Barry Weinstein is the Head Coach at FootCamp which is the fastest growing barefoot lifestyle brand. FootCamp offers free barefooting classes in Central Park, New York, supplies barefoot shoes, toe socks, toe spacers, and rock mats to strengthen our customers feet and build a robust orthopedic system to live a pain free life.
Barry’s emphasis on forefoot walking as a means of reducing orthopedic injury makes him unique in his coaching style. He uses a mix of history, anthropology, and anatomy to teach students barefooting technique.
Barry is a barefoot runner, a decorated track and field thrower, an Olympic style weightlifter, a former employee of the New York Road Runners and NYC Marathon finisher. Barry was also on the prestigious CRCA Junior Development road cycling team, competing in multiple stage races including the Green Mountain Stage Race and competed in the Tour of the Battenkill AKA “the hell of the north”, and raced in the collegiate circuit in the Washington D.C. area.
Barry has been previously featured in publications such as Scientific American, Fox News, BBC World News, Crain’s New York Business, Forbes and many others.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Barry Weinstein about the correct way to walk barefoot.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How the Achilles tendon absorbs and recycles impact when running barefoot.
– Why there are high rates of back and foot injuries associated with modern running shoes.
– How the only way to change minds is to build rapport and have non-confrontational conversations with people.
– Why some people experience orthopedic problems similar to those who overuse hell strike problems even when they don’t run.
– How overstriding or reaching out with the foot in front is not ideal for walking or running.
Connect with Barry:
Guest Contact Info
Links Mentioned:
classpass.com/studios/footcamp-new-york
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
All right, when you’re walking, should you be landing on your heel? Should you be rolling over your heel? Should be landing flat-footed? Should be landing on your forefoot? Should be landing on your toes? Should be floating in the air and never touching the ground? I don’t know. Let’s take a look and 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 feet first, you know those things at the end of your legs.
We’re going to break down the propaganda, the mythology, and sometimes the flat-out lies people have been telling you about what it takes to run or walk or hike or do yoga or CrossFit, or play in whatever way you like to do that, and to do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently. Did I say enjoyably? Trick question, I know I did, because look, it’s the most important thing. If you’re not having a good time, do something different so you are, because won’t keep it up if you don’t enjoy it, or unless you’re a glutton for punishment, and where’s the fun of that? Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, and then I guess that’s fun.
Anyway, be that as it may, I’m Steven Sashen, co-CEO, co-founder of xeroshoes.com. Here’s the T-shirt to prove it, and also xeroshoes.eu and xeroshoes.co.uk. Basically, Xero Shoes. This is The Movement Movement Podcast, because we, and that includes you, more about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do. Getting out of the way of things that make it worse even though they’re advertised as things that make it better.
All you need to do to be part of the movement is spread the word. Go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There’s nothing you need to do to join. There’s no money involved, there’s no secret handshake, there’s no song and dance that we do every day. It’s just that’s the only domain I could get, so that’s the one we’re using. And you’ll find the previous episodes of the podcast, all the ways you can interact with us and the places you can leave a review and a thumbs up and a five star or something, and hit the bell icon on YouTube. Look, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. All right, here we go.
Barry, do me a favor, tell people who you are and what the hell you do, and then we’ll talk about why you’re here.
Barry Weinstein:
So, my name’s Barry Weinstein. I am the head coach at FootCamp, which is New York’s Premier Barefoot Walking Studio. I have a class in Central Park, New York where I get New Yorkers to take off their shoes, which they do not like to do, and I guide them through a course where we walk on hard surfaces, rocks and gravel and grass, and try to create an introduction to your feet.
Steven Sashen:
I must ask the obvious partially obnoxious sounding question, if you are New York’s Premier Barefoot Studio, is there any competition whatsoever?
Barry Weinstein:
Nope. Nope, I’m the only one. I think there’s something like eight million people in the city, and I’m the only one doing this, so I get the label of premier right off the bat.
Steven Sashen:
New York’s number one undefeated top of the line barefoot studio.
Barry Weinstein:
Fastest growing as well.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. As someone who lived in New York for 10 years from ’83 to ’93, and when I go back, I’m either walking around often in our sandals or in bare feet, much to the chagrin of many people. I can’t wait to hear about that part. Do you want to say more about how you got to this before we jump into the question that I teased everybody with about walking form and structure, et cetera?
Barry Weinstein:
Sure, sure. I ran the New York City Marathon in 2022 with shoes, Altra shoes, so with the cushion and foot shaped toe box, had a cushion, zero drop design. Almost there, but not there, and I got a back injury from heel striking, and this was running. We’re not talking about walking, we’re talking about running. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Pause there. How did you conclude, and I’m not arguing of course, but how did you conclude that heel striking was the cause of whatever happened to your back?
Barry Weinstein:
Oh, I read Born to Run like the rest of us. Read Born to Run, everyone’s saying, “Read Born to Run.” I said, “Ah, Born to Run, it’s a bunch of hippie stuff, right? I don’t want to hear that.” I read Born to Run, changes my life, and I realized that my injuries, because when you’re in New York, you have your shoes on all the time. I grew up in a shoes on in the house household. I had deformities in my feet just like everyone else in the western world, bunion, plantar fasciitis. I had a tailor’s bunion on my pinky, I had very severe foot weakness, and I was jumping from shoe to shoe to shoe, a Nike Pegasus.
I eventually settled once all the foam ran out on Hoka shoes with a big thick cushion, and I said, “If only they’ve made a shoe with even more cushion.” Because I ran out of cushion on that, and I ended up running the Brooklyn half-marathon and heel striking through it, and I got severe back pain and I said, “How could I have severe back pain? It’s like I’m running on clouds. It’s like I’m running on zero gravity.” And that’s when I read Born to Run, and then I saw Harvard University went to I think Eldoret, Kenya and started looking at the college kids running and said, “They don’t run like we do. They have fascia strength, they have foot strength, they’re running on the ball of their foot.” I said, “Well, that’s curious. They’re running on the ball of their foot.”
And the other thing is, what I’m actually good at, I’m 225 pounds. I’m not a good runner, but what I’m actually good at is a hammer to throw and Olympic weightlifting, and the hammer deal and the snatch in the Olympic weightlifting are the two most technically demanding movements in sport, and that’s one and two with hammer being first, snatch being second. I have a very good knowledge of technique in general, which made me question the fact why I didn’t know how to walk or run.
I’m in the 2022 New York City Marathon, I’m getting ready for the photo station. They let you know so you can strike a pose, and you know what pose I struck? A massive raging heel strike just like that. I was probably 600 meters from the finish of the marathon. I’m looking at it later after reading Born to Run, and I find out that heel striking is not good for us and it causes back pain, ankle pain, headaches. Everything that I’ve been experiencing my entire life of 22 years in the sport. I used to work for the New York Roadrunners who puts on the New York City Marathon. I have 22 years in the sport, it was the first time I had ever heard it.
I had spoken to thousands, hundreds of thousands of runners, even elite runners. I had gone through coaching with Olympians at the Armory in high school, I’m Olympian coaches, and never once did they tell me I should cure my heel strike. And I read Born to Run. I look at this, all of a sudden I say to myself, “Wow, the running shoes that were being given are causing our injuries?” And I’ve spent so much money on these and so I said, “Okay.” And you know, I still haven’t come to the conclusion of this experiment, but I said, “Before I start telling everyone else this, I need to ditch the shoes and I need to see, because if I end up in severe crippling pain for the rest of my life, then at least it’s just me.”
But I have to do an experiment where I start off in the Xero Shoes. I started off in Xero Shoes, the Xero Preos, which I still wear today. I have a couple of them and those are the popular ones too, and then those are the ones I have experience with. I’m running in the Xero Shoes up to my local Costco to get some smoked salmon or something, and I heel strike the way through it and the next thing I go, “Oh, my back hurts like absolute crazy,” but there was something different about it this time because now I knew. Now I knew. I said, “Whoa, don’t heel strike in minimalist shoes.”
And then I go online, I find runforefoot.com with Bretta Riches who’s a Canadian running form practitioner who focuses on forefoot running, and she has, and I see this woman running without shoes over rugged terrain, something that before that I thought was impossible to do. I said, “The human foot was not even designed for this. You’ll get stress fractures, you’ll get all sorts of things.” And I see this woman doing it, and here’s the other thing, she’s not wincing. She’s enjoying it, which is incredible.
And this isn’t even the minimalist earth runner type sandals. This is like straight up unshod, straight up not even first world type thing. This is outside the western industrialized world kind of no shoes. It was incredible. But it was mostly incredible because she’s in Canada and I’d only seen people ever do this in documentaries in planes of Africa and all these places where they won all the championships. And she says that the difference between the forefoot running and the heel strike running is that you get to use your Achilles tendon when you run on your forefoot, which has 850 pounds of force absorption capacity, much more than the squishy shoes, even the new Nova Blasts with all of this, and you don’t need the stiff sole running shoes. They’re actually hurting you.
I go for a run the first time in the Xero Shoes. I’m sorry, the second time, after I learned no heel strike. I made it to the other side of Central Park. I can’t run another step. That was it. It was probably something like 400 meters. Now I’m stuck on the west side and I can’t take another step home. I have to decide whether or not I’m going to go on the horse carriage or the petty cab, both which costs a week’s salary. But I ended up just walking on my heels back home. Do it again, make it around the whole loop after probably three, four weeks of this. But each time getting totally stranded at a different part of Manhattan, trying to work my way home.
But then I start to see improvement in my feet, but most importantly, improvement in my low back, which I had eight months of chronic back pain from my running, which no one should ever have this sort of back pain from running. Running is good for you. Running is something that should help you. And I eventually saw that my feet were the only things that were getting work, the only things I’m improving. The rest of my body actually stopped having the orthopedic pain. Eventually I ran nine miles down to my wife in the Xero Shoes. Now, I’m 225 pounds, nine miles to me is equivalent to you like 30, 40 miles.
Steven Sashen:
You misunderstood. If I have to go 30 or 40 miles, I’m doing that in a car.
Barry Weinstein:
Yeah, oh.
Steven Sashen:
Sprinter, I don’t even take turns at the end of the track, because first of all, I don’t have a GPS watch. I don’t like getting lost. Yeah, I don’t understand distance at all. It’s very confusing to me.
Barry Weinstein:
But you know what’s so funny about it is everyone says the same things to me, and you having lived in New York, you see that in New York City and probably London as well where I lived, there’s a modesty culture behind shoes. It’s almost… And say, what do I mean by modesty culture? I mean when you go to some parts of the world and you’re not supposed to not cover your head, it’s the same in New York City. And I’ve had people have public freakouts where I’m in the park and when I’m in the park running barefoot, I’m headphones in, hood up. Stop talking to me everyone, I got to get my workout in. But you obviously want to spread the word, but every time within two or three minutes you’re running, someone’s going up to you saying, “Your phone’s out, I need to ask you questions about what you’re doing,” and they’ve never seen it before.
I had never seen it before, and I’ve been on this experiment where now I am a fairly comfortable long distance barefoot runner and I can run on rocks, on the bridle path, which is all rocky and sandy. I could do that for long distances. I run on asphalt. People say, “Oh, aren’t you afraid of the impact of asphalt?” And they just don’t understand, the impact is absorbed and recycled by your Achilles tendon when you just get out of the stiff sole shoes and get up into that forefoot position. It’s like a bow and arrow and it goes boing, like that, and it protects your orthopedic system from shock.
And they all are so confused about what is healthy for you because when you show them the Hoka shoes with the narrow toe box and the two inches of foam, they all say, “I want that one because that’s going to protect me,” but that is why we have 80% rates of injury to our back and feet. But in the western world, when people in the non-industrialized world who grow up barefoot can still use squat toilets into their nineties and can still run long distances into their nineties. We’re losing this battle Steven, but we got to keep fighting. But everyone outside, the foam’s getting worse, the heels are getting worse, and the solution that people have is now new niche shoe companies with even more foam and they’re rolling ankles and all that.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, it’s even crazier. There’s an event every year called the Running Event. It’s for companies that are selling to running shoe stores, and not only have things gotten higher, but they’re now making what I’m referring to as single-use shoes because that’s what they are. They’re basically have gotten rid of the outsole, the rubber outsole. They’re basically just using the mid-sole foam, and the idea is you’ll wear these for one race and then they’ll be useless. And guess how much they cost?
Barry Weinstein:
$500, the DNS ones.
Steven Sashen:
$400 to $500.
Barry Weinstein:
$400 to $500.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is I can make an argument for why they may make you faster, and the argument is simply that they’re so light that there’s less energy just moving your legs. They’re not slowing down your steps per minute, slowing down your cadence. And because they’re so high, they’re basically allowing your stride length to be slightly longer because of the height. And if you have your stride frequency staying the same and your stride length getting slightly longer, that makes you technically faster. And so, but it’s a fake out. I mean, it’s a fake way of doing it. But I was blown away by seeing even new startup companies going for even higher, even thicker, even whatever else.
I mean, now that said, I also think that when we are the only game in town in a place like that event, then things are going to turn and they are starting to turn in a number of ways. While I don’t know that we’re losing the battle, but we’re definitely gaining some ground in the battle, just we haven’t taken over the opponents. We haven’t made it across their fictional border yet.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
That’s the-
Barry Weinstein:
I can see that. I went for a run on the bridle path and I ran into a guy who was a financial guy of some sort, some sort of financial genius, and he stopped me on his way to work and he stopped his commute and said, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “Don’t you need to be somewhere instead of asking me these questions?” But he got me in contact with the BBC who was not even on… He just said, “Let me call this financial guy at the BBC and get you on television because we need people to see this.” And I spoke to the BBC about this with a guy who read Born to Run and still wears super cushioned all shoes, and still that’s the weirdest one because you get people who read it and then they do the opposite having read it.
Steven Sashen:
I have been in a number of orthopedic offices in my day in the last 14 years, and the number of times where they have a number of books in the office is very high, and the number of times Born to Run is one of those books is almost a hundred percent. And then everybody walks in wearing their quote, normal shoes, and they all talk about how they love the book. It’s like, but you didn’t get it.
Barry Weinstein:
It’s because the group dynamic, especially in urban centers, is crazy. And in terms of the claims, now there’s the claims. I’ve seen the $450 single use super shoe. If you put that on a mid-level athlete, because this is supposed to make you faster, and the alpha flies for the slow group, unacceptable. Carbon plate for the slow group, unacceptable. Code spring, the roll-off technology, unacceptable. And you know what I do all day? For my marketing, I don’t have any paid at anything. I just go on Facebook, I Google foot pain from running shoes. I then look at everyone who made their comments from foot pain running shoes, and then I just say, just repeat points from Born to Run over and over and over. And eventually you get into their head, but it’s one person at a time.
And then in some ways, I don’t recommend Altra shoes because altra shoes have other problems, which is the cushion makes us stomp our feet and cuts off our 200,000 nerve endings at the bottom of our foot, which are there to guide us to learn how to run. But they’re like harm reduction because the people I talk to have bunion and they have all of this, and then they have the heel and they have all the technology and they’re just getting clunkier and clunkier shoes and they need something. And when you see these technologies, especially around Christmastime. At Christmastime, people get gifted shoes and then they’ll go on the forums and say, because they don’t have experience with these shoes, “Should I return them or should I keep them?” They don’t have any love for these shoes yet, but that’s where you need to be. Return those shoes, get those back into the thing and…
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ve got a book recommendation for you. First of all, kudos to you for engaging in the conversation, and you are right. The biggest thing that impacts people is what they think other people are doing and what those people in their social circle or circles would think if they did something outside of the norm. There’s a book called How Minds Change by a guy named Dave McRaney, and if you’re going to be dealing one on one with people, I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version of the book. The first thing you need to do is basically build rapport with people by helping them realize that you’re more than willing to hear their story and hear what they believe without criticism, without questions, literally letting them tell you more and more about their experience. By the way, there are like four people who develop variations on this technique.
The second part is getting them to, and this is what leads to all the rest of it, is getting them to think about their thinking in a way that they haven’t done before. And one of the ways that almost everyone has come up with is you ask them something like, let’s say we’re talking about arch support and they’ve been talking about how they need arch support and they’re trying all these different products, et cetera. You can say, “On a scale of one to a hundred, how confident are you that arch support is a solution?” And if they say anything other than a hundred, the question is why not a hundred? Why isn’t it higher? Or what would it take to be a little lower? Or where were you before you even heard of the concept of arch support? If you can remember back that far, which pretty much means you were in the womb.
Barry Weinstein:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Once they explain something about why they’re not a hundred percent confident, and it may be something as simple as, “Well, I’ve tried a bunch of things and they don’t seem to work,” then that opens up another conversation where you can start to get them to think about their thinking, how they come to conclusions, where they get information. The first person who recommended arch support, tell me about that and what made you decide to believe that person versus something else?
And anyway, it gets very, very interesting. And then you ask them again at certain points, “Where is your confidence level?” And sometimes with some of these conversations, you can get people from one side of the fence, “I’m 99.9%,” to, “I’m 0.1%.” And sometimes all you’re doing is getting people to be a little curious.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
And if somebody becomes a little curious, that’s not a hundred percent, but it’s often good enough because that wasn’t there before and then maybe they’re going to look at something. Anyway.
Now, the trick for me is that I can’t do, I don’t have the time to do just one-on-one all day, every day, 24/7. And so I’m actually talking to the people who developed these various techniques, and by the way, they have all given up on the idea of trying to change someone’s mind. Actually, one out of the four is undeniably there to get people from one side of the fence to the other. The other three, they are there to just have the conversation. Wherever it goes, it goes, and they’ve dropped all intention of having someone change their mind, either in real time or at all, which is admirable. I’m trying to change people’s minds.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
I’m literally talking to the four people in the book, I’ve already talked to one, and the guy who wrote the book to have a conversation about this. But anyway, be that as it may. That’s my kudos to you for doing that. And I think you might find the book interesting because it might make some of those conversations more interesting.
Which brings me to a question I wanted to ask, when you are… Oh, two things. It’s not just major metropolitan areas where if you are in bare feet, people are going, “What the hell’s going on here?” Here I am in the middle of Colorado, I spend a lot of time in bare feet and I get it all the time. It’s a weird thing that when I’m either in bare feet or what I’m wearing now, which is shoes, two different colors of the same style, you do anything unusual with your footwear and people notice it from like 50 yards away and they’ve got opinions.
Barry Weinstein:
Mm-hmm.
Steven Sashen:
My favorite barefoot one, and I’m going to come back to you for the win in a minute, is when it’s in the summer, and I’m going in a Costco, into Costco, and I do go into Costco and into our grocery store and into our favorite restaurants, they all know me by now. In fact, at Costco, I’m sure I’ve told the story, I was in the line at the pharmacy and the guy behind me says, “Hey, your shoes don’t match,” and the pharmacist without even looking up says, “He’s wearing shoes today?” They know who I am.
But I’m walking in once and a little kid like five years old says, “Mommy, that man’s not wearing shoes.” And the mom to her credit said, “Why don’t you ask him about that?” And he says, “How come you’re not wearing shoes?” I said, “Have you ever been to the beach?” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you wear shoes on the beach?” He goes, “No.” I said, “How’s that feel?” He goes, “Oh, it’s really fun.” I go, “Same thing even when you’re not at the beach.” And he’s like, “Oh.” And mom was like, “Okay, got to go.”
Barry Weinstein:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
But there’s ways of engaging in a way that is interesting. I am curious when you are out and about, what is either the most entertaining or craziest thing anyone’s ever said to you?
Barry Weinstein:
I had a woman who was wearing probably three inch heels, which were not anatomical, run, which was very impressive. That’s the first thing. It was a very impressive run, over to me and melt down in front of me saying, “Bare feet? There’s glass out there. Be very, very careful.” And then she started to hyperventilate and then she ran away from me. It was insane. It was totally nuts. I have people…
When I’m in New York and I’m on the bridle path walking with my wife, just doing some barefoot walking, and keep in mind, I don’t really do this as a cultural thing. I don’t really do this as a spiritualistic thing. I do this as a sports performance and medical rehabilitation thing. I don’t really, if I could snap my fingers and then cover my feet up with an invisible blanket, I would just to be like everyone else, but I can’t do that because I’m not going to put my health at risk by doing that. But everyone within a 400-meter radius is looking at me. Nobody’s looking away. I’m in Central Park. They’re worried about me. They’re disgusted by me. They think I’m a total freak.
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to pause. They’re worried about you. This is the anesthetical to what people think about New Yorkers. I mean, granted, they’re misguided, but they’re concerned for you. They worry. New Yorkers are so compassionate, they just may be a little off base.
Barry Weinstein:
They’re a little off base. And the history is interesting too, because when people from England came to the American South, they came from the north of England, and this was less rich at the time, or yeah, I think it was a little bit less rich than the south of England where all the queen is and all the hoity-toity people are. And then they came to New York-
Steven Sashen:
By the way, the queen is not there any longer.
Barry Weinstein:
Unfortunately. Unfortunately not. This queen was Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth, so she’s not there either anymore. Rest in peace. All due respect to the queen. But the history behind the footwear with the horses, the history behind the rounded toe box was to fit into our horse stirrups, the pointed toe box, and I was equestrian as well. You do need a shoe to fit your-
Steven Sashen:
It helps.
Barry Weinstein:
It helps. And then the heel, unless you’re riding bareback, which Native Americans used to do, which is incredible, and probably, I can’t say much on that, but then the heel as well, and this is a cultural thing that was heavily concentrated in the south of England because in Elizabethan England, you started getting widespread access to horses. And just like if you’re in your car, people are more willing to talk to you because they say, “Oh, he’s a car owner. He must be in the community or something.” I’ve noticed that since getting a car a couple of years ago in Manhattan. I’ve never even done that in my life.
But it was the same thing, having a horse meant you were a person of respect and those people who had the horses came to New York, the people who did not yet have access to the horses came to the American South. And I find that in places in the American South, Northerners will make fun of certain communities in the American South that have acceptance for unshod lifestyle, barefoot lifestyle, laugh at them. I’ve seen this multiple times. But the problem is that the shoes that people wear in the north are quite literally causing them all sorts of damage, and it’s the other thing is why do you think a lot of sprinters with good fashion strength are coming from Florida, Beachtown and Texas, which is slightly more welcoming to people with bare feet?
And Australia, I’m sorry, Jamaica, unshod culture. You can be a classy person in Jamaica. I keep saying Australia, but they’re the same thing. The other place with a really big barefoot culture and good track and field teams, and we can’t even keep up with East Africa in the marathon. And people say, “Oh, it’s, they’re in the mountains,” but then there’s people in Colorado in the mountains who can’t keep up. But the reason why is because they run barefoot in cross country up until sub elite. And then when they get into the elites, they put $500 single-use shoes on them, and they only have to use it once and they get their payout.
But if these shoes really did make you faster, you would find the people using them getting faster. But people get faster when they run barefoot and when they go finally their elite level or sub elite level in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and even fake Kip Yegan, I think, came in bronze medal place in the World Cross Country Championships barefoot, that was a modern version of this. And it’s really bad because the culture here in New York is so damaging, and you see people start to age here at age 30 in the same way that people who survive until that age in rural China age at 90, and they say, “Oh, it must be genetics. Must be genet-”
Barry Weinstein:
And they say, “Well, it must be genetics. It must be genetics, those people out there.” But the second those people move to the United States and have kids, there are kids put on the shoes, and then, they start to have the same wear profiles as we have in the New York area. The question is, this is all one big long rant going back to do the $500 shoes make you faster? If we were to do a real estimate of that, we have to look at everybody who wears the Super Shoes. I would say 60% of them, within a couple of weeks, will be going zero miles an hour because they’ll get injured from it because Super Shoes get you super injured. And then, the other 40% will probably see a slight, while they can last outside of being injured, they’ll see maybe a slight advantage from some spring. And then, eventually as they lose the ability to use their Achilles tendon, they’ll get injured in the next year.
And then, the one guy who is already running two hours, nine minutes marathon barefoot or whatever, is going to get the shoes, get his shoe sponsorship, and then, his kids are going to go into shoes, and then, never… That’s why heredity doesn’t seem to be such a big thing in the sport of track and field because in the marathon, you get rich, you put your kids in shoes, and the kids no longer become competitive. So, it’s not the shoes that do it’s the people that do it. The shoes are fashion.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s funny, Eliud Kipchoge who broke the sub two-hour marathon under perfect conditions, there was a couple articles that came out that got squashed where the headline was him saying, “It wasn’t the shoes, it was my legs.” But nobody appreciated that. Now, I’m not going to argue that certain shoes may, for certain people, help a little compared to what they were wearing before, but there are other confounding factors, placebo effect being one, and many things where you… How do I want to put this? Well, it’s basically placebo. If you think these things are going to be helpful, the signals that you used to get that were telling you slow down or signals that you’re now using saying speed up, or stay consistent, or whatever it is, there are, of course, people who are still winning races who aren’t in those shoes. The reason that everyone’s wearing those shoes is not necessarily because they’re making people faster, but if you’re neck-and-neck with somebody in a lot of races, and then, they switched shoes and for whatever reason, beat you, the first thing you’re going to do the next day is go by those shoes.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Because people are at the very least, superstitious about what it’s going to take to beat that guy who’s just next to you. There’s a friend of mine who… And to your point, I have a friend who is a multi-time Olympian, and world champion, and race champion, Boston Marathon, New York Marathon, who was trained by Arthur Lydiard in New Zealand, and Lydiard made shoes for his athletes that looked a lot like ours. And she says to me, “We never got injured until we got shoe contracts, and we’re wearing-”
Barry Weinstein:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
Never had a problem until then, which was very, very interesting. And now, she lives in her shoes, which is fun. She wears them all the time. She doesn’t actually live in them. She’s much taller than it would take to actually live in a pair, let alone a number… There was one other point that I wanted to make. I’m seeing if I can remember it. Oh, the other thing about runners and sprinters in particular is when there is a cultural pressure or cultural support which goes hand in hand to that’s supporting this event, marathon, sprints, whatever, then there’s going to be more people doing it, and you are going to just find, if you have a bigger pool of people, you’re going to find those weird genetic freaks who weren’t going to do it before, but now, there’s some cultural benefit for doing it, and they’re going to show up as well.
So, there’s some advantage of just having more people doing it. To sprinting, I will say one of the things, and this could get me canceled, so here we go. I’ve joked with a friend of mine who’s a world champion, four by 400-meter runner, and American champion, 400-meter runner who has been a coach of mine as well as being a friend, who is a tall, really just unpleasantly, good-looking guy. He’s just one of these guys. Actually, it’s funny. When he’s got his game face on when he’s ready to compete, he’s just scary. I didn’t talk to this guy for years because he scared the crap out of me.
When he’s done and he smiles, this guy’s model gorgeous. Just spectacularly good-looking. Anyway, I joked with him, I said, “It’s not…” How do I want to put this? “It’s well-known in the sprinting community that having good strength in your glutes and hamstrings is really important especially.” And if you watch the way most white people walk, they don’t use their glutes.
Barry Weinstein:
Nope.
Steven Sashen:
And if you watch the way most black people walk, and again, this is going to get me canceled, ignore it, is they’re walking in a way that’s actually using their glutes. And I exaggerated this stereotypical way that black guys walk, and he just burst in hysterics and said, “Do you think this is why there’s only been one white guy who only one time ever ran, a sub ten second 100 meters?” And actually-
Barry Weinstein:
Oh, there’s only one.
Steven Sashen:
Well, there’s actually two, but the second one, it was wind aided. So, there’s only one who’s ever done it without wind aided. And he only did it one time. And I said, “So, do you think this is the reason why no white guys run a sub 10?” And he just burst in hysterics. He goes, “Could be. Don’t know.”
Barry Weinstein:
That’s really interesting. Glute recruitment, once again, we have a… Jamaica is a huge landmass, but it’s a tiny island nation in population, and they produce all the best women’s sprinters. Now, of course, there’s Sha’Carri’s our shining hope, but Elaine Thompson, and then, also Shaunae Miller-Uibo, I think she was from The Bahamas. But the thing is, is this region-
Steven Sashen:
Same idea, The Bahamas, St. Kitts, which yeah, it’s that whole area. Yeah.
Barry Weinstein:
Barefoot culture. It’s okay to walk outside barefoot. No one’s going to be staring at you, Steven, if you’re anywhere in Jamaica, barefoot.
Steven Sashen:
Well, to that point, there is a specific correlation between foot and ankle strength and sprinting speed.
Barry Weinstein:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know the RSI test?
Barry Weinstein:
No, I’ve heard in past.
Steven Sashen:
Basically, you put your hands on your hips, and you bounce up and down 10 times as high as you can while trying to bend your hips and your knees as little as possible. You’re just bouncing with your feet and ankles. And what you measure is what you do is you divide the amount of time you’re in the air by the amount of time you’re on the ground. And basically, anything over 2.5 is really good. Over two seven is exceptionally good. Over three, you are a freak. I am happy to pat myself on the back and say at the age of sixty-one, I’m like a two seven one, and I’m a pretty good sprinter.
So, foot strength, hugely important. Research is very clear. Walking around barefoot, or the research is actually in minimal shoes, builds foot strength as much as doing an exercise program. The other thing, there is a let’s call it, for lack of a better term, an epigenetic version of this where people who start out as ballet dancers in particular, or gymnasts, or jump ropers, or anything where a young person, you’re doing a lot of foot strengthening things, which goes back to the point you’re making about people growing up in a barefoot culture, that helps really a lot too. I started out as a diver, became an all-American gymnast. But there is the genetic component to that because some people can build that foot strength, but they’re just not fast for whatever other reason. It turns out my grandfather, I didn’t know this till as in my mid 40s, nor did my mother ever. My grandfather was a gymnast.
Barry Weinstein:
Oh, wow.
Steven Sashen:
Who knew?
Barry Weinstein:
Who knew?
Steven Sashen:
Maybe there’s something in there. Don’t know.
Barry Weinstein:
So, Valarie Allman, the discus thrower. I’m New York discus thrower champion. So, I’m a discus thrower, and that’s not even the master’s division, but I had to beat a couple of college kids. But New York, there’s no throwers because we’re all not really thrower type, so it’s an easy field. But Valarie Allman was a dancer and she would go on point in ballet, and then, she’s the discus throw champ. She throw as far as I do, she used to throw at the men’s weight probably twice as far as I do. It’s incredible.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow.
Barry Weinstein:
So, dancing definitely, and volleyball as well. Anything with a large forefoot. But you notice that in the vault in gymnastics for women, you do have a barefoot run up to the vault, and people always say, why do gymnasts run so weird? Actually, they’re the only ones in western society who can run right. The rest of us are all-
Steven Sashen:
Well, admittedly, they run weird, not all of them because many of them do that straight arm mechanical robot thing. I don’t know why. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Actually, I never thought about it until right now. I can think of why. Because when you watch what they’re doing with their arms, they’re basically keeping their arm swing to a minimum, which helps pick up cadence because you only have a limited amount of time to run. And I knew for me, I knew when I hit my maximum speed, which was not running the entire length of the runway, it was about 10 feet less because I just figured the max speed when I hit the board that way. But yeah, they do have mostly weird arm swing because they haven’t been taught to actually run in a way where they could look normal-ish. But also, there’s another reason as well, which is that for some of those vaults, you need to get your arms from behind you to in front of you straight, quickly. And it may be advantageous to do it that way because you don’t see them-
Barry Weinstein:
Wow, that’s so interesting.
Steven Sashen:
Well, yeah, because when you look on floor ex, where they have to run as well, many of them don’t have that weird arm thing when they’re running before a roundoff. But their last step or two for a roundoff do look weird because they figured out a weird technique to get them in the position the right way, but that’s neither here nor there.
Barry Weinstein:
Gymnastics is so complicated.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ll tell you about gymnastics. Now, the floor, when you’re doing floor exercise, is basically a trampoline. And I used to watch the Olympics. And when I was doing this with my girlfriend, and I was getting really frustrated, and she goes, “What? Are you just jealous?” I went, “Yeah.” Because the moves that they just did, I was doing in high school, but I was doing them on a wrestling mat. And if they had done that move that way on a wrestling mat, they would’ve just broken both of their ankles. So, I’m jealous because I never got the opportunity to do shit on a trampoline like floor, where I would’ve been able to do some crazy stuff that no-
Barry Weinstein:
Wow.
Steven Sashen:
So, oh well.
Barry Weinstein:
Well, mother of all sports, I think it’s so impressive. I’m an Olympic weightlifter as well, that all ex gymnasts-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, funny.
Barry Weinstein:
I think that the emphasis on technique, we need to borrow from gymnastics into running because when you-
Steven Sashen:
Don’t get me… Well, I’m just going to say it this way. There are things that you do as a gymnast to learn highly complicated movements that have never been applied to, I’m going to say sprinting in particular. And I have figured out a way to do that. There’s actually two, and then, there’s a third thing that has nothing with gymnastics that needs to be done. And I’m actually working with some guys on a patent that I have about how to do this because many people think sprinting is just faster running. And if they have bad running form, they need to move their legs faster, which is not the case.
It’s learning how to sprint well, and I would argue that I’m still, yikes, still, make that go away, my apologies. I’m still learning how to do that, to learn how to sprint well, you’re either lucky enough to figure it out somehow, or it’s just built into the way you naturally move. But I believe that I could take a, let’s say, mid-level sprinter and make them a highly competitive sprinter by using some things from gymnastics to teach them the proper form and embed that in their brain in a way that that becomes the way that… My undergraduate research at Duke was on cognitive aspects of motor skill acquisition. I know what it takes to learn a new movement pattern. There’s no opportunity to do those things in track and field activities.
Barry Weinstein:
Interesting. Interesting. For me, my philosophy, how I learned my running technique, I obviously had all the drills, A skip, B skip, C skip, all that stuff. Many years, my running technique wasn’t getting any better. Still heel striking. For me, I found that the best thing to get an efficient running technique is the nervous system in the foot and a combination of your natural environment as well as the 200,000 nerve endings of the foot. If you’re coming down on your heel too much, ouch. If you’re running too high up on here, ouch. And then, eventually, you find how to do it. If you land too far forward to your big toe, ouch. So, eventually, you have to run gingerly on the outside of your foot. And after a million steps, a million renditions, each one of them just hurting like nuts, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to choose this pain or you have to choose orthopedic pain that’ll just happen to you.
Steven Sashen:
You’re the perfect case for this. My wife has a great line. She goes, “Our shoes aren’t doing anything other than becoming your coach. The feedback that you’re going to get if you listen to it, will coach you into better form.” Optimal form? Not necessarily. I’ve seen people who have the idea, you’re supposed to land on the ball of your foot, and we’re about to get there, do crazy things like reach way out in front of them with their foot and point their toe to land on their foot. I know it’s horrible. I’ve seen people learn to run by basically doing a fast version of how Groucho Marx walks.
Again, it’s not actually a running form. There are ways if you’re getting the wrong feedback or not knowing how to interpret the feedback, where you can still be a little out of whack. I have another patent for that. So, working on that problem. But anyway, let’s move on to the thing that we tease this with because this is the perfect segue, and that is this whole question of where you’re supposed to land on your foot when most people, we talked about running, but you brought it up about walking. And you have, you have told me, taken what many would consider a controversial position about this.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
How did the controversy begin?
Barry Weinstein:
Okay. In the West, we started wearing heeled shoes. I know you know this. This was just to the audience who needs to hear the whole story. We started wearing heeled shoes and narrow toe boxes from a tradition of equestrian transportation, so horses, where the narrow toe box shoes goes in the stirrup, and the heel prevents you from slipping out of the stirrup, the two-inch or one-inch heel on the back of the shoe interrupted our natural walking gait where you land on the forefoot, and then, go down, come down to the midfoot, and just like a bow and arrow, and then, you push off. What this happened was that this interfered with this block here and we started going, “Kadunk.”
Steven Sashen:
Let me pause because the controversy is in the one or the phrase that you used about it being our natural thing to-
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
And I’m not saying you’re right or wrong, where and how did you come to that conclusion that that’s the natural way to walk?
Barry Weinstein:
In Northern Tanzania, the Hadza tribe who are a modern hunter-gatherer tribe who walks for business, they’re not a nomadic tribe, but they are persistence hunters, the same way of hunting that was in Born to Run, Born to Run, they are, I think, the last true Bushmen of Africa, there’s video of them where they’re walking along a rocky path where they’re walking on their forefoot, every one of them. And that’s the first piece of evidence. And I’m just going to do the second one. The second one, look at how toddlers and kids walk. Because toddlers walk. They need to learn how to come down on their heel a little bit because when toddlers and kids will actually run and walk way super Kipchoge heel, nowhere near touching the ground. And do you know what doctors do when the kid doesn’t… And the other thing will happen, special needs kids.
People always talk about, so somehow, special needs kids will be forefoot walking. Why is that? Because special needs kids aren’t attending school at a regular basis the way the non-special needs kids are. They’re homeschooled, and oftentimes, these kids will not be forced to wear footwear in the house. So, because of that, they never get the fascia binding construction of a modern shoe and will continue to forefoot walk. They say, “Oh, it must be something to do with a mental disability of some sort.” But it’s not. It is just because they aren’t being socialized to wear mandatory footwear. Indigenous people in northern Tanzania, the Hadza tribe, or Hadzabe tribe-
Steven Sashen:
Hadza.
Barry Weinstein:
As well as kids, as well as what happens unhindered.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, so the things that I’m going to say are based on ideas that I have about walking form, but I’m going to throw this out there. And again, I’m not taking a position at this moment. You mentioned with the Hadza tribe, watching them walking on rocky surfaces.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
My question is what, if anything, changes if they’re walking on a flat smooth surface, or if they’re walking uphill or downhill, and if they’re walking at different speeds? And I don’t have the answers, but not surprisingly, I’ll tell you where I’m going with this. With kids, I’m the first one to say that if you watch kids who grow up predominantly barefoot, what they’re doing when they walk and run is different than what other kids are doing. The problem that I have with using kids is I’m going to take it slightly out of context. It will be not uncommon for someone to show a picture of a baby’s foot or someone up to the age of maybe two and their foot, where they’ve got a relatively narrow heel, and their toes are spread like crazy wide, and they go, “See? That’s natural.” And I go, “Yeah, their heads are also three quarters of their body.”
If your head as an adult was the size proportionally that it is for a baby, you would be 80% head. So, we can’t use the morphology of prepubescent children as an example of what we’re supposed to be when we become adults. So, there may be, and I don’t know, there may be other factors that lead to how babies, and toddlers, and special needs kids walk that I don’t know, I haven’t identified. Again, I’m not going to try and stake a claim in an opposing position, but I want to highlight just a way to think about these things of just how to investigate the thoughts that we have to start looking for counterfactual information, to see if it’s valid or not. Go ahead.
Barry Weinstein:
Mary Leakey in 1978, went to Northern Tanzania to the Ngorongoro Crater, which is truly the cradle of humanity, and found the oldest trackway. A trackway is a set of footprints from Australopithecus afarensis, who was the first ever human-
Steven Sashen:
Humanoid.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Yes, homo something. Yes.
Barry Weinstein:
She concluded that this group of early human only used their heels when walking as brakes and otherwise. And she said, “When you want to put the brakes on, you put the heels down.” So, you talk about natural human, they excavated it. And I think it’s in the British Museum right now. And you can see that these people were walking… In the United States though, they have trackways in White Sands National Park in New Mexico, and they discovered this trackway. They said it was the first human trackway discovered in the US or the North America, and they have a full print. But then, they also said that this was a kid, a teenager who was holding a baby downhill, and that it’s likely that if you don’t put on the brakes, the kid’s going forward and holding a big heavy weight. And you can even see that as the daughter, or not the daughter, as the teenage girl puts the baby down, the baby will walk a couple steps, and then, get tired and start complaining. You have to pick the kid up, put him on the other side, start walking again.
There’s plenty of the actual trackways from before we even had any shoes, which suggests a forefoot walk. But the other thing is just inside my own body, I speak to… And not even my body, most of the people I speak to on a daily basis are not running Leadville 100 or doing anything like that. Most of the people have never run in their lives actually, and they are experiencing the exact same orthopedic problems as people who are just overdoing it, heel strike running, and they have never run.
Steven Sashen:
It’s not about running. The simple thing, and we didn’t address this specifically, but actually, you just gave me the perfect segue for my current thoughts about walking and running, which is when people say, “Where’s my foot supposed to land?” My answer is, “You’re asking the wrong question because it’s going to vary in some ways based on whether you’re walking uphill, downhill, accelerating, decelerating, fast or slow, and the surface that you’re on.” I said, “But my answer is also fundamentally, you want to do the same thing whether you’re walking or running, which is to the point you just made, not overstriding, not reaching out, and putting your foot out in front of you, putting the brakes on, getting your foot underneath your center of mass.”
Now, I’ll say this, go with it where you will. I’m not putting a stake in the ground, but what I notice in my house where the majority of our house is tile, we have carpeting in the upstairs, in our bedroom, and in the hallway leading to our bedroom. And downstairs in our basement, we have a room where there’s a little bit of carpeting there too. But mostly, it’s just tile. I’ll walk in one of two ways, and it depends on if I’m going faster or slower. Or it also depends on whether I’m wanting to make sure I don’t wake up my wife. I will not infrequently be walking, landing on the ball of my foot landing, like you said before, outside edge, which is what people refer to as supinating. My foot rolls in. I’m still landing with my foot mostly underneath my center of mass. If I’m trying to go faster, and I’m still in that same situation, I will be over striding a little bit, and sometimes, but still landing in the same way.
Or I will land flat-footed. Or sometimes, I would need a force plate to really show this. Your heel is a ball, and you can land on different parts of the ball. If I’m landing where my heel is touching the ground first, still outside edge first, and mostly towards the front of my foot in that ball instead of the back of my foot. When I get on the carpeting, I’m much more prone to be rolling over that heel, again, mostly being on the front part of the ball. I’m much less likely to land forefoot when I’m on the carpeting. But again, the key thing from my perspective, which is the same point I make about running, is get your feet underneath you, and push… I just kicked the box behind me.
And the thing that moves you forward, and humans have a hard time with this, is the thing that happens to be behind you because we don’t have eyes behind us. We’re not as attentive to the thing that’s moving us forward is if you think about ice skaters, what moves them forward is pushing back, pushing their heel behind them, not letting the other foot get in front of them, having the foot land underneath them because if their foot was in front of them, once they took any weight off the back foot, they’d fall on their ass because their foot would go flying out from underneath them. Anyway, that’s a roundabout way to say where my current thinking is about walking.
Barry Weinstein:
So, gravity is an oppressive force. Gravity is the worst and no one even knows about this-
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Barry Weinstein:
When you learn to go barefoot and you actually just say, “Fine, I have to wake up this morning, actually deal with this gravity thing, you can’t keep avoiding it’s bad for me,” you start to learn what gravity is the hard way. For humans, the most efficient way to move forward is obviously just to just say, “I can’t deal with it anymore.” And then, deadpan fall on your face. So, that is the most efficient way.
Steven Sashen:
I’m not sure. It’s certainly the least amount of energy to use to get to… It’s not moving you forward per se, unless you’re trying to cross the finish line. Yes. The least energy you could use, you would just be falling in some direction, most likely forward.
Barry Weinstein:
So, if I just give up, I just fall forward on my face. But it also is the most efficient way to move because it doesn’t require any muscle. It doesn’t require any sort of… It is just a natural occurrence, and it’s very inexpensive from the amount of oxygen you need, and your muscles don’t have worked that hard. So, walking and running are both simply just continuing this falling on your face and catching yourself reflexively, when your back foot is here… People try to think of these muscles. In weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting, it’s a lot of muscles, a lot of… It’s a very short movement to move the weight over your head, but it’s a lot of muscles. It’s a lot of oxygen, it’s a lot of burning, fat, calories, all that stuff. But in running and walking, it’s all tendons. And the point of the muscle is to stretch.
Same in the throat, especially in the shot put. You want to actually get a stretch reflex where your body thinks your pec is about to break and will reflexively go forward like that. When you fall forward on your face in walking and running, all of a sudden, your Achilles tendon will load up, and then, your calf muscle, your calf muscle is not there to lift you up, like all that in your psoas muscle. Your calf muscle is just there to say, “Oh my goodness, I’m about to rip in half. Let me get this foot out of the way.” And it’s a stretch reflex. That’s the difference between running, and walking, and weightlifting. Weightlifting, you’re using your muscles in order to move the weight. In running, you’re using your muscles just as a stretch reflex, and also, throwing as well in track and field. That’s why when you land on your heel when you’re walking, you don’t actually activate that stretch reflex until you’re already on your forefoot. And when you do that in your calf muscle. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Well, again, let’s bring that back to overstriding because I think there’s another piece to this. And FYI, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to agree with you and tell you how I’ve been walking up hills lately. You’re going to like it.
Barry Weinstein:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
So, if you overstride and land on your heel, by the time your foot comes down, your plantar fascia are stretched already and unable to be responsive. They’re unable to be strong. You basically stretch them without really… Well, they’re under load…
Steven Sashen:
Them without r
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