Originally from New Orleans LA, Jay completed the Master of Physical Therapy degree at Louisiana State University Medical Center and is a Board- Certified Sports Clinical Specialist. Jay built his international reputation as an expert in biomechanical analysis as Director of the SPEED Clinic at the University of Virginia. Through this innovative venture, Jay was able to blend the fields of clinical practice and engineering to better understand and eliminate the cause of overuse injuries in endurance athletes. His unique approach goes outside the traditional model of therapy and aims to correct imbalances before they affect your performance.
Jay literally wrote the book on running gait assessments: he is author of “Running Rewired” + “Anatomy for Runners“, writes columns for numerous magazines, and has published over 35 professional journal articles and book chapters. Jay has had an active research career, teaches nationally, and consults for numerous footwear companies, the US Air Force and USA Track and Field. His ongoing research focus on footwear and the causative factors driving overuse injury continues to provide him cutting edge knowledge to educate and provide patients with an unmatched level of innovation and success. Having taught in the Sports Medicine program at UVA and Oregon State University-Cascades, he brings a strong bias towards patient education, and continues to teach nationally to elevate the standard of care for Therapists, Physicians, and Coaches working with endurance athletes.
In addition to his clinical distinction, Jay is a certified coach through both the United States Track and Field Association and the United States Cycling Federation, and certified Golf Fitness Instructor through Titleist Performance Institute. He has a competitive history in swimming, triathlon, cycling, and running events on both the local and national level, and has coached athletes from local standouts to national medalists. He enjoys exploring the Pacific Northwest with his family on knobbies, skis, boards, and soles.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Jay Dicharry about if super shoes are good for runners.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How super shoes may encourage overstriding and landing on the heel, which can lead to injuries.
– Why people should look at other factors besides super shoes that contribute to their perceived improved performance.
– How shoe technology is not a substitute for proper training and form.
– Why people tend to chase trends instead of relying on common sense when it comes to footwear.
– How some athetes experience a decline in performance when they switch to high-stack cushioned shoes because it alters their natural timing and stiffness.
Connect with Jay:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@mobo.board
Links Mentioned:
moboboard.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Okay, the big question, are super shoes really super? Let’s find out on today’s episode of The MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Starting feet first, those things at the end of your legs, we break down the propaganda and the mythology and sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do yoga or CrossFit, or what you’re going to put on your feet, which is going to be today’s topic, obviously. I’m Steven Sashen, co-CEO, co-founder of Xero Shoes, and we call this The MOVEMENT Movement podcast where we, that includes you, I’ll tell you about that in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do, not getting in the way of doing something that you can actually do without whatever gets in the way.
And here’s how you can participate, really simple. Leave us a review somewhere, give us a thumbs up, hit the bell icon on YouTube, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes and other places you can engage with us on social media and engage with us on social media. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. So let’s have some fun. Jay Dicharry, tell people who you are and why you’re here.
Jay Dicharry:
I’m a guy in a cape trying to become more super with super shoes.
Steven Sashen:
No, you’re much more than a guy in a cape.
Jay Dicharry:
Steve, thanks for having me. I’m a physical therapist, a researcher, and I’m part of the faculty in the PT program at Oregon State University and founder of Mobo, a tool to improve stability and balance in your feet. I do a lot of validation, innovation testing for a number of different brands, and I think the reason we’re talking today is to try and dig deeper in a little bit about what’s on this whole myth. I think people get focused on the hype, and they need to bring back to reality a little bit.
Steven Sashen:
I love you so much. So before we do that quick endorsement, your Mobo, M-O-B-O, the Mobo Board, great, great product for building foot strength and balance and all the things that go along with that. So is it moboboard.com, M-O-B-O-board?
Jay Dicharry:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, check that out when you have a moment. That’s the earliest promo I’ve ever done for a product on however many hundreds of these podcasts I’ve done. Okay. So I have a lot of opinions about this whole super shoe thing. You have been asked to throw in yours in many situations lately. Do you want to do the high level overview of let’s start with what people are calling a super shoe, what claims they are making about them, and then the fun that will happen after we decide to dive into all of that?
Jay Dicharry:
Yeah, for sure. So I think the biggest thing to understand is that when you think about cushioning in your footwear that you’ve had for years, decades, those shoes, basically when you walk and run, your body weight compresses that cushioning, and then it will sort of return back to where it was. It doesn’t do so very fast and doesn’t do so very much. When you look at these new category super shoes, we have to use a different vocabulary. In fact, the word cushioning isn’t even there. It’s actually better thought about as compliance, right?
So imagine jumping on a mushy pad, like a foam pad, the pad just gives, and you land soft. It feels cushy, but you don’t really bounce back. And now imagine jumping on a diving board or a trampoline, when you distort that diving board, you bend it down or you jump on a trampoline and bend the trampoline down, it actually springs you back up again, and that’s a key distinction.
Steven Sashen:
Well, wait, I got to pause on that a little, because as a former All-American gymnast and prior to that former nationally ranked diver, the diving board is amplifying what you are doing with your legs, but if it weren’t for your legs, none of that shit would happen. And what makes it work, let’s think diving board in particular, what makes it work is that you literally tune the diving board, you change the fulcrum of the diving board to get the maximum interaction between you and the board. If you just literally went to the end of the board, jumped on it, and didn’t use your legs after that, there would be no compliance. Basically, the board would just make your legs pop up to your face and you’d break your nose and nothing good would happen. So I want to make it clear, because the implication, not intentionally, from describing what you said is that these things are in fact acting like a spring or acting like a lever, which I would argue is not the case since … Okay, and you were shaking your head no as in agreement with that comment.
Jay Dicharry:
Yes. Yeah. So let’s break it down a bit. So people are saying, “What’s the fastest shoe?” Shoes don’t race. People race. Okay, let’s make that clear. The issue, though, is when you, and I actually use that analogy offer about tuning the diving board, those of you’re unfamiliar with this, if you go to your natatorium or your pool around town, some of the competition pools, well, all the competition pools have a diving board that has a big usually white dial right next to it, and you can move that dial forward or backward to sort of match the load or the energy that you’re going to invest in a diving board and have it turn with you. And one of the really important notes about that analogy that Steve and I just made is that the shoes only work when they’re tuned to you. And I want to make that really clear.
Steven Sashen:
Dude, dude, I can’t tell you how many times I have said that exact phrase on previous episodes. The moment the first big shoe came out, I started saying, “All foam is tuned to a weight and speed, and if you’re not that weight and speed, you are screwed.”
Jay Dicharry:
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And so for those of you who want particulars on this, so unless you’re in, and it’s a little bit of a range here, because it depends not just on your body weight, it depends on how fast you’re running, it depends on the type of running stride you have, too. So in general, okay, these shoes are tuned for people in the 110 to about 145 pound range who are running really fast. So I’m not saying that if you’re one of those people, it’s going to work for you. One of my good friends was in the original Nike 4% study, and he is one of those people, he’s 145 pounds and he’s like a world caliber runner, and he had no improvement in these super shoes. So it’s not just weight, it’s not just speed. There’s a number of things which are a little more complex to discuss that have to do with stride dynamics.
But how you load that spring, the important thing to talk about super shoes is it’s not cushioning, right? So maximal cushioning shoes, again, just compress and then they take an eternity to sort of return. They don’t really rebound. What the crop of super shoes is doing, as Steve said, you do have to have tension in your legs for sure, but the shoe does actually distort and then the shoe does spring you back up again. And I think it’s really important to understand that if the spring is tuned to you, you can have some results. If the spring is outside your range, you’re not going to quite have that result. And so the reality is most people are watching videos of Kipchoge running and want to run like him in these shoes, and again, that shoe was tuned specifically to him, not just somebody his weight, it’s tuned to him.
And so they alter your stride, and that’s important to understand, it takes you out of your normal movement pattern. And I’ll make that really clear, because I’m going to preface this and just say this bluntly, I’ve been around since these things, well, even before they were invented, but I’ve been around these shoes first came to market, and I had two athletes who were given this shoe because the company said, “Oh, we had this new shoe. It’s going to make you faster.” And every athlete in the world wants an advantage, and both of those athletes got hurt to the point where they missed Olympic trials and missed the Olympics. And I’m going to preface this again by saying those are two both previous Olympians, who were pretty much it was their race to lose. So I come from this as trying to make sure you can keep showing up every single day, and I want to be clear this shoe technology does have a role, but it also has a very big downside if you’re not very careful about how you adapt them.
Steven Sashen:
I want to throw in my hat in that ring. When I first saw a handful of Olympians that were on the track with me who switched to these shoes, this was, Jesus, 12 years ago, the first one, or 11 years ago, and I said to them, I’m watching how they’re running, and I’m watching how they’re gate changed, and they were all over-striding, landing with their foot too far in front of their body, landing on the heel, and these were Olympians. I said, “You got two years until your knees are shot.” And they went, “No, I’m putting in more miles than ever. These are great.” I went, “Two years until you’re done running.” Two years later, it was two of these guys, two years later, they became cyclists. And so if you can, though, God, where to begin? There’s so many-
Jay Dicharry:
Well, can I jump on that real quick? So your anecdote is actually true, right? So there’s a research paper that came out that looked at a group of people running in traditional footwear versus super shoes and found that it actually does switch your cadence. So unless you’ve been under a rock, all research in the past 10 years or so has come out showing if you can actually shorten your stride, move your contact point closer to your body or your foot strike closer to your body, you can have less joint stress. It’s basically the knees, but a bunch of locations, right?
And so this shoe technology does the opposite. It actually cues runners to contact further in front of them. What does that do? Well, it gives more time to load the spring and have it rebound. That’s how the technology works, right? This is a given. But what it does to you, it changes joint stresses a lot. And I want to be clear, imagine if you went and ran every day, and you said, “This is what I’m used to.” And then I said, “Let’s go play basketball.” The next day, you’re like, “Whoa, I’m super sore. I’ve never moved that way before.” That’s what super shoes are doing to your gate. It is totally different.
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting, because so we have a mutual friend, Jeffrey Gray from Helux, and Jeffrey and I sort of, mostly him, I will confess, came up with a theory about why people are claiming to be running faster, regardless of whether they’re in that 110 to 145 range, regardless of how fast they’re running. And it was, well, there are a couple of components, I’ll give you the ones that he did, then I’ll add mine. His was the shoes are light enough, at least the new ones are. The original Hokas, for example, they weren’t, they were heavy, but they’ve gotten super, super light. So it’s not really altering your cadence because of the weight at the end of your limbs. And because they’re so high, you’re kind of running on stilts. So if your cadence is the same and you have that extra height, you could arguably be getting an extra inch or so out of your stride length, and speed is just stride length times cadence. So that was his thing about why people might be running faster.
Mine was that may be true, and let’s not forget two things, one, or a couple of things, one, massive placebo factor with almost anything that you’re doing in athletics. Two, if you’re in the top, I’m making this up, top five in your event, and someone shows up in some new shoe and they beat you, what do you think you’re going to do tomorrow? You’re going to go buy that shoe. Yeah, you’re going shopping.
And so the fact that everyone adopted something, and the fact that people have been getting faster in certain events anyway, the idea that the shoes are making them faster seems a little suspect at most. And then the last part to that is it may be also, from our acquaintance, he’s not a friend of mine, I haven’t met him yet, from Tim Noakes, who’s got this idea of the central governor theory, this part of your brain that tries to keep you limited from hurting yourself so you don’t hurt yourself. And when you put on some product that you’re told is going to make you faster, and by the way, as you and I both know, and we can dive into this, maybe the whole idea about 4% was complete bullshit from the beginning, but you have the idea it’s going to make you faster. When you’re getting those normal signals that you get from your brain telling your body, “Whoa, whoa, slow down. You’re doing too much,” you’re going to possibly reinterpret that. So I’m going for a big psychological component.
And last but not least, saying, “There’s still people who are setting personal best and beating people in super shoes, so it can’t be just the shoe.” And sorry, last but not least, is my favorite part. The marketing is fascinating that they’re being marketed for everybody. My favorite part of this, oh, wait, that thought just flew right out of my head. That’s really annoying. Oh, there it is. There was an ad from a company that I won’t name by name, let’s just say it rhymes with Nike, I mean really rhymes very well with Nike, they said the shoe gives you the feeling of propelling you forward.
And I put some of these shoes on, and it gave me the feeling of something, because as my heel was coming off the ground, to your point, the foam was expanding faster than my heel was moving off the ground, so it tapped my heel. But since my heel was already off the ground and the shoe was already off the ground, it’s not doing anything, but it gave me a feeling that something was happening. And if you get that feeling, that might make you inspired to keep moving differently, moving more, et cetera. So anyway, that’s my little rant in the middle of this.
Jay Dicharry:
Yeah, for sure. Anybody who’s ever put on a racing spike, right? I laugh. I ran in high school, and you train all week in your trainers, and then race day comes along. You’re on your bed, you pull this box of your spikes out, and you open it, and this angel glow comes out and you hear music. It’s like, “Oh, it’s go time.” Right? You are in a different mental state, right? It’s your race shoe. You go into a race mode. And so definitely, there’s a psych factor there for sure. And I’ll be clear too, you run different in a racing flat, you run different in a spike, right? So like-
Steven Sashen:
Wait, I’m going to interrupt on that one. So when I was in Bill Sands’ lab, where he would have you come in, he was, for people who don’t know, former head of biomechanics for the US Olympic Committee, had a lab out in Western Colorado, and he would analyze your running in every shoe you’ve ever run in. And what we saw is for most athletes, every shoe you put on changed your gate, and for all of those people, they didn’t notice, but there was mostly middle distance runners, 800 to milers in particular, and sprinters. So pretty much anything from a sprint to up to maybe a mile, you could pretty much put bricks on their feet and nothing changed. It was just amazing. They would just had that gait locked in, because that’s the thing, especially the milers. And marathoners, if they’re doing shorter distances, they just have that pattern so ingrained, nothing got in the way of that. It was fascinating to watch.
Jay Dicharry:
Yeah, yeah. You’re more important than the shoe, and your technique, your form, all the parts you built since day one, that’s the most important thing. If I can back up and take even a bigger step on this, every single time you do anything, you’re putting a load to your body. And so the more you can load your parts in a beneficial way, the more you build strong bones, strong tendons, strong muscles, and that’s important. And so people are looking for the easy way. “How do I opt out? How do I find an advantage? How do I get something easier?” And let’s be clear here. When you put a super shoe, or I’ll tell you, and it’s not just telling you, I’m giving you research, even a maximal shoe, which is not a super shoe, but they have high stack heights that have lots of rocker in the forefoot and the rear foot, you are literally, and we’ve done research on this, multiple papers have validated this, you are offsetting the load at the foot and offsetting load at the ankle. Okay?
So what you’re doing is you’re actually letting you roll through as you take a step versus having to absorb and propel yourself. And so if you said, “Hey, can I move a little bit easier in these highly rocked shoes?” The answer is yes, you can. Okay? We know this to be true, but guess what? You are offloading your body, and when you offload your body, guess what happens to your body? It becomes weaker, period. Let that sink in, please, because it’s really important. You want to train comprehensively, and there’s nothing wrong with having a race day shoe, not necessarily a super shoe, a race day shoe, it’s fine, but just understand that things are changing when you’re in different footwear, and you’re giving your body different stresses.
And so what I tell my athletes is, “I need you prepared every single day, and that means we’re doing things, not just in the off season, in the winter in the gym. We’re doing stuff year round, forever, as long as you have goals to move your body, you need to take care of it.” Again, let that sink in too. But you need to take care of yourself, and I want to make sure you’re ready for whatever it’s you want to do. And so if you’re training away just shifting loads around, that lends itself to injury.
And I’m going to give you a concrete example here. Okay. Let’s say you’ve been somebody who has been, whatever shoe you’ve been in, all of a sudden you have a raging case of plantar fasciopathy, okay? Your foot hurts, and you’ve been told don’t walk barefoot. You need to be in a super supportive shoe. And so you may go to the store, and they may say, “Oh, we’ve got these maximal shoes here. They’ll let you kind of roll, right?” And so what happens is your foot and ankle don’t have to bend as far, and therefore there’s no strain, yanking and lengthening that plantar fascia. And you may say, “I feel great in this maximal shoe walking around, and I don’t have any pain. Awesome.” I’m glad you feel a little better, acutely, but that is not a helpful environment in any way, shape and form to improve the tensile strength of that tissue and improve the control inside your foot so that you don’t wind up here to begin with.
So it’s like if you were hurt, what do we do? We’ll give people crutches. Do we say, “Great, you have a pair of crutches. I’ll see you when you’re dead?” No. It’s a temporary thing, which might have a purpose, but we need to get you off those crutches and teach you how to support and stabilize your body. And that’s irrespective of footwear, right? You need to show up ready. So just when you look at what you’re doing, if you’re listening to me, you probably think, “Oh, I probably need some different type of shoes and probably need to spend a lot of time in some minimal footwear to make sure I am ready.” Yeah, that’s the whole point.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s funny. As a sprinter, everyone says, you have to get out of your spikes as quickly as you can when you’re done racing, because otherwise you’re going to screw up your Achilles. It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no.” Your Achilles is only potentially vulnerable because you haven’t been in a flat or your spikes all along. Now, there are reasons to get out of your spikes. They’re so damned pointy and squeezy and whatever, and they screw you up in other ways, but the idea that, I even see this just with runners in my neighborhood where whether they’re in a super shoe, a maximal shoe or anything other than a truly minimalist or barefoot shoe, these are a lot of good runners. And first of all, I love that you brought the whole rocking idea, because none of these people rock from heel to toe. They’re all landing midfoot or on their forefoot, and even the heel of that big thick shoe is not coming anywhere close to the ground.
So they’re basically training their Achilles to only stretch a certain amount. They’re telling their brain, “This is as far as I can go.” And then they put on something minimalist, and they go, “Oh, see, I hurt my Achilles.” “No, no. You just hadn’t gotten given your brain the info to remind it that it’s safe to do that.” So you were fighting with your brain, effectively. And for anyone who knows Feldenkrais’ work, his body work methodology, it’s all about reminding your brain what your body can actually do instead of the limitation you have taught your brain that you have. And even with the whole rocker thing, I love when they talk about, the shoe companies talk about making that transition from heel to toe, and back to your mentioning Kipchoge, you watch the first hour and 30 minutes of that sub -two hour marathon, and his heel never comes close to the ground. And then he’s just trying to get to the end, and all hell breaks loose.
But the other thing about Kipchoge, he had a couple of articles that came out and got squashed pretty quickly where the headline was something like, “It wasn’t the shoes, it was my legs.” That article disappeared surprisingly fast. Sorry. And back to the 4% thing for the fun of saying this, that all came from a lab right down the street from me in Colorado, from Roger Crom’s lab, where he was seeing what he said was a improvement in VO2 max of 4% for everyone who was wearing these shoes, which was not actually accurate. There was people that got kicked out of that. But Nike then turned that into 4% improvement, meaning 4% faster. And Roger in a second article said, “Yeah, I’m not saying it’s faster, I’m just saying it’s 4% improvement in VO2 max,” because if it was just VO2 max, we’d line people up, we’d get their VO2 max, and we’d hand out awards.
I’ve been seeing more and more of what we’ve just said in the mainstream press, in the Washington Post, in the New York Times, in running magazines, but sales are still going through the roof like there’s no tomorrow. What do you see as what’s happening in the industry, and what are you projecting given that more and more people are starting to go, “This is not as good as I thought.” And oh, by the way, I’m just waiting for the research about the number of ankle sprains, wrist breaks, and clavicle breaks.
Jay Dicharry:
Yeah, I mean, we chase polarity, right? Nobody looks at common sense. They look at headlines and shiny things. And so right now, super shoes are shiny things, and people are looking for those. I hope at some point in time we’ll have a return to common sense in the fact that as an athlete and as somebody who wants to take care of their body and do things you love to do, you take care of yourself. It’s funny to me. We had “conventional footwear” for a long time, and then people say, “Oh, the barefoot movement happened.” What the hell’s a barefoot movement? We all have feet. And there’s still skeptics come out and say, “Oh, the barefoot movement failed.” Look at the wall of any running retailer today versus 15 years ago, it’s categorically different. It’s not even remotely the same.
So the barefoot movement didn’t fail. Shoes have gotten more, I would say, less in general. And then we had maximal. Maximal was a shiny thing, and they chased that pendulum. It shifted the other way. And so maximal footwear is interesting, right? I’m going to tell you this story, it’s interesting, this is, again, not super shoes. These are high stack-height, high off-the-ground shoes that are not designed to be springboards. They’re just big cushion blobs. And there was an elite training team in Oregon, which I’m not going to name, who is sponsored by one of these brands, and it was interesting. The coach called me up one day, said, “I’m really confused.” I’m like, “What’s up?” He said, “Well, when my athletes use their own shoes, they run their splits. And when the athletes put these new shoes by the sponsor on here, none of them can hit their splits in the track. They run slower. They can’t run the same speed.” And I was like, “Oh, it’s easy.” He’s like, “What do you mean it’s easy?”
And again, you tune your body to be, as Steve said, stiff in your legs, and when you put this big marshmallow under your foot, you’re changing the timing of how that whole process takes place. And those big mushy kind cushions on their foot can’t respond to the fast contact times running fast. And so we are talking people running fast, I’m not talking about running a fast marathon, I’m talking about running a fast mile, right? Running a fast 800, right? And then-
Steven Sashen:
Anything really. I put one of those shoes on my feet, I took three steps starting to sprint, and then I stopped because I felt like I was in a foot of sand.
Jay Dicharry:
Yeah, totally. Because that shoe is just the wrong environment. You need to be on thin, firm and light when you’re looking to go fast, you need a stiff, stiff, stiff lever. And interesting, there’s a study, I found this years ago, and I can’t remember the reference, but it was interesting. The study basically showed that, again, you have to forgive me, I’m a biomechanical dork, but we look at something called modeling, right? We actually can model how stiff your foot is at various aspects of the gait. And for a long time, shoe companies said we have a “stability shoe” to stabilize your foot. No shoe will ever even approach the inherent intrinsic stability and stiffness of a human foot. Your foot muscles are putting out hundreds of pounds each to hold that system stable and under control every single stride, and that’s their job. They’re awesome. And when you put this big squishy thing underneath it, you can’t feel what you’re supposed to do, and so your body’s confused, and you can’t generate force as fast.
And so people always say, “What’s the one thing you’re chasing, right?” You’re chasing this thing called rate of force development, how fast can I apply a force down to the ground to propel me forward? And when you put soft, mushy junk underneath, you inhibit your rate of force development. And so it speaks to the fact that, again, shoes do change your gait, period. And so you have to understand that. You said, I’m giving you a very long-winded answer for what do I think is coming, but I hope we look at what’s the goal? Is the goal to make my foot work? And I don’t mean that in a bad way, because I want my foot to work well, right? Then guess what? You want to be in something super thin, firm and light.
If you’re looking to offset load to the foot, any cushion, any rocker, any heel bevel offsets load to the foot. Now again, can you walk easier that way? Yes, you can. Can you run easier way? Yes, you can. But Wolfe’s Law says if you take away stress, you get weaker, and we know that when you make things weaker, they don’t get better. Okay? Nothing gets better with rest. And so then we look at super shoe. We have a different category now of like, “Okay, now we have springs,” and running shoe companies can’t say they’re springs because IFF makes it illegal, but they’re a spring. Be clear. It’s not the foam, it’s not the plate, it’s both together. They’re tuning away to displace and rebound.
Steven Sashen:
Well, wait, I want to pause there, but please don’t lose the train of thought. My contention and what I’ve seen, it’s like none of the shoe companies are making any claims about the carbon fiber part, because from what I’ve seen from the manufacturing side and talking to people on my side of the business, everyone’s saying, “Oh, the carbon fiber is there, because if you just had that much of that foam without something in the middle, it would shear almost instantly.” So it’s structural, not doing something functional, or the structural part is significantly more than the functional part.
Jay Dicharry:
It’s a little bit of both. That is true that too soft a foam won’t hold together. But I have tested some shoes that don’t have plates, they have some other things in them, that still work. But let me put it this way. When super shoes came out, and they wanted to figure out some way to make these legal, I’m going to back up even more. One second. So I swam as a kid, and so Speedo came out with the speed suit, and they marketed it as it’s slipperier than the drag coefficiency of your skin, and it was in fact. And so the sanctioning body came down and said, “You know what? We want to make this about swimming, not about bathing suits. So anything that has a drag coefficiency greater than this level or less than this level than is outlawed.” So they put a level on that of what you can do.
Cycling, for the hour record, there’s people going to a velodrome, which is this kind of bank track, and they ride as fast they can to see how far they can go in an hour. And for a long time, we had just normal road bikes. Then aero bars came out and disc wheels and changes in position. So the governing body came out and said, “Hey, we want the sport to be about the rider and not the bike. So we have limits on geometry as far as how far you can do things.” So there’s a preface here that we have restraints to keep things sort of about the athlete and not about the equipment.
When it comes to super shoes, it’s interesting, because now you’ve got this different state where how do we control this? Do we make it about the foam? Do we make it about the spring? How do we quantify this and give people boundaries? And so it got tough, and nobody wants to stifle innovations. So the governing body came through and said, “Okay, we’re giving you 40 millimeters of stack height. You can do whatever you want with those 40 millimeters. You go be creative, and that’s still going to be legal.”
Now, this is really interesting. A few months ago, another company came out with a shoe, which has a stack height of 44 millimeters, and that is illegal. But here’s the thing. They’re claiming, “Oh, even though we’re illegal, we’re faster.” And yes, you are faster because I gave you more room to compress and rebound. So if you’re bored, I made a little video on YouTube. If you Google a “masterclass on super shoes,” my last name will come up.
But I use this as a visual to show what happens. It’s me jumping on the ground up and down, I’m jumping on the ground, and if I’m doing that, I’m using what?? My body. I was barefoot jumping on the ground, so all the muscles and tendons in my legs are doing all the work. Then I jumped on a trampoline. You jump on a trampoline, that trampoline gives and rebounds and springs me back up again, and you can see really easily, I jump way higher with the same amount of effort, even less effort jumping a trampoline. Anybody can do this.
Steven Sashen:
It’s actually more effort having to do more work with your legs and hips.
Jay Dicharry:
Well, it’s different stiff-
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s definitely, yeah, because look, jumping rope, I can do that for way longer than I can jump on a trampoline, because when I’m jumping rope, everything’s much more stiff, I’m using things better. When I’m on a tramp, my legs get tired fast. You watch, just for the fun of it, competitive jump ropers, and sometimes they’re just told, “Stop, you won. There’s no need to keep going.” You watch competitive trampolines, they’re getting lower and lower and lower with every jump, and they’re done in 30 seconds.
Jay Dicharry:
And certainly, it definitely takes effort. But go back to that point real quick.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, sorry.
Jay Dicharry:
That’s okay. So when you’re jumping a trampoline, that trampoline material is distorting and then it’s rebounding, right? So yes, you’re still working, but the trampoline is doing the work. The work is forced through a distance, right? It is compressing through a distance and is rebounding you back up again. So then what I did was I took some firewood that was sitting right there, and I stuck it underneath the trampoline that I’m jumping on. And so now that trampoline can’t give as far, right? It can only move about half the distance it was deforming, because again, work is forced through a distance. And you see very clearly I don’t jump as high. So when we allow something else to move you, if I shrink the distance, I make it less effective.
So when you say what’s coming, there’s a reality here. If I allow for more translation for center of mass, you’re going to springboard back up again, period, end of story, okay? So when you look at what’s out there, we need to look at how we can take technology and still keep the human in mind, because again, when you offload the body, dangerous things start to happen. And here’s one thing that’s really important too. If you use my trampoline example, if you happen to jump perfectly up and down, then your body moves perfectly up and down. But we don’t do that, right? We drift a little bit sideways, forward, back. You come at a little bit of an angle, and if you come in a little bit of an angle, what’s the trampoline do? It brings you back off at the angle again. So now, you’ve got an increase, not just in vertical speed and forward speed, but you’ve got more instability in your system.
Who wants to run with your friend pushing you right and left as you run behind you? That’s no, okay? And that’s what’s happened, when you come in these super shoes and you’re unaccustomed to them, if you’ve got a little imbalance, super shoes will increase your imbalance, they’ll magnify it. And so now you’ve got a certain person who’s used to running a certain way, and you said, “Let put this super shoe on, and I’m going to run in this new way now.” And now I’ve got tissues being loaded more throughout a given range of motion, every single stride. Guess what happened? Body starts to go, “I’m not prepared for this. We’re done.”
So very long-winded way of saying, I hope we can get some semblance of common sense coming in, but we say, “We’ve got footwear that helps the footwork as it’s supposed to, and we’ve got footwear that has a competitive purpose.” And again, we’re still trying to figure out how do we really match these shoes to given people. If those of you who skate-ski, you walk in the shop, and they basically have you stay on a scale, not weight-shaming you, they’re just seeing how heavy do you weigh and how stiff a ski do you need to camber and decamber underfoot? Those of you who don’t skate-ski, sorry for the reference, but it’s simple, it’s weight categorized because there’s not much elasticity in skate-skiing. Sorry, my computer’s pinging.
But when we look at running, there’s more to it than just body weight. And so we have to look at, those of you who are curious, we look at body weight, yes, we look at stride speed, look at stride contact, style dynamics, even the tightener, what’s called the contractual proteins, your muscles, which is a genetic thing, even that makes a difference in how these forces go through into your actual body parts. There’s a lot of things that are really hard to quantify right now. Again, this technology is kind of in its early stages. As we figure out how to classify these more, we’ll probably be able to do a better job. But right now, it is the wild west.
Steven Sashen:
It is fascinating to me just sort of seeing, we more or less bumped into each other at the trade show called the Running Event, it’s all for running shoe stores, mostly, all mostly, anyway, mostly running shoe stores, some others, and everybody had some giant “super shoe,” and you could replace the logos between the shoe brands and you could never tell the difference primarily. And the biggest thing that I saw that blew my mind was the companies that are doing, I don’t know what they call them, but I call them single-use shoes, and the idea is you can wear these for a race and then they’re done, and, “Oh, by the way, they cost about $400 or $500.” I mean, that just blew my mind.
Jay Dicharry:
Yep, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So we shall see. Here’s a question for you. How then, given what we’ve just said, I can’t even think of the right verb here, how do you think about, it’s an easy verb, our friend, Dr. Phil Maffetone, who still holds onto the idea that the first person who’s going to run a legit sub-two-hour marathon will do it on a course similar to what Kipchoge did, and basically just smooth and not a whole lot of turns, but we’ll do it in bare feet. And there are a number of his reasons, I don’t know how familiar you are with the reasons, but thoughts?
Jay Dicharry:
Well, I have not heard his quote, but I can tell you that we know that feet actually do a very good job on their own, and when you put stuff between the foot and the ground, they don’t work as well, period. So the idea of having someone run two barefoot is totally within the realms of physiology. I’m not even surprised by that statement.
Steven Sashen:
He’s fundamentally wrote a whole book called 159 or 1:59, so 1 hour, 59 minutes, and it’s in many ways not really based on but may as well have been based on Ron Hill, who won the 10 K in Mexico barefoot. And when someone said, “Why’d you run barefoot?” His answer was, “They were the lightest shoes I could find.” And that’s a big part of Phil’s idea is you got nothing getting in the way, you’re going to be more responsive, you’ll be stronger, et cetera. And people say, “Well, then, why don’t you just find some athlete and sponsor them and do that?” I go, “Yeah, we don’t have the kinds of millions of dollars these people are getting paid to do this, and more importantly, it would be a couple of years of training for someone to get used to doing that kind of distance and handle that correctly.”
Which raises the other obvious point, it blows my mind that to this day, people will watch somebody win some race in some shoe, and people who are not a 105-pound Kenyan running roughly over two hours for 26 miles, they will then go buy that same shoe if they are 350 pounds, who can barely complete a 5K? And I’m not trying to body or distance shame anybody, just trying to draw discrepancy between the person wearing that shoe and then what happens in the marketplace, which just blows my mind.
Jay Dicharry:
Steve, years ago I was at a track workout with some of my athletes, who it was three Olympians, and it was kind an open track session, and there was community folks there doing their own track workouts. And it’s one of the things which it’s like certain things stick with you, and the athletes had just finished their workout, and they just blue splits out the water, and people just rubber necking as they’re watching, they’re doing their own workout. And after the workout, they’re sitting there, just doing some recovery stuff in the middle of the field, and a bunch of people come by and, “What shoes are you running in? What do you do for this and that and that?” And they just kept peppering with all these stupid equipment questions. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be stupid, but it was just …
And Madley sat there and just listened to it and tried to put on a nice face. And then when the group walked away, one of them just said, “If those people had any idea how much hard training we have to do to show up, day in, day out, and do these things, they’d quit running.” And it just goes to the fact that this stuff takes work, and yes, the people you see are in the new shiny, fancy stuff because they’re selling the product, right? It’s reality. But you don’t understand, it takes a lot of hard work.
I know we live in a world where people are like, “What’s the three exercises? What’s the one thing to do?” If it was that simple, then we’d all be Olympians, we’d all be singing about records. And it’s not that simple, it’s actually quite hard. And on that note, it’s interesting to me that, I’m old, so if I go back 20 years ago, and you said, “Who does core work?” People are like, “What the hell’s core work, right?” These days, everybody does core work.
Up until five years ago, you said, “Who does hip work?” “Oh, what the hell is hip work?” Recently, “Yeah, okay. Hip work, I should do my rotational hip control, right?” It’s starting to become more in vogue. And you talk about cable. Guess what? Your spine’s a body part, your hip’s a body part, guess what? Your foot and ankle are body parts too, and putting your shoe and sock on doesn’t make that relevant, okay? I tell my athletes, “Look, we’re leaving no stone unturned here, right? You’ve got a goal of doing whatever it is you want to do. That’s your goal. I just want to help enable you to get there, right?” And so what I’m going to ask every single person, listen to this, is I want you to look backwards at whatever your goal is, whatever your goal. Maybe I want to walk on a hike pain-free, maybe you’re going to run a marathon this year. I don’t care what it is. It’s your goal. It’s awesome.
But let’s work back from there and make sure that you’re taking care of your body, because we don’t. We think, “I’ll just do this one thing. It’s fine. This one exercise.” That’s not enough. It never is. And so start somewhere, build some habits for sure, but if you really want to make commitment to yourself, make them a commitment, put the time in because you’ll see results. Consistency always wins. At the end of the day, the one time you screwed up and had a cookie is not going to hurt you, but all those days you didn’t show up and have some fruits and veggies and take care of your body, that’s the problem with nutrition, right?
Same thing for your body. If you miss one day, so what? Right? But the years and decades of work that you’ve built up and taking care of your body and building stability and control, that stuff really matters. And I put that in there just to say, again, I’m the PT, right? I’m the guy who you call when you’re broken, and I don’t want you broken. I want my phone to stay quiet, not pinging. Sorry. And that comes into taking care of your body.
Steven Sashen:
It’s funny you say that. Yesterday, I got an email from Joel Smith that was talking about this in a different way. It’s like basically you want to get your whole body to be able to handle whatever you’re doing, and even if you’re doing something that’s the same thing, running, it’s just moving forward, your legs are doing the same thing, unless you’re on the trail. But that doesn’t mean there’s not these little things that you need to be strong enough to handle.
And in this email that he sent, it’s like, “Hey, let’s look at,” I’m reading this, “look at the general physical preparation methods of the Polish weightlifting team from the 1980s. And what I can tell you is they’re doing better gymnastics than most high school gymnasts. They’re doing all this stuff to just get super, super strong, super flexible, just really become good all around athletes.” Now that said, gives me a flashback, the first time I walked into a CrossFit gym, they were trying to get me to sign up there, “We’re going to make you a better athlete.” I went, “Yeah, I don’t want to be a better athlete. I just want to get that much faster in the 100 meters.” They just didn’t know how to deal with that.
Jay Dicharry:
Yeah. It’s interesting. I had a friend who went to undergrad in Austria, and she was in the kinesiology program there. And the kinesiology program, to get into the kinesiology program, you had to meet their standards list. Their standards list, I think there’s probably 1% of the population in the US who would meet it. You had to be able to run a certain distance in a certain time, do a certain amount of pullups, pushups, swim a certain amount of distance dragging this weight behind you into the pool, do all these crazy … You had to do tumbling was part of the entrance to the kinesiology. You had to be a specimen. A ninja warrior would get in.
And just again, they wanted you to say, “Okay, look, if you’re looking to study this field, we want you to be excellent at these things, so you’ve built good behaviors, good body awareness. We want to teach you to learn through feeling, right?” We learn through play. And so the more you do things, the more your body learns skilled movement and the more you can develop a better movement ability and to do all the things you want to do, right? It’s obviously an extreme example, but I just go back to that like man, they walk the walk, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s a thing that I’ve said, I wish that to graduate high school, you had to be able to do a round-off back handspring, just something just to get people to learn how to move in ways that otherwise they wouldn’t. That changes the way you think about the world. Every gymnast that I know talks about how much they like being upside down. No one else has that conversation, and it literally does things to you that can be very, very helpful.
Jay Dicharry:
100%.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s a whole other conversation. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else in this, anything we’re missing in the wonderful world of super shoes?
Jay Dicharry:
Again, they’re tools, right? They’re tools. They do change things. They might help you run faster, they might not, but they’re going to change your gait, regardless. And anytime you change anything footwear related, you need to make sure you adapt. And so people say it takes a year, it doesn’t take a year for your tissues to adapt, but it takes several weeks to months depending on the different body part, and you want to make sure you do it slowly.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’m going to say it depends a little bit, I mean, the shoe is going to force a gate change that you would otherwise not necessarily do on your own. This is an interesting bit of timing. I’m getting together on tomorrow night, Friday night, when I’m recording this, and then Saturday with Nick Romanov from Pose Method, and we’ve had interesting conversations about the optimal form, et cetera. But it makes me think of another conversation with our friend Benno Nigg, and Benno, his whole thing is don’t arbitrarily change your form, because that’s the thing that’s going to get you injured, and the shoes are semi-arbitrarily changing your form.
Now, I have arguments with Benno about this whole idea, because there’s ways of changing your, you have to arbitrarily change your form if you’re going to learn to do a round-off back handspring, double backflip. That’s not a normal thing. You have to learn to change your form if you want to be a better sprinter, and you’re just not one of these genetically gifted people who has perfect form from day one, which is pretty much 1% or not even 1% of the population.
So you have to learn things properly. You have to be able to learn new movement patterns, which brings up another point. My undergraduate research was all about how you learn new movement patterns, and it’s not by making an instantaneous acute change. It’s by slowly and in slow motion learning how to do it until your brain feels comfortable, and then you get better, faster, et cetera. So this is just violating all the principles of neurological learning.
Jay Dicharry:
100%. I’ve always said for years, and I actually talked this morning to my students about this, I was basically saying, “Look, anytime you see anybody do anything, anything, like get up from a chair, what you’re seeing is their best compensation.” You’re saying, “Today, with a given amount of range of motion, strength and flexibility that you’ve got, that’s how you get from a chair. That’s how you walk across the room. That’s how you do a back handspring. And so if you want to change form, if you force a change, you typically wind up doing two things. One, you screw up neuromotor control,” as you said, you don’t have motor muscle memory dialed in, “and two, you overload the body because your body hasn’t been exposed to that amount of strength and strain for a long period of time.”
And let me actually give you a really good example of this. So I’m going to give a plug here, because I can do that. My book, Running Rewired, there’s a second edition. I just want to-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wait. Hold on, hold on. First of all, this is going to be the first podcast, other than the last time we talked, where people aren’t going to watch and listen to it in double speed, because you and I are, I mean, we just get into a race. So pitch your book again, but say it slow enough that people can figure out what the fuck you said.
Jay Dicharry:
All right. I wrote a book called Running Rewired, came out about five years ago. The second edition just went to the printer literally last week. It’ll be out in March. But I have a chapter in there, a lot of new content, but I have a new chapter in there. We talk about what happens in masters runners and masters athletes. And this is really interesting to talk about the idea behind movement versus how things change and how things get overloaded. A lot of people will say that, “Oh, we see changes in masters runners. We see average results in masters runners show things shifting as direction, right? Oh, when people age, my metabolism slows down.” Okay. I’m going to tell you one, metabolism does not slow down as you age. You decrease your lean body mass, which affects your metabolism.
And guess what happens when you decrease your lean body mass? You can’t generate enough force production down to the ground, and when you do that, you still want to go for a four-mile run, you can do a four-mile run, but because you can’t apply as much force down to the ground, guess what happens? Your stride compensates. Okay? And so the problem is not the fact that as you age, you are in peril. The problem is you’re not doing enough work to take care of those body parts we talked about to make sure you show up ready.
And so going back to the idea behind compensation and force changes and all these things, if you actually do strength and power work, you can put down just as much force down on the ground as you did when you were younger. Okay? Now, you’re not going to sprint what you could at 40 what you could at 20, but you can do a whole heck of a lot better. So it’s interesting to me, there’s a lot of research coming out showing, “Oh, masters runners do this and that and are more susceptible to these injuries.” What are you doing outside of running?
Because this is a line from my book, if you asked any biomechanist, any physical therapist how to improve specific characteristics of bone, muscle, and tendon, we would not say running. We won’t say running’s bad for you, but it’s not the most optimal stimulus to improve those body parts. To improve each body part requires targeted intervention. Those cells which make your muscles, bones, tendons, ligaments regenerate are all different in how they respond to stimulus. And so you need to think comprehensively. And so going back to your point about when you force a cue or force a certain stride compensation, you don’t know how to handle that. If you show up with a better body, you can do more awesome things.
Steven Sashen:
I love that. Speaking as a master sprinter and watching things get slower, slightly slower every year, it’s like my goal, my now goal is just I want to hit All American times every five years. That’s it. I’ll tell you one thing about master sprinters getting slower over time. There’s a race that we have at the end of the season every year up in Fort Collins, Colorado, a master’s race, and the last event, maybe second-to-last event, sometimes we’ll do goofy relays just for the fun of it, but last or second-to-last event is an age-graded 100 meters. So basically, there’s a thing about hitting an All American time where if you look at the chart for All American times, you start seeing up until about 40, 45, they stay pretty consistent. Then they start slowing down, and then they get really slower once you get over 60, and they get really slower once you get over 75.
So if you reverse the time into distance, what it turns into is a way of taking a bunch of sprinters who are different ages and having them run a different amount of distance, different distance for a hundred meters. So at 61, I think I run, I don’t remember, 76 meters, something like that. The young guys are running a full 100, the 80-year-olds are running like 40 meters. And what’s so great about this and what’s so amazing and fascinating is that that race is always a photo finish, not for who came in first versus second, it’s all eight positions. You can’t tell what’s what, and it all happens within the last step, everybody coalesces.
So you see someone who’s thinking they’re going to win, and they put their arms up, and then they’re suddenly like, “Whoa, what the?” And there’s everybody right next to them. And the old guys are going, “I was freaking out, because I was getting chased,” and the young guys are going, “I was freaking out, because I had to chase you guys.” And it is so much fun that they make you pay to be in this race. And what’s even more fun is if you win, you get half of the pot. If you get second, you get 30%. If you get 30, you get 20%. And I instituted a policy that whoever wins has to buy pie for everybody else.
And so yeah, it is a blast, but it is fascinating. It reminds me when Jack LaLanne was 90-something, and they were doing a news story about him. And Jack LaLanne, if you’re young enough you don’t remember, very big deal fitness guy, and he also co-invented the Universal Gym, which you pretty much can’t find those anywhere. Anyway, they’re showing him bench pressing on the Universal Gym, and he’s putting out all the force that he can. And if you look closely, you can see it was like 20 pounds that he was lifting. And so aging is a real thing, and there’s things that we can do, like you were saying, to do the best you can with what’s going to happen with what you got.
Jay Dicharry:
Totally. Take care of yourself.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Seems like a good place to call it a day.
Jay Dicharry:
Sounds good.
Steven Sashen:
So let’s call it a day. First of all, thank you, guys, for being here. Everyone who’s watching or listening, a reminder to go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com to find previous episodes, all the places you can find us, and how you can engage with us on social media. By the way, there’s nothing you need to do to join. You can subscribe to hear about new episodes, but there’s no secret handshake, there’s no money involved. We don’t make everyone get up and do a dance in the morning, although that’d be really fun.
And if you have any questions, comments, requests, people who you think I should have on the show, I’m still waiting to get somebody on here who thinks I have a case of cranial-rectal reorientation syndrome. I’m also trying to make that phrase more popular, and you can drop me an email. Just send me an email at move, M-O-V-E, @jointhemovementmovement.com. But most importantly, go out, have fun, and live life feet first.
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