another weird tangent. I was an all-American gymnast way back when and I stopped doing gymnastics actively when I was 32. I’ve spent the last, how old am I now, 57, the last 25 years. I’d spent 25 years doing what I refer to as getting the gymnast out of my body. Pretty much done it now. Maybe it took me 20 years to do it, but it was unbelievably difficult to just get out of having my shoulders rounded and internally rotated, my pecs over developed. It’s totally stunning
Skyler Tanner:
That’s amazing. I’ve got a four-year-old. He jumps off of everything, so I’m going, “We need to put you in gymnastics.”
Steven Sashen:
It’s going to be great, but I can tell you, did you say it was a girl?
Skyler Tanner:
No, no. No. I’ve got three sons. But no, he-
Steven Sashen:
I don’t know in my mind. That was because, as you sort of saying that I was remembering, when I first moved to Boulder, I met a woman who had a daughter who was 10 at the time who’s getting into gymnastics. And I said, just so you know, if she gets good at this, and I can tell she will, in eight years her posture is going to look like mine.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah. Right.
Steven Sashen:
We look like we were cut out of the same mold. It was just like-
Skyler Tanner:
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, there’s a great book, I think it’s called Bodies of just like 1999 2000, and it’s a photo pictorial of all these really high end athletes from probably 25, 30 disciplines. The amazing thing is, we talked about athletics accelerated evolution in the sense that even though Usain Bolt was taller than all the other sprinters, he was just kind of an elongated body type of a sprinter, which makes sense. That’s why he’s faster than everybody else because he took fewer strides. He can maintain that.
But it’s amazing, because you look across all these people and you put your thumb on their heads and their body types are so self-similar. And so yeah, it’s amazing how coaches are good. What’s the classic sprinter line? I can’t make you faster but I can’t make you fast? Sprint coaches.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, that’s funny. I never heard that one but it’s totally true.
Skyler Tanner:
I can make you faster, but I can’t make you fast in the sense that you come pre equipped with a certain amount of talent. Of course, work beats talent when talent doesn’t work.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. When I was at the World Masters Track and Field Championships in Finland, I asked all the people who are over 85. I said, “So how are you here? Is it nature or nurture?” Everyone of them had the same answer. They said, “It’s all genetics that we got here. It’s all training to see who wins.”
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. I wish they had more track kind of events here because unlike the prototypical 800 guy, like middle business guy, but there’s just not enough competition to reinforce the training. I mean, there’s competition but there’s not events where you go and have that I want a bit blasted for a week kind of thing.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I mean, there’s not a huge sprinting community in Boulder. Even though there’s a bunch of really good sprinters on the University of Colorado team, but there’s not a sprinting community here. There’s only a couple of us. But it’s so funny. I was in Austin this past weekend and I met Nick Symmonds who is a former 800-meter Olympian and he’s-
Skyler Tanner:
Run Gum! Run Gum!
Steven Sashen:
Run Gum guy. He’s turning himself into a 100-meter guy. I said to him, “It was so cool watching you do this because when you first started doing it, you just looked like an 800 guy who was just trying to move his legs faster.” Watching him learn to become a sprinter has been really entertaining. I said to him I want to raise him at some point. He often raises people for 100 bucks. I think I could beat him.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
That’s a shoutout to you, Nick. Let’s do it.
Skyler Tanner:
No. I mean, those are great videos. But it is funny, because I’m going across and I put my over Johnny Gray’s. You know who Johnny Gray was?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Skyler Tanner:
He was the American runner. I’m like, son of a bitch. Like, 175 pounds, 6 foot 3. It was just like, well …
Steven Sashen:
But this is also my argument. When people say things like, they look at Olympic level marathoners and they look at the shoes they’re wearing and then they go buy those shoes. I go, “Hey, look. I don’t know why you think anything that guy or that woman is doing is relevant for you. You’re not 105-pound Kenyan running at 13 miles an hour for two hours.
Skyler Tanner:
Right. Right. Or, and even more than that, what was that 105-pound Kenyan doing when they were first getting started regardless of their body type? That’s a classic, isn’t this book Range recently where the author was talking about how people want to know what the coach is doing now, but that’s very different than what the coach would have done with someone at the beginning.
Right. So, that’s my actual point about this. We’ll see the Erwan Le Corres of the world. I mean, he is the most prominent. When you’re growing a business, you keep the blinders on, trying to make sure the lights stay on.
But the people who were most prominent and you’re seeing the result of a long period of time working on things. I mean, he was a triathlete before that. He had a long athletic history that slayed a certain amount of foundation. And so, it’s my job, or our job, to kind of like how can we shorten that so people can get the fun?
Steven Sashen:
Okay, we’re going to get to that in one second but I just want to tell this because you reminded me of it. When I started gymnastics, on day one, this was in seventh grade in junior high school, the coach hands each of us, there’s, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine of us, each of us have a sheet of graph paper, 10 to the inch graph paper. Each of those squares is 10 pushups. Whoever fills in the entire page, front and back first, wins a Coke. And we’re just competitive as crap.
Within a very short period of time, we were doing 1000, 1500 pushups a day in spurts of 100, 150. Because the most important movement you’re going to do in gymnastics pushing and then just lifting your arm straight in front of you. He knew, and it’s like, here you go. And there was a couple of odd things that he did the same thing, first one to do this wins a Coke. It was insane. But, I mean, it really laid down. He knew that as, how old we were, 13-year-old kids, something like that, we needed to get strong. That was going to be the most important thing for the rest of our career, and that’s what we did.
Skyler Tanner:
Yep. Yep.
Steven Sashen:
That’s a myriad way but that’s beside the point.
Skyler Tanner:
That’s cool.
Steven Sashen:
So, somebody comes in. So, building a foundation for natural movement. This is where we’ve all started and where we’ve jumped around too. Talk to me about what you did with human beings and what human beings, listen to this, can do to build that out.
Actually, before we jump into that, I said I was going to talk about Irene Davis. The conversation Irene and I have, she says people really need to walk before they run. Literally. Like, spend a bunch time walking barefoot, walking in a truly minimalist shoe like ours then build up for running. I say, that’s cool. That’s one way.
The other way is run for a super short distance, 20 seconds, 30 seconds. See how you feel. If it hurts, do something different as long as you’re having fun. If it feels like just muscular pain, just rest. You need to do less, not necessarily get stronger. It’s usually because you’re trying to do too much with certain muscles. And if it feels like you really hurt something, then you need to pay attention to your forearm and most likely you need to stop over striding, stop pulling your foot across the ground, stop pushing your foot off the ground, pick up your cadence a little bit, et cetera.
I ultimately think that we’re getting similar results because we’re not hearing of people having a whole bunch of injuries, having a bunch of problems. We all want to make sure that people who are getting into natural running are as free from things like stress fractures as humanly possible. Because the moment one person out of a million gets one, everyone goes, “See, that’s bullshit,” which is of course nonsense because the point that I always make is you have to make the look at the cohort of normal runners in regular shoes and see what the injury rate is there and then compare it to people who have acclimated to natural movement. We don’t have that data but I know you would agree anecdotally we’re pretty confident that the people who’ve acclimated are not getting the same kind of injuries or severity of injuries.
Skyler Tanner:
And those 105-pound Kenyans you’re talking about, Daniel Lieberman pointed this out that, and actually in the book Running with the Kenyas, the author was talking about how old the young Kenyan kids in these early track meets. They’re all running barefoot.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah.
Skyler Tanner:
And then, eventually, because the cadence is the good cadence, the barefoot strike cadence is so ingrained, then you can go to a normal shoe and they’re still landing with their foot underneath their center of gravity-
Steven Sashen:
Normalish.
Skyler Tanner:
Normalish.
Steven Sashen:
Because if you add enough padding to the heel, in normal “barefoot gait” the heel just literally gets in the way. It just bump into it and then you’re kind of screwed.
A guy that I met this past weekend, he’s a double amputee from the time he was four. He had meningitis and they had to remove both his legs from the knees down. I think, knees down. I can’t remember if he’s got knees or not. Anyway, he’s got a son who’s four years old and at ran-a-one-mile-trail race recently and came in third to some 10-year-olds. And he’s never worn shoes, not normal shoes. He showed me a picture of this kid at the end of a race. First of all, his form is gorgeous. Secondly, he is just beaming. He’s so happy. And this is my joke about barefoot runners, you can spot them from a mile away because they’re looking like they’re having a good time.
Skyler Tanner:
Right. Oh yeah, it’s amazing. You’re right. Even in the most minimal shoe, it’s still different than barefoot running, and so returning to that barefoot running even when you’ve gotten good at it.
I played a game with my kids. It’s like just running high fives in front of our house. It was like a long run up, but they have to do it barefoot. We have to run and do it barefoot. It’s amazing. I mean, they’re running everywhere barefoot.
I think both you and Irene are triangulating on I’m going to use distance running vernacularly. I’ve run a 25k trail race, but I don’t fancy myself a distance runner. If you think about 80% of your time walking barefoot to build up, small percentage of time, maybe 15-ish percent of your time with those sporty kind of stuff maybe on an end field of a track, something like that. It’s a softer natural surfaces. Oh, it doesn’t need to be softer. I’m saying softer relative depending on the track because I’ve got a track-
Steven Sashen:
No. You don’t want to have someone go run barefoot on a track because those mondo surfaces are like glass.
Skyler Tanner:
Right. Right, right, right. Yeah, some of them are better.
Steven Sashen:
Like broken glass.
Skyler Tanner:
Right, broken glass.
Steven Sashen:
I do it but I don’t recommend it.
Skyler Tanner:
Right. And then I’m suggesting that when coming full circle, the biomechanics of this whole thing at the ankle and the calf. There’s only so many articulations that are like the big foundational articulations. Plantar flexion, dorsiflexion, right?
Lifting your head, and you have inversion and eversion which is the wiggle. Actually, when people are coming into this, plantar flexion is not just the calf, the gastroc. It is the plantar. It is muscles of the arch of the foot also contributing, pulling up and getting strength.
When we think about, I have a machine to do shin raises in here but I have found that if you could take somebody, I have to find a video for you so to help demonstrate this to people. You put people’s heels on a bock and you put them kind of leaning against the wall with their toe, as if they were in really high heels-
Steven Sashen:
So, wait. Hold on. Which way? Are they facing the wall?
Skyler Tanner:
Their back is on the wall, so their body is kind of like this and their foot is down like this-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to paint this for people who aren’t watching. So, you’re back’s to the wall. You’re how far away from the wall?
Skyler Tanner:
I mean, maybe, I’m walking away here. If you put your whole foot to the wall and then step forward maybe half of the length of your foot and put it under your heels.
Steven Sashen:
Okay.
Skyler Tanner:
And then you lean back on the wall. So, now you’ve got a little bit of a movement on there. And then, you’re going to use your heel as the fulcrum. And if you lift your foot to use the shin musculature and the anterior musculature of your ankle, you slide up the wall slightly. You have a little bit of resistance.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting. I’m going to do this.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do it barefoot but if you have something under your heel, you get range of motion.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on. Hold on.
Skyler Tanner:
I literally do I with a 2×4.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to take a shoe and step on the shoe. There.
Skyler Tanner:
You got to have about a half of your foot length, the half of one foot length and then lift hard and hold it to the top. You can feel your shin going.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah, yeah. It’s subtle but if we talk about stress fractures and plantar fasciitis or even if we’re … Some people, during that transition period, maybe they’ve been prone to shin splints, the strengthening of the shin muscle would be helpful to just how can we speed up this whole process? How can we make those articulations stronger, because those are the foundational articulations that support the dynamic movements that you’re going to be encountering in the real world.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. That’s a really good one. What do you recommend for people doing that and people are going to want to know how many sets, how many reps-
Skyler Tanner:
Sure, how many sets. How many sets, how many reps. I focus on quality. I would actually try to distance … Now, this is challenging because what I want to try to say is I’m going to give people time and start by doing this for controlled repetitions for a minute and then adding time rather than saying get eight sloppy repetitions.
Steven Sashen:
So, let’s back up to our whole thing about “mind muscle connection” and doing things naturally. So, if you want people to be paying attention to the good feeling, the right feeling, if you will, what would you be cueing them to pay attention to so that over time they know when things are broken down and it’s time to stop?
Skyler Tanner:
Okay. Okay. So, the muscle, the actual in that dorsiflexion kind of sliding up the wall, the muscle belly becomes basically connective tissue tendon up near the tibial plateau, which if you touch your kneecap and then slide down maybe an inch and a half, it dips a little bit and then it becomes that bone. You feel it pop up. That’s the tibial plateau that you’ve just run your fingers across. You shouldn’t feel the effort there. The middle of your calf of the outside of the leg, you’ll feel the flesh, the muscle belly and the shin.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I felt that.
Skyler Tanner:
That’s where you should be feeling it. That is where the work is being done. You will feel a little tension on the front side. And as you get more aware of what’s going on, you’ll actually feel the muscles on the top of the foot that are lifting the toes. And, because I have a large cohort of older population, there’s some evidence to demonstrate that people’s gait improves when you strengthen their shin muscle chicken or the egg. Why would it improve? Why would their stride increase? Because the reflex of lifting their foot through the gait cycle, it gets out of the way. So, do they start dragging their feet because they’re weak or do they start shortening their stride because their foot starts to drag?
Steven Sashen:
I love that you pointed this out. It’s something that I’ve noticed is every now and then, especially with our sandals, somebody will say, “Hey, can I have one handy? It’s too far away.” They’ll say, “Hey, this sandal is floppy.” And I hold it up and I go, “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t flop on its own. It doesn’t flex in the wrong way on its own. What’s happening is you’re dragging your toes because you’re not getting, and it’s not that you’re not lifting your toes out. I don’t say it that way. But you’re not positioning yourself where you get the reflex that your toes naturally lift as they come underneath your body. One way of describing it would be dragging your toes. But what you just described why that’s happening the way that I hadn’t thought of before, it’s brilliant.
Skyler Tanner:
It was totally accidental. It was one of these things where I had an older woman who was, she was going to go on a pretty aggressive hike in either Peru or somewhere in South America.:
So, I was going to bolster her. I was just like, “Okay, well, what can I do to make sure that you’ve got some armor?” She came back to me after a little while and she’s like, “I’m walking better all of the time.”
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Skyler Tanner:
I started digging into literature and I put this together. I don’t have an answer, but that seems to be there’s a lot of literature on kind of asking, okay, is it the tibial dorsi flexors that are weakening that result in this shortening of the stride, or is the shortening of stride due to propulsion or is the shortening of the stride due to this drag as a result of this reflex not being as strong. I mean, get the foot out of the way during the middle of the swing phase.
Steven Sashen:
Right. What’s funny, because you would think, and I played with this as I’ve been walking, you would think that as your foot is about to come off the ground, where your toes are pushing into the ground, that the reflex would be or the natural thing would be that as your foot comes off the ground, your foot points more or you plantar flex more because it’s already heading in that direction or you’re putting force in that direction. But the reality is the exact opposite. The moment your foot comes off the ground, it pulls back. It dorsiflexes back towards your knee in a way that obviously makes sense. It’s why we can walk. But it’s one of those things that’s seemingly counterintuitive when you’re doing it. It’s like you watch it happen. You should. But it’s like, oh that seems odd because anywhere else, if I was pushing and then got rid of the force, I’d keep going in that same direction. But in this case, it’s doing the exact opposite.
Skyler Tanner:
Right? Well, we’re full of recoil tendons, so there’s a lot of the wind up and pitch, wind up and pitch. That’s the key component. I think that this is just a tiny, tiny addition. And the fact that you’re deliberately doing this makes you bring a certain amount of deliberate intensity to it, which as we know, done with the right dosing, pays much more per unit of time. So, in the grand scheme of things, I’m asking that people go, okay, what are the big articulations to build a foundation so that I can do more of the natural movement that I’d rather be doing. And it’s a few minutes.
Actually, this is the problem, is that most people, you look at studies of like active 80-year-olds who garden and otherwise active, and then 80-year-old resistance trainers. What happens is the resistance trainers can actually volitionally recruit all the available strength in their muscle tissue versus the merely active people. Does that mean we don’t need to become weightlifter? Well, they’ve been doing an isometric test that nobody’s practice. Nobody’s training to the test, which is nice. But as a result of that, my client is locked in but she’ll appreciate the end of this discussion. The result of this is that being active is the whole point and we want that. But if we can add a little bit of resistance training to get those fast twitch fibers in the ankle, which are your immediate stabilizers, your subconscious signal goes to the spine, goes right back to the foot stronger. It’s just a little dose. You’re going to have a lot more fun.
Steven Sashen:
No, it’s true. And we should open with that against the wall exercise. It’s interesting because this is something that Sarah Ridge at BYU, who I talked to, her research was that just walking in a minimalist shoe gives you the same strengthening benefits as doing a dedicated foot strengthening program. They didn’t think to have a cohort doing strengthening plus just walking.
Skyler Tanner:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
We don’t have a whole lot of time left, but I just want to check. So, anything else that you want to share with people about, something about building a foundation, whether it has to do with walking, running. I mean, I like it, of course, because that’s a foot thing, but anything else that something that people do that you see on a regular basis where if they would make this little tweak would be way, way helpful?
Skyler Tanner:
Yeah. Often planking or plank-like motions, crawling-type motions get thrown around in the natural movement world, and I can encourage anybody to do anything in a plank type motion. Plank should not be a passive exercise. What people should be doing when they’re down in that position is attempting to pull their shoulders down towards their hips as far as possible and simultaneously tilt their pubic bone up towards their sternum. If you imagine that kind of crunch on the ground shape and flip it around. Gravity is trying to pull your belly button to the floor, so what often happens is people are hyperextending their spine and complaining about how much they feel their back. And then this translates to crawling, right? Because what happens is, nobody’s been on the ground in a really long time, then they’ve got their back sagged and they’ve totally spilled their pelvis in the anterior tilt and they’re complaining about their back. Well, the fix to that is actually not to just try to suck in your belly button but to actually mildly flex your spine against gravity by creating tension in your stomach.
Steven Sashen:
It’s something that, there are a number of people who’ve talked about this and it’s really true, how most people think of a plank. I don’t know how to describe it, but the real value of doing it is basically creating tension through your entire body.
Skyler Tanner:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
I mean, elbows down to your toes and squeeze your glutes, which is like people are, “But that’s on the other side.” It’s like, “Yeah, I know.” That’s what you needed to do to engage the ABS as well. It’s something I talked about before Glen Mills is Usain Bolt’s coach. He said that what got him to be a successful 100-meter runner was they spent a year just getting his core working because he was just super loosey-goosey. Of course, that works for your glutes, that works for your abs. And he hates the way he run, just hates the way her ran.
Skyler Tanner:
Usain or Glen?
Steven Sashen:
Usain.
Skyler Tanner:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
Glen loves the way he run. Usain is-
Skyler Tanner:
Because I see videos of Usain in the weight room. Probably because Glen put them in there.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, no. He’s crushing it. He’s just definitely doing it.
Skyler Tanner:
Sure.
Steven Sashen:
We used to talk about that, which is very entertaining. And there’s a whole argument about you whether sprinters need the weight room. Well, that’s a whole lot of thing. Anyway, anything else you want to leave people with on the movement side.?
Skyler Tanner:
No. I think we’ve covered it all.
Steven Sashen:
Talk about it again. That sounds perfect. So, dude, Skyler, thank you so much. If people want to get in touch with you in any way, what would you recommend? How would they do it?
Skyler Tanner:
Sure. Sure. I’m not really on social, so it’s hard time finding me there or at least it’s going to take a while for me to come around to it. Skylar, that’s S-K-Y-L-E-R, @smartstrenghtaustin.com. Feel free to shoot me an email.
Steven Sashen:
Smartstrengthaustin.com
Skyler Tanner:
One giant word, no hyphen.
Steven Sashen:
Yes, of course. It’s amazing to me that people still say things like all one word or all lowercase. There’s like, oh come on, we know this by now. I think it’s my mom who still says that, “It’s all one word.” “I know, mom.”
All right, well, dude, once again, total treat. I will see you at the next Paleo Effects. I’ll be out there. You’re going to be walking by?
Skyler Tanner:
I might be walking by. I might be walking by.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I got shoes for you.
Skyler Tanner:
Well, well. Definitely, if I’m there, of course I’m going to see you.
Steven Sashen:
Okay. You know where to find me. So, for everybody else, in where you can find me is at www.jointhemovementmovement.com. That’s all one word. We are creating a MOVEMENT Movement, getting people to share the fun and benefits of natural movement so we can make this the obvious better healthy choice the way natural food currently is. You are the movement of this movement. So, share and like and review and give a thumbs up and ring the bell so you hear about these if you’re watching this on YouTube. As I always say, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email at move@jointhemovementmovement.com. If there’s anyone you know who should be someone that we chat with on this, you can send that as well. And, as always, go out, have fun and live life feet first.
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