Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement about whether or not carbon fiber shoes make you weak.
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Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Sometimes I feel like I am just shouting into the wind but happily, an Olympian is now backing me up. We’re going to find out what that means on today’s episode of the MOVEMENT Movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting with the feet first. Those things are, of course, your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the lies, that’s going to be relevant today, that many shoe companies tell you about what it takes to run or walk or dance or do yoga or CrossFit or play or hang out with your kids or just hang out and do that enjoyably, effectively, did I mention enjoyably? Yes, I know I did.
And that’s because if you’re not having fun, just do something different ’til you are because you’re not going to keep it up if it’s not fun anyway. So, we call this the MOVEMENT movement because we’re creating a movement, I’ll talk about that in a sec because that involves you, about natural movement. And what that means is letting your body do what it’s supposed to do, letting your toes spread, letting your feet bend and flex and move and feel the world so they tell your brain what’s going on at the other end of your body so it knows how to move your entire body.
The movement part is you and it’s really simple. All you need to do is share this kind of information with other people. So, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, you’ll find previous episodes, you’ll find all the different places this podcast appears, including YouTube and Facebook and et cetera, et cetera, and all the places you can download podcasts. And what else? Oh, and then like and share and give us a thumbs-up or hit the bell icon on YouTube, you know how to do. Basically, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe.
So, let’s take a look at this article over here. This is from, you can see, runningmagazine.ca, that’s Canadian, are your carbon-plated shoes making you weaker? Now, what’s going on lately if you’re not aware of this is simple. So Nike in particular, has put out some shoes that they’re claiming make people faster and people are setting records. But of course, people are setting records in other shoes at the same time and there’s another phenomenon, which is that when someone gets a shoe, an elite runner gets a shoe and then wins a race, everyone assumes that it’s the shoe that’s the reason that they’re winning the race.
Now, Eliud Kipchoge, the guy who ran the sub two-hour marathon for Nike. Well, he didn’t do it for Nike, but in these shoes, he tried it for Nike, didn’t make the sub two-hour, did it later, did anyway. He came out with an article and some comments back in about January, I think, where he was kind of shouting, “Hey, it wasn’t the shoes it was my legs,” but people didn’t care about that, they’re still responding to the shoes because if you’re an elite runner and you think that someone’s getting an advantage by wearing a shoe, guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to buy that same shoe.
And if everyone’s running well, people are going to set records because everyone’s wearing the same shoe. And then, it becomes a self-fulfilling loop of it’s kind of an echo chamber is what it really is. But be that as it may, the interesting thing, the couple of interesting things, and this is where the screaming into the wind idea comes from is that A, the research on the 4% shoe was that it improved VO2 max, how you’re uptaking oxygen by up to 4%, not that you’ll run 4% faster and you look at Kipchoge and he did not run 4% faster under perfect conditions when he was wearing those shoes.
So anyway, that’s where this all sort of starts from. Oh sorry, back to me for the win. And so, I’ve been screaming and shouting that the shoes are not the thing, that cushioning is not the thing, that the carbon plate, the way some “footwear experts” have been talking about the carbon plate in some of these shoes is that it’s a spring, which it’s not, or a fulcrum, which it’s not. You can look at the previous episodes to find the previous episode where I talked about this [inaudible 00:03:41] why but the simple answer is physics. So, here’s where it gets fun. Closer look at the physiological effects of the latest trend in running shoes. All right.
So, new technology is popular, consumers look for drawbacks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, this is interesting. So far, the major downfall of the carbon shoe revolution has come from more ethical issues like accessibility and mechanical advantage. That’s not really an ethical issue per se. I mean, they’re super expensive so they’re certainly not accessible. I’m not sure if that’s ethical. Mechanical advantage, are they creating a mechanical advantage? I’m going to take some comment about that or make a comment about that in a sec, but this is the important thing in there, stack height.
So, stack height is a, basically the height of the shoe. You can see with this HOKA shoe, super, super high, that’s a giant stack height versus Xero shoes where they’re super, super thin. So, here’s an interesting thing that is of course, the magic question, is this for real, is this making runners weaker? Now, here’s my favorite part where I love it when people agree with me. Shalaya Kipp, who as it says 2012 Olympian and now a PhD candidate. And she has worked on several studies, including the original 4% and the argument about weakness goes back decades. Basically we know shoes can make our feet weaker.
Why? Because when they’re supporting you, supporting any joint and your feet have and ankles have, more bones and joints than well, a quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body. So, lots of joints supporting them, not letting them move, not using the muscles and tendons and ligaments around them to be strong, makes them weaker. There’s research, I’m going to flick back to me, there’s research from Protopapas, that just came out where they took healthy athletes, put orthotics in their shoes, arch support in their shoes and within 12 weeks, they lost up to 17% of the muscle mass in their feet. That ain’t good.
Imagine what that does over time. Now, it doesn’t go to zero obviously, but it does get weaker, weaker, weaker and then hits a sort of asymptotic point of diminishing returns where you’re weak. Now the good news is, you don’t have to stay weak if you just start using your feet, research from Sarah Ridge at BYU shows that just walking in a pair of minimalist shoes can build intrinsic foot muscle strength in eight weeks, as much as doing an actual foot strengthening program. So, there’s always hope. All right, back to the article.
All right. Kipp raises an important point. Of course, that kind of protection technically makes the foot weaker. What do you mean technically? It just flat out does. And the idea that carbon plates cause weakness isn’t new, again, it’s just a little buzzword. Now here’s what’s fun, we’re still not sure if the foam or the plate is contributing more approved economy and recovery in runners, which some critics equate with weakening. In fact, I’m back to me for the win, in fact, the original study from Roger Krom here at the University of Colorado, he even suggested that the reason there might be more running economy, better VO2 max is because you’re not using your muscles, ligaments and tendons as much when you’re wearing these shoes.
And of course not using something, use it or lose it, in this case, you’d be losing it. All right, moving on. Kipp says the idea of a stiffening plate has been around as long as orthotics, which conceptually work in a similar way, not even conceptually, totally, just a different material, different tensile strength and different weight and thickness. That’s really about it. The February study on adding carbon plates shows that they didn’t improve running economy at all. Interesting. Now, this suggests the secret sauce is the cushioning combined with the plate, not just one or the other.
No, no, no, no. It suggests that they don’t know the answer. Just going with, so just saying, “Oh, it’s the combination of the carbon and the foam,” this is what the shoe companies have been saying but we don’t know. I think it’s two things that are completely different than what’s being suggested here. One, placebo effect, pretty simple. You put on something and you think you’re going to run faster, you may run faster just as a result of what you believe. I can tell you, I tried a pair of these shoes on Saturday, someone at the track had a pair.
And when you’re just walking around, they feel springy because as you’re walking, they definitely kind of spring a little faster, the foam uncompresses a little faster than your foot is moving off the ground. So, as your foot is leaving around just walking, the foam uncompresses and you feel that little pop in your foot. It feels really cool, it feels like it’s doing something. It’s not really doing something but it feels like it. Running, especially as a sprinter, I felt like I was running in quicksand, it was ridiculous. But, so placebo effect is one.
There’s another thing related to the placebo effect, which is a thing called the central governor theory, this came from Tim Noakes and the idea is there was a part of your brain that basically tells your body how to not exert all the effort that it possibly could. Because if you use any muscle in your body, you can break your bones just by flexing a muscle, your muscles, ligaments and tendons are often more stronger, more stronger? Often stronger than your bones. At the very least, your tendons can rip off, your tendons can rip muscles. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of things where your brain is basically saying, “Chill out dude because if you put up more force, you might hurt yourself.”
The interesting thing about the central governor is that it’s often wrong, it’s often protecting you way in advance of where you’re actually dangerous or dangerous to yourself. And so, the idea of the central governor theory when it comes to endurance, running in particular or as an example, is that you’re learning to listen to those signals the central governors give you and reframe those or not be as affected by them until you get further along to the point where you might be getting injured. So, combined placebo effect, the central governor theory, when you’re wearing these new shoes, you may get signals from your brain saying, “Ooh, not good,” and you might be reinterpreting those as reasons or things that are good. And so, you keep going.
Another reason, you can be faster. And there’s one other that I’m going to mention in a sec. Actually, wait hold on. Let’s go back. Okay, here we go. The point Kipp wants to drive home is the new shoe technologies undeniably lessening the workload of a foot. We don’t know what the long-term effects are, true … Well, we clearly do, you get weaker over time. This is not rocket science. If the foot isn’t working as hard, muscles get smaller. I mean, really, really simple. After we wear the shoe for months, nobody knows that outcome. Well, we haven’t done the study. But I mean, come on, it’s not like you’re suddenly magically going to get stronger after you get weaker by continuing to not use your foot.
This is by the way, the shoe that I wore over the weekend. While shoes are undeniably changing researchers, Kipp included, are unsure if the dramatic results are coming from the plate or the foam or as I said, from something completely different. And let me address what that other thing is. In the episode that I recorded with Geoffrey Gray from Heeluxe, a footwear researching company, he came up with this theory that I think has some validity, which goes back to the US Olympic Committee, banning things with this over a certain stack height. These shoes, incredibly lightweight, the foam unbelievably light, which by the way means it breaks down really fast.
And back to that ethical thing about accessibility. While a regular running shoe, they say you need to replace it every three to 500 miles because the foam is wearing out and then it made the rubber to wear out, the outsole rubber wearing out at the same time the foam is wearing out. Well these shoes, some of them they say explicitly wear out in as little as 100 miles. So, if you’re getting a $200 shoe, that only gives you 100 miles worth of wear, yeah, that’s really problematic. But here’s the thing that Geoffrey mentioned. Big, big stack height, super, super lightweight. So, the lightweight means that your cadence, your steps per minute is probably not being affected by the weight at the end of your leg.
In fact, it may let you have a slightly faster cadence and slightly more economy because you don’t have so much weight at the bottom of your foot. Now, it’s not a huge difference I compared it to our Speed Force, it was about a half an ounce to announce different, which over the course of a marathon can make a difference, shorter races you won’t notice. But add the lightweight and the same cadence with the stack height and imagine running and stilts, if you could. Basically, Geoffrey’s idea is that you’re going to get a longer stride length with the same stride frequency or faster stride frequency. And stride frequency times stride length equals speed.
So, that’s the way that some people may be running faster if in fact, they are legitimately running faster because of the shoes and not just because of all the other points that we made. So last but not least for now, we know that shoes improve economy. World records are falling at an unprecedented rate. Again, irrelevant if everyone’s switching to the same kind of shoes, then the fact that world records are falling doesn’t necessarily mean anything in particular. Some people argue, some people have said that that the four-minute mile, when Bannister broke the four-minute mark on the mile, it was a psychological thing. And suddenly, everyone was able to do this.
Once someone did it once, then people knew it was possible and people breaking four minutes over and over and over. The reality is, there was a lot of people who are really close and Banister just happened to be the first. But the interesting thing is, if that idea of the psychology of it is true, then again, this comes back to placebo effect. Some people are doing better in the shoes, everyone thinks they can do better. They’re pushing a little harder, they’re ignoring the central governor in a slightly different way. It’s just not necessarily the shoes.
Anyway, as far as the negative side effects, if there are any, we have to wait longer to discover. Wait, wait, we’ve already, this is so funny. This is like one of these things where articles try to be fair and balanced by reporting both sides of a story even if there’s only one side. As far as the negative side effects, if there are any, we’ve already talked about that, we’ve already discussed getting weaker. I mean, you’ve already hit that there are negative side effects. We don’t know what the long-term negative side effects are arguably, but think about it logically. If your feet get weaker, how is that better for you in the long-term?
Give me one situation where weaker is going to be better than stronger. Anyway, I just want to do that quick analysis because it’s wonderful to have not only an Olympian, an Olympian who’s getting a PhD in the relevant science to say, “I don’t think this is what people are saying it is.” But again, what’s amazing is the marketing is so good. I don’t mean, well, the marketing so effective that I guarantee this article will make no difference in sales, no difference in people’s perception, no difference in how many people go out and buy these shoes at all, which is the sad, sad, sad thing is that you can’t give people information. You can’t give them data to convince them of something be different than what they already believe.
What you can do is help people recognize that their experience doesn’t match what they think they believe and that might cause some cognitive dissonance, which might cause them to change their mind. But you can’t just say, “Hey look, carbon plates, not good, cushioning, not so great, getting weaker, not so good.” They’re going to go, “Yeah, but people are running faster.” Anyway, fingers crossed that enough of this data starts to come out though that it starts making people question their own beliefs about their own experience and we’ll see where it goes. The other thing I’ll leave on this point, people keep talking about the pendulum swinging from minimalist to maximalist.
I just want to highlight that that’s also nonsense, there is no pendulum swinging. The minimalist thing, that’s basically what shoes were like for the first 9,950 years that people knew we were making shoes. The new modern athletic shoe is a 50-year old idea. So, what we’re doing at Xero shoes is basically just going back in time to the way shoes really were. The only pendulum swinging is this half of a pendulum from these maximalist shoes, super high, super stiff, super cushiony, super expensive, super undurable, whatever that means. So, maybe if the pendulum swings back, it’s just going to swing back to normal and we are the normal. The modern athletic shoe is actually part of, I guess, it’s like a three-dimensional pendulum if you could think of it that way.
We’ve got modern athletic shoes and super maximal shoes on one end and then what we do on the other side, both of those could go away and we’re left in the middle with footwear that lets your feet be feet, bend, move, flex, toes spread, feel the world, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, hope this was useful. I want to hear your comments about what you think about the article, what you think about maximal versus minimal, what you think about, well, anything, drop me an email, move@jointhemovementmovement.com or just post comments in all the places you can post comments and like and share and thumbs-up and hit the bell, et cetera.
Again, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. If you have any comments or questions about anything else, again, drop an email to move@jointhe movementmovement.com and as always go out, have fun and live life feet first.
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