Trevor Thompson is a former US Navy SEAL with eight years of service, including three tours overseas. During his time in Naval Special Warfare, Trevor acquired a wide range of skills, from counter-terrorism and mini-sub driving to high-altitude covert military parachuting. He developed a passion for Demonstration Parachuting while serving as a member of the US Navy Parachute Team, the “Leap Frogs,” for three years, rounding out his career in Naval Special Warfare.
After leaving the Navy, Trevor pursued a career as a B.A.S.E. jumping and skydiving cameraman and stunt performer. His travels around the world for performances, deployments, and jumps fueled his passion for adventure and led him to become an expert in Special Forces Asymmetric Warfare, combat diving, civilian SCUBA, B.A.S.E. jumping, and skydiving. Trevor is dedicated to continuous learning and acquiring new skills.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Trevor Thompson about the benefits of barefoot running during physical training.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How SEAL teams specialize in assault operations in a maritime environment.
– How Special Operations Training tailors physical training and movement patterns to unique mission objectives, enhancing resilience and performance in high-intensity situations.
– Why passionate athletes are often more resilient and injury-free than highly paid athletes.
– How adapting to extreme conditions through physical activities contributes to increased physical fitness, mental toughness, and overall well-being.
– Why minimalist shoe designs have been associated with lower injury rates and improved performance.
Connect with Trevor:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@trevor.p.thompson
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
What do people who are in super high performance, super intense situations, like people in special ops, like SEAL team guys, what do they think about this whole barefoot thing? I mean, my God, they’re out in the middle of nowhere doing all this crazy stuff. Well, I don’t know. Let’s find out on today’s episode of the MOVEMENT Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first, those things at the end of your legs. They’re your foundation. And so we here break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to use them, what it takes to run, to walk, to play, to do yoga or CrossFit or hike or whatever it’s you like to do and to do that effectively and efficiently and enjoyably. And did I just say enjoyably? Yeah, of course I did. Because look, if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep doing it anyway. So pick something you enjoy and then do that.
Steven Sashen:
I’m Steven Sashen from xeroshoes.com and dot eu and dot co at UK. I’m the host of the MOVEMENT Movement podcast, and we call it that because we, including you, more in a second, are creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do without getting in the way unnecessarily. So how do you become part of this movement? It’s really easy. Spread the word. Give us a thumbs up, give us a good review. Share this. Like it on Facebook. Give us the hit the bell icon on YouTube so you know to get previous episode or you’ll hear about future episodes. In fact, you can just go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement to find all the previous episodes, get notified about the new ones, find us on social media and find another place to get the podcast if you don’t like the way you’re getting it this time.
Steven Sashen:
In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. It’s really simple. So let’s have some fun. Trevor, welcome. Tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.
Trevor Thompson:
All right. My name’s Trevor Thompson. I spent nine years in the SEAL teams. I come from a background of running cross country. I ice climb, back country ski. I guide up in Alaska, and now I’m working for Protect products and kind of spreading the whole body, whole health type of religion.
Steven Sashen:
I’m just going to make this really easy for you. I’ll never forget, actually, wait, I got to tell this story. You’ll get a kick out of it. We had a whole bunch of special ops guys who were coming to have a meeting at NORAD, and they stopped off at my house when my wife and I were running the business from the house to pick up some sandals. They were really into what we were doing. They were suggesting we should be standard issue. That was a whole other story, but just for the fun of it, I said, “Hey, I love when military technology makes it down to consumer stuff like GPS, but now I’m just wondering, what’s the resolution you get? We get three foot, but what do you get?”
Steven Sashen:
They go, “No, we’re using the same satellites you are, the same that you’re getting.” I said, “Cool. Well, then what can you take a picture of from space?” They went, “Oh, yeah, we can’t tell you that.” Okay, so let’s do this. I’m just curious about the historical part first. What inspired you to even try to become a SEAL team person, and what’s the whole process of that happening like? It gets either aggrandized and exaggerated or quite the opposite in the mainstream world, if you will, but what was it like from your side?
Trevor Thompson:
So I was 18 years old. I was in college in Chicago. I was actually going to an art school.
Steven Sashen:
As most people pre SEAL team do.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah, as most of them are. That was about 2006, and the middle of the war was going on. My family’s had somebody in every conflict back through the French and Indian War, so it wasn’t out of the question for me. So we’ve had a really long history, and I thought, “I want to give back. I want to do something also.” And I literally thought to myself, “Okay, so I’m a decent athlete, I’m not an idiot. Let’s do the hardest thing possible.” And I literally picked the hardest thing I could pick.
Steven Sashen:
Which just conflicts with that I’m not an idiot thing.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I didn’t say I didn’t have a screw loose.
Steven Sashen:
Sorry. I didn’t understand the difference.
Trevor Thompson:
And I went and talked to a recruiter, and about a year later I was in the Navy on my way to go do the thing.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t even know where to begin. What’s it like when you say you’re going to be heading in that direction? What do you have to go through? What’s the training like? What’s the process of actually getting on the SEAL team like? And, of course, obviously the first thing is how many people start? How many people end up?
Trevor Thompson:
So my class started with a little more than 200 people, and we finished with about 19. So it’s a pretty high attrition rate. If you just look at that, you’re talking at 90%, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Trevor Thompson:
And the way that process works is before you join the Navy, you have to take a physical aptitude test that’s specific to those programs. So it’s a one and a half mile run, a 500 meter swim, and it’s breaststroke or sidestroke, max pull-ups, pushups, sit-ups, and there’s bare minimum scores that you have to pass, which if you’re only passing the bare minimums, there’s no way in hell you’re going to make it. Most of the guys are tripling, quadrupling those numbers. Usually. Because the minimums are truly minimums.
Steven Sashen:
ive me an example for pushups or pull-ups.
Trevor Thompson:
I think pull-ups is six.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow. That is a minimum.
Trevor Thompson:
It is a minimum. They’re dead hang, chest to bar type of pull-ups. But, man, if you weren’t doing 20 to 25, people were looking at you weird. And then beyond that, you’re just getting your ass handed to you for six months, and they’re trying to find somebody that doesn’t just have a physical and mental aptitude because that’s relatively simple to find. There’s a lot of collegiate athletes that can outperform us and name the discipline, but they’re really looking for people that can dig out that really impossible thing to get ahold of, for psychologists to look at, which is the, “I’m not going to quit no matter what the scenario is.” It’s just damn near impossible for them to figure out which person is going to be able to pull that out of themselves. And every time I’ve been asked by guys, “Hey, what’s it going to take? And how did you get through that?” I always tell them, “How bad do you want to be there?” That’s what it takes because if you’re a decent enough athlete, that’s not a problem.
Steven Sashen:
It sounds though like it’s more than, I would guess, even more than that. It’s when people talk about entrepreneurship and they go, “I’m starting my business because I’m really passionate.” Everyone’s passionate. That’s not the thing. So I would guess that everyone’s got that stick-to-it-ness as well. But there’s another part where to your point of saying you’re not an idiot, the special ops guys that I’ve met, they’re all super smart, and there’s something about that problem solving in the face of sheer what would be terror for normal human beings. My wife, early on, we don’t have children, but at one point she said something about how she was afraid if we had kids, she doesn’t know how to handle it. I went, “Oh, you haven’t seen me under pressure. That’s my favorite time.” Because when it’s serious pressure, everything gets super crystal clear and all I want to do is solve the problem.
Steven Sashen:
Normal stuff like people driving 10 miles an hour below the speed limit in front of me, that’s a whole different thing. I lose my shit. But when I was in Tiananmen Square and six guys were pointing machine guns at my head, I could not have been more lucid. So slightly different thing. I’m not suggesting I would be a SEAL team or a special ops guy. First of all, they don’t take guys who are 5’5″, but that’s a whole other story.
Steven Sashen:
So when you got down to that 19, did you all, this is going to sound… Wait, I have to do a weird segue. Here’s the question, but don’t answer yet. The question is, did you all look around at each other and go, “Oh, wow, weird variations of the same guy”? And before you answer, I had a girlfriend who knew a bunch of people in Hollywood, and when I was going out to Hollywood for something for the first time, she said, “Oh, I got to introduce you to these six guys.” And so we all got together. It turned out they were all her exes, and at the end of the lunch, one of them said, “Does anyone think it’s weird that we all get along better with each other than we ever did with her?” And I said, “No, she only likes one kind of guy. Here we are.”
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty much a variation of the same type of personality. There are outliers always, but you end up with a whole bunch of dudes that can pretty much get along and are very similar. I think the average dude who’s in the SEAL teams is 5’9″ to 5’11” and 170 to 185.
Steven Sashen:
It’s like CrossFit.
Trevor Thompson:
Very similar. Yep, super similar.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s the exact same perfect body type for that. Is there any real difference? This is going to sound like a weird question, but I’m completely ignorant, so I don’t care. Here we go. With the special ops teams and the other military branches, what if anything, are the differences between those?
Trevor Thompson:
It’s all mission set, so it would be like professional sports. So all the professional sports, they’re pro athletes, but baseball players play baseball, football players play football. So for us, our mission set is different than say the para rescue guys or then Green Berets or Delta Force or the Marine Force Recon. We all have very particular things. The SEAL teams are a commando unit that does assaults, and we are based in a maritime environment. The Green Berets are trainers of a partner force to help with an insurgency in a foreign nation. So most of those guys, I think, they all have to speak a foreign language. So it’s a slightly different mission set, and that’s what allows us to be set on one path or another as a unit when the nation focuses their efforts with that unit.
Steven Sashen:
When did you leave the military?
Trevor Thompson:
Let’s see, I left in 2016, so I did nine years. That’s what, about eight years ago?
Steven Sashen:
Again, this could be personal, no need to go there. But backing up to when I was in Tiananmen Square and guys were pointing machine guns trying to figure out who was going to pull the trigger. When I got out of that situation and had this mind blowing endorphin rush, that felt like when you’re standing in the ocean facing the beach and you feel the undertow and then you get slammed by a wave, it was like that, but with endorphins. And my next thought was literally I’m running away from guys still shooting, and I’m thinking, “If I went through that a couple times a month, a week, day, I would not be able to come home in any way normal.” In that if someone said, “Honey, the refrigerator’s broken.” It’s like, “Are you kidding?” So, again, you don’t have to get into it if it’s way too personable, but what was it like coming back and getting out of whatever you had been doing for those nine years?
Trevor Thompson:
I base jump, I ice climb, I back country ski, so I still find ways to entertain my brain in the same way. I still keep that lizard brain on its toes, and I love it. I get super calm and relaxed, and I don’t lose it when there’s high stress scenarios. And I think that that’s a little bit of a post-traumatic reality, and that’s okay. And I like it. Some people are built for it. That’s okay.
Steven Sashen:
The one time I did a tandem skydive, the guy strapped on my back was saying, “As soon as we get out of the plane, just spread eagle, otherwise we could die.” And we roll out of the plane, and I’m a former all-American gymnast. We start rolling, and I didn’t feel like I had left the plane, and so I’m just going, “This is going to be so cool.” And I’m totally chill as we’re starting to roll, and the guy’s smashing my helmet and it’s like, “Oh, right, sorry about that.” So there’s a picture on my fridge after we land of me looking all happy, and the guy behind me just scowling at me. It’s like, “Sorry, we’re okay.”
Trevor Thompson:
That’s his problem. I’ve taken a bunch of people in tandems, and I find them fun. They should be fun.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it was an easy job, and everything was fine. We landed standing up. It was great. But he was just still freaked out from freaking out. And look, I get it. He didn’t know that I was chill. He thought I was panicking. I understand. So, of course, here’s the magic question. We are talking because you have some thoughts and feelings about human feet. So when did you start being curious about what you’re going to put on your feet and how your feet were going to work, and let’s chat about that.
Trevor Thompson:
So I count myself very, very lucky. My cross country coach in high school, so being what, 14 or so years old, he had us run, I’d say almost half of our mileage. A third to half of our mileage was done barefoot, which I know is not common. And that would be very early on in the spectrum of the barefoot type of movement in North America for US schooling.
Steven Sashen:
So I don’t know how old you are. So when was that? When were you 14?
Trevor Thompson:
That would be like 2001, 2002.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, yeah, that’s way early.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
There weren’t a lot of people doing that then.
Trevor Thompson:
No, and I think that came from him being a marathoner and him looking at specifically a lot of the Sub-Saharan African runners and a little bit of the Copper Canyon Indians and him just thinking like, “Hey, this works for them, and so why not start my kids that way?” He didn’t have us running on concrete or anything crazy. He had us running on grass and turf, which as children, you can really overdo it for kids that have never done it. So, man, I owe a debt of gratitude to him because I then got to the point where I can run as long as I want to run on concrete or dirt or whatever the medium is.
Steven Sashen:
Did he say anything? Did he just have you do it, or was he explaining the value of it?
Trevor Thompson:
He explained the value. He gave us the, “Hey, your feet are meant to be attached to the ground. This is what we’ve done for millions of years. This is how our feet developed. This will give your body a mechanical advantage when you have to cushion via the thing that’s attached to your legs instead of using the shoe as the cushion. So you will learn how to run properly and avoid lower leg injuries.”
Steven Sashen:
Who was this brilliant man?
Trevor Thompson:
His name was Wes Smith. I think he’s probably still out there in the LA area.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, my God. We’ll have to look him up and say hi. I got to hear that story. That is delightful. So here’s an interesting question then. So was the whole team training barefoot sometimes?
Trevor Thompson:
You mean the cross country team?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah. Barring any odd injuries or specific mechanical disadvantages that somebody would have and they possibly would refuse to do it, almost everybody did it on a very regular basis.
Steven Sashen:
I asked because I was just at an event at the American Physical Therapy Association, and one of the guys presenting, he’s the family doctor in a very small community, and they have a high school that’s also really tiny. And he got all of those high school cross country runners to be training either barefoot or in minimalist footwear and competing in minimalist footwear. And since they’ve done that or in the years that he was involved in that, they didn’t have one injury that kept someone from running, from competing. And the only couple of injuries they had that were causing some pain, but, again, didn’t stop someone from running were people who while they switched to a minimalist shoe were still over striding and heel striking for whatever reason. Everyone else totally fine. And this tiny, tiny, tiny little school from upstate New York placed, I think, fourth in the nation against these massive schools with tons of money. And a lot of it was just due to the fact that they stayed healthy the whole time.
Trevor Thompson:
And I think it was very similar for us. I don’t specifically remember any injuries more than the occasional shin splints. We were putting 80 to 100 miles in and a lot of that on concrete and asphalt, so it’s going to happen. But shin splints, talk about a minor, it’s a hiccup.
Steven Sashen:
We had a guy working for us, our first customer service person, who was 65, and he was using our thinnest, all we had was our do it yourself kit then. So he’s running with a four millimeter piece of rubber underneath his foot, putting on 120 to 160 miles a week on roads. And everyone’s going, “You can’t do that.” He goes, “I just did it.”
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah. Man, I have since spent the same amount of time doing the same stuff running. I’ve run around in bedrock sandals, next to nothings. It doesn’t bother you if you train the body.
Steven Sashen:
I’ll be getting you some sandals that are better than those. I know a guy who knows a guy. He’ll hook you up. So backing up to when you were in SEAL team, what were you guys doing for footwear then? And I ask in part because I met a guy who I think he might’ve been Green Beret who said their whole team, they all switched to minimalist footwear. Now, interestingly, he also said, “We all got a lot of plantar fasciitis.” And I looked at him, and this guy was massive. This guy was like 6’5″, 250, no body fat. And I looked at him, I said, “I don’t think you have plantar fasciitis.” He’s like, “Well, my doctor said, ‘Yeah, I got a hunch.'” He said, “What are you thinking?” I said, “Well, can I stick my thumb in your calf?” He goes, “Sure.”
Steven Sashen:
I put my thumb in his calf. He’s suddenly flat on his face on the ground. I just sat there digging out the one spot that I could tell was super tight. And then after about three minutes of that, I said, “How do you feel?” And he stood up and walked around and he went, “Geez, that’s like 90% better.” I said, “Good, go back to the base. Tell your physical therapist to do that for a week for everybody. Let me know what happens.” And I saw him a year later, he goes, “That was it. We just had a lot of tight calves.”
Trevor Thompson:
Magic.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Trevor Thompson:
I think actually the bulk of the guys were running around in, if I recall correctly, a lot of them had those early Merrill really thin bottom shoes. And then I had a pair of high top Innovates that I deployed in. So a lot of the guys actually were embracing the either zero drop or very thin shoe because it works.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and my God, I’m also thinking the reason that some of the guys were saying our sandals should be a standard issue is this doesn’t take up any room in my pack. And there’s times where I need to get out of something that’s got my feet soaking wet so that my feet can dry off so I don’t end up having more problems. And the good news with all the special ops guys is you guys have your own credit card. You can do whatever you want.
Trevor Thompson:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we’ll go ahead and group purchase that thing. No, I recall doing some of those.
Steven Sashen:
Was there anything that you went, “They’re not going to notice. Let me buy this”?
Trevor Thompson:
No, everything had to get written up, but we sure found reasons to buy a lot of things.
Steven Sashen:
That probably wasn’t looked at too closely.
Trevor Thompson:
No, because honestly, we weren’t trying to fleece the government. We were trying to do our jobs. There was some definitely creative language used, but it works. The equipment works that we needed.
Steven Sashen:
Well, look, I imagine that you treated this in the same way that any professional athlete does of, “If this looks like something that could give me an edge, I got to try it.”
Trevor Thompson:
Exactly. And that’s what they’re looking for for any of the guys in any of the special operations groups, which is they want people that are thinking outside the box or just throwing the box away.
Steven Sashen:
I used to say that I prefer to live on a planet that doesn’t have boxes.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
So were there any people who came into that program and they were wearing some big, thick, padded, motion control, whatever, and then found themselves discovering that that was not doing what they needed and became another natural movement person?
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah, actually, I think that the teams that I was at, by and large, almost everybody there embraced that direction, which it really is just a function of the times that people were being taught the benefit of that movement pattern. We had guys coming in teaching us yoga, teaching us how to do these movements, and you have 20 Navy SEALs out there doing downward dog and cow cat, and it’s wild to see. But then you see the backend benefit, which is we’re more resilient. We don’t break as often, and that means we’re better to deploy.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing actually. It just occurred to me that the difference between what you just described and the spec out mentality of making you guys more bulletproof, it’s amazing to be seeing in professional sports the opposite where they’re not doing that and working almost on an attrition basis. We’re starting to work with a bunch of pro-athletes. And one guy reached out to us recently, an NFL guy, and said, “You’ve given me extra seasons of my career.” And that’s worth billions of dollars to both the players and the teams. Why they don’t do something similar to really keep people healthy is a mystery, and happily, we’re starting to do that with them.
Trevor Thompson:
It’s a wild mystery. And what’s really interesting to me looking at professional sports in particular or Olympic level sports, is that the athletes that get paid the least and are doing it for the passion are usually the ones that are the most proactive, not reactive to their PT, which is incredible to think about. The guy that’s getting paid $50 million a year as opposed to the skier that has to fund their own trip to the Olympics, and that skier is doing all their own PT and they don’t get hurt, and then the football player is hurt on a regular basis, but they have the world right in front of them.
Steven Sashen:
You reminded me, when I went to the World Masters Track and Field Championships, every other team except the US, so every other country other than us, had paid for physical therapists and massage therapists to come with them. And our guys, “No, we’re not going to do that.” It’s like, “What? Are you kidding me?”
Trevor Thompson:
Bonkers.
Steven Sashen:
No, it was. There’s also a book called Speed Trap about Ben Johnson, and when you read that book, you see how they treated him like a racehorse. So he would do a warmup and then get a massage, and then do another warmup drill, get another massage. Basically, anytime there was any little glitch in any muscle fiber, they want that out before the next thing. I was so jealous. I can’t even imagine. But at the same time, those guys, especially the superpower athletes, their careers tend to be way, way, way short.
Trevor Thompson:
They are. And some of that is just a function of the activities that they’re performing.
Steven Sashen:
And some is just like a genetic something or other. There’s a friend of mine who’s got, I think the American record and maybe the world record in almost every sprint event that I’m in. He’s just a couple years older than me, so there’s no way I’ll ever get near him, but he’s super, super fragile. So he’ll go out, set a world record, then be injured, and then the next time he’s on the track six months later for another meet, sets another record. It’s just one after the other. It’s mind-blowing. Whole different world, Egads. What else? It’s so interesting that you started in high school, and I’m curious, at any point did you find yourself really diving into the whole bare footing things just with any of the research or any of the science behind it? I have no doubt that at some point you’re walking around in whatever the hell you’re wearing, and people are giving the comments to you that we all get.
Trevor Thompson:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was on the full far end of that spectrum of that guy. I was practicing yoga on a regular basis. I think I found a do it yourself kit for a copy of the, what is it, Rhamani sandals?
Steven Sashen:
Rhamani is just basically what they call themselves, which is running people.
Trevor Thompson:
And I had read that book, that Born to Run, and I was so far down, “No, this is just what you’re supposed to do.” Reading old reports about Appalachian children having strong feet and never having lower back issues and all this crap. And I was trying to espouse that to everybody that I could get my hands on. I was constantly telling the holistic health thing too. And, yeah, occasionally you get looked at like a goofball, but the reality is, if you’re able to change one person’s perspective, you might save their back, knees, hips forever.
Steven Sashen:
In the time, since you’ve again been out of the military, what you’re doing now or through what you’re doing now, I’m trying to think of how to even ask this question. Obviously what you were doing then, a lot of this was supporting all the things you were doing at a performance level. Now it’s a slightly different thing. How has it changed for you?
Trevor Thompson:
It’s still a performance thing because I ski. I back country ski at a relatively high level. I still do a lot of hard physical efforts from hunting. I hunt in moccasins on a very regular basis like moose hide flat for real moccasins. It’s a part of my life. It’s a lifestyle now. It’s not just a choice. I will not be stepping away because I just cannot see myself doing that. I just don’t see a benefit to moving backwards.
Steven Sashen:
What’s your experience dealing with skis and ski boots that are not the most barefoot friendly?
Trevor Thompson:
They are not. But specifically with ski boots, they’re such a clamp down, mid-calf down piece of equipment. I just treat them as, “Okay, that’s a function of the sport.” It doesn’t screw with me too much. And your feet are so locked in as opposed to being in a boot where you functionally have a little bit of motion, but you’re off the ground and you’re set weird. With a ski boot, you can actually be set pretty flat in the boot itself if you get it fit right. And then beyond that, it’s just a ski boot.
Steven Sashen:
I expected that that was going to be the tenor of your answer, which is basically you’re strong enough to handle that time when you’re doing the thing that you need to do that it’s not ideal, but that’s what you need to do. I have a similar comment when I talk to climbers. I go, “I know you need a climbing shoe that’s going to squeeze your foot into a tiny little crevice, but once you get out of it, check this out.” And that’s what they do. We need strong feet to tolerate when our feet aren’t strong.
Trevor Thompson:
Precisely. Or in a compromised position.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, exactly. There’s a friend of mine who she actually put out an ebook, I think it was called Catwalk Confidential, but don’t hold me to it. It was basically how to walk in high heels or how to be comfortable in high heels, but it was a fake out. It was really a foot strengthening exercise program. It’s like, “Once your feet are strong enough, you can tolerate this for a while.”
Trevor Thompson:
And that’s the truth. You’re not going to be in ski boots for more than four to six hours during the day likely, and that’s fine. If the rest of the time you’re walking around barefoot or nearly barefoot, cool. That’s the PT that your body needs.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to have this conversation because obviously you’ve been in more extreme situations than the average human being, and I wanted people to understand that this is more than just walking around in a goofy pair of shoes or being barefoot every now and then or whatever. This is a legit thing for very high performance people and super appreciate that.
Trevor Thompson:
Absolutely. And I will talk about it to my dying day because I 100% believe it.
Steven Sashen:
Well, people will sometimes say to me, they’ll use that B word. They say, “Well, you believe it.” I go, “No, this is not what I believe. This is a fact.”
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah. Humans have done it for 99.9% of our history. I think it works.
Steven Sashen:
Actually, Irene Davis did the math. I saw her do this the other day. It was 99.99975.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah, it’s completely mind-numbing to think that shoes are the answer.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ll tell you something amazing. I’ve talked about this on the podcast. I’ve also just done a rant about it, but now there’s a new piece of information that I didn’t have before. So on the website for a major footwear brand that I shouldn’t mention, their name rhymes with Mikey, let’s leave it at that. So on this one page hiding in their website, they published a portion of the abstract from a study that they designed and paid for, did it about four and a half years ago. And the way they publicized the results were that they have a new shoe that reduced injuries compared to their bestselling shoe by 52%. And the injuries, they were tracking this over a 12 week half-marathon training program, and an injury was anything that kept you out for at least three days. So that’s basically a week now.
Steven Sashen:
It sounds really cool. It sounds great. Then if you actually look at the page, amazingly, they published the numbers, which is that the bestselling shoe injured 30.3% of the people wearing it in 12 weeks, and the better shoe “only” injured 14.5%. Now, it says some amazing things. First of all, it proves that shoes can be the delimiting factor for injuries, which shoe companies have been denying for years. They basically say, “If you’re getting injured, it’s because of you because the shoes are great.” So that’s one thing.
Steven Sashen:
Now, of course, it raises questions like, “Well, if that other shoe is better than the bestseller, why are you still selling the bestseller? Why isn’t everything made the way that new shoe is made?” And then of course, the question, “What’s the difference with that new shoe?” And their answer, which they didn’t publish, but I have a copy of the study, is, “We removed many of the protective features.” So they made it more like this.
Trevor Thompson:
Oh, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
If we injured 14 and a half to 30% of the people wearing our shoes in 12 months, this conversation would be happening from my jail cell. So it’s amazing. But here’s the thing that I never thought of until someone asked me this the other day. They said, “Why do you think Mikey has this on their website?” I went, “That’s a really good question.” I’m betting, and I could be wrong, but they know about what we’re doing. I talked to the agent for some of the pro-athletes that we’re working with. I said, “The moment one of your boys plays five minutes in a game in our shoes, we’re going to hear about it.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, Mikey called me last week to find out what you’re up to.” So they’re tracking us. My suspicion is that they have that on their website for the same reason there’s a warning label on cigarette boxes.
Trevor Thompson:
Oh, yeah. It’s a liability thing.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. If someone decides to go after them, they go, “Well, we put it on our website.”
Trevor Thompson:
That whole thing has always been wild to me, just based on looking at the original shoes that Bowerman was making. What a divergence you guys really took from a thing that is essentially like a cross country running flat, which worked fine.
Steven Sashen:
The first Waffle Trainer, I remember I was 12 years old when I put it on. It was about 10 mL of a little bit of foam. It did something clever that Ultra then copied in a way. It was the sole was flat just where your foot is, but at the toe, the foam was like a V-shape or however you want to call it. Basically it just was like a-
Trevor Thompson:
Like a wedge.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. A wedge instead of being totally flat across the whole thing. So I remember as a young sprinter, I leaned forward to start running, and it just rocked me onto my toes, I went, “This is great.” And it was too narrow, still kind of squeezed your toes together, but fundamentally, it was a minimalist shoe. And then they went in a whole different direction obviously. The even more fun example is Arthur Lydiard, who was the coach from New Zealand. He made shoes for his athletes. They looked just like these.
Trevor Thompson:
Zero surprise. He had them doing all sorts of wild stuff like running in sand, running downhill. His programming was gorgeous.
Steven Sashen:
Totally brilliant. And similar to what we were describing before, I know a number of those athletes, and they all say the same thing, “We never had an injury until we got a shoe sponsorship.”
Trevor Thompson:
Bingo.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Irene Davis asked that to someone who was in the Stanford Running Club in the late sixties, early seventies. She said, “What’d you guys do about injuries?” And he said, “About what?”
Trevor Thompson:
Well, look, the reality is you can look at apocryphal mentions of, say, Native Americans or even long hunters from the 1700s, they lived in moccasins that had 1-2 mL of thick moose or elk leather, and they literally survived on their feet. You could not have a lower leg injury. You would starve.
Steven Sashen:
Let me see if you have an answer to this one. People say to me, “But we didn’t evolve to run on hard surfaces and bare feet.”
Trevor Thompson:
Those people have not been outside very much.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Trevor Thompson:
I’ve been on a lot of hard dirt.
Steven Sashen:
My answer, I said, “If you go to where we evolved, you’re going to find hard packed mud that’s just as hard as cement.”
Trevor Thompson:
Everywhere.
Steven Sashen:
And I’ve also said, “We didn’t evolve to fly jet planes or do double back flips.” I can do the latter. I’ve been in one of the former, so we can do things that we didn’t evolve to do that we’re capable of doing. We do that every day.
Trevor Thompson:
Precisely.
Steven Sashen:
How much time do you spend actually barefoot barefoot out in the wild? And by the wild, I mean around other humans.
Trevor Thompson:
I worked for Black Rifle Coffee company, and it was enough where if I didn’t come into work in either sandals or moccasins, they would ask if there was something wrong. And I’m talking this is Salt Lake City where there could be two or three feet of snow on the ground. And I’m like, “Well, this is how I believe I should be walking around.” I’m in moccasins a lot. If I need to protect my feet, that’s what I do. I literally wear a leather sock.
Steven Sashen:
I was in the pharmacy line at Costco a while ago, and if I’m wearing shoes, I wear mismatch colors. Here’s the shoes that I have today.
Trevor Thompson:
Okay.
Steven Sashen:
Same shoe, different color. Guy behind me says, “Hey, your shoes don’t match.” And the pharmacist without even looking up says, “He’s wearing shoes”?
Trevor Thompson:
See. It’s the same sort of thing.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I’ve had to tell many a store that there’s nothing illegal about being barefoot. In fact, at a supermarket, they said, “You can’t be barefoot in the store.” And I said, “Why?” They said, “Well, it’s a sanitation issue.” I said, “I don’t care if my feet get dirty.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?”
Trevor Thompson:
That’s the truth. There’s nothing that says you can’t do that.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I said, “When’s the last time you cleaned your shoes because I clean my feet every day. So I’m not sure what you’re talking about about sanitation.” They were a little perplexed by that one. You can have a policy that you’re supposed to wear shoes, but it’s not illegal. And even with a policy, they can ask you to leave, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
Trevor Thompson:
No, exactly.
Steven Sashen:
At one point, I was in Whole Foods barefoot, and somebody complained that I was in bare feet just as a dog walked by. I went, “Wait, so is he.” And that confused him.
Trevor Thompson:
What about hands? People use their hands to touch everything.
Steven Sashen:
Right.
Trevor Thompson:
Do you need to be wearing gloves?
Steven Sashen:
Well, clearly you must, otherwise there’s going to be some problem. Yes, we could go on forever about the illogical responses to running around in anything other than a normal shoe, and normal air quotes around normal.
Trevor Thompson:
Precisely.
Steven Sashen:
So anyway, clearly we could go on about this forever, and I’m hoping it was just fun for people to get a bit of an insight into a world that is somewhat secretive.
Trevor Thompson:
Supposed to be.
Steven Sashen:
Until you guys leave, and then there’s the chatter boxes.
Trevor Thompson:
Oh, some of them really are.
Steven Sashen:
You’re nothing compared to the father of a friend of mine. He was one of the top CIA guys for 40 years. And when he was in his 80s, I was grilling him on stuff. I’d say, “What were you doing in Thailand in ’59?” And he goes, “Oh, I had a large suitcase of money I had to bring across the Burmese border to get the war started.”
Steven Sashen:
“What were you doing in Zaire two years before the coup?”
Steven Sashen:
“Oh, I had a large suitcase of money that I… ”
Steven Sashen:
“What were you doing?”
Steven Sashen:
“Oh, I had a large suitcase.” Literally everything I could think of, he was there two years earlier with a big suitcase full of money.
Trevor Thompson:
That is wild.
Steven Sashen:
And I told his kids, and they’re like, “Wait, what are you talking about?” They had no idea, which was even more wild. So that was pretty fun. Well, Trevor, if people want to just find out what you’re up to, especially with the biz you’re connected to, or just want to say hi, if they have any questions or if you’re open for that, how can they track you down and say hello?
Trevor Thompson:
So the best way is literally I just have an Instagram account that says Trevor.Patrick.Thompson or trevor.p.thompson. That’s it. It’s super easy. It’s just my name. And then I’m affiliated with, and I work for Protekt Products, and those are the easiest ways to get ahold of me or find out.
Steven Sashen:
Spell Protekt Products for them since it’s not a typical spelling.
Trevor Thompson:
Yeah, that’s right. Protekt. And then Products just like it’s supposed to be spelled.
Steven Sashen:
I have a fantasy that someday we will stop… Protekt didn’t do it, but I have a fantasy someday we won’t just remove vowels to come up with a new product name or a new company.
Trevor Thompson:
Oh, yeah. Just shake the Scrabble box for the next pharmaceutical.
Steven Sashen:
That’s one. If you look on Amazon, there’s a whole bunch of companies, Chinese companies, that got into the idea of making barefoot shoes, and they undeniably just grabbed a bunch of Scrabble tiles, threw them on the ground and went, “That’s the product name.” Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Well, Trevor, been a total, total pleasure. I really appreciate the conversation. For everyone else, I hope you do as well reach out to Trevor if you’re inspired to say hi. And remember, go check us out at www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find links to all the social media platforms that we’re on where you can say hi and interact with us there as well. And as always, if you have any recommendations, suggestions, if there’s somebody you think should be on the show, especially if it’s someone who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome, pass it on. You can drop me an email. I’m at move@jointhemovementmovement.com. And most importantly, go out, have fun and live life feet first.
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free