From Heel Strike to Health: Minimalist Footwear Will Change Your Life with Steven Sashen

Content By: Ari Whitten

In this episode, I’m speaking with Steven Sashen, who founded minimalist shoe company Xero Shoes with his wife Lena Phoenix in 2009.

His philosophy? Modern footwear is actively hurting you.

In this discussion (which was so fun and informative thanks to Steven’s lighthearted approach to his work), we explore what the shoe industry has been hiding about arch support, cushioning, and elevated heels, all while knowing these features actually increase injury rates.

Steven’s company exists because he wants to change people’s lives, and after 16 years of challenging the footwear industry’s biggest myths, he’s revealing how traditional shoes weaken your feet, destabilize your balance, and even contribute to falls that kill older adults.

Get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about what to put on your feet. This conversation could literally save you from decades of unnecessary pain, injury, and disability.

Transcript

Ari: Steven, welcome to the show.

Steven: Ari, thank you. First things first. How many other annoyingly good-looking people are in your family between– other than you and your brother? Is that–

Ari: [laughs] We have an older sister as well.

Steven: Equally hot?

Ari: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, she is.

Steven: Were your parents part of some genetic experiment? [inaudible 00:00:26] folks.

Ari: [laughs] Steven, I looked at my inbox before this, my email inbox, and fortunately for me, I never delete any messages. I have tens of thousands of messages in my Gmail account.

Steven: Yes, me too.

Ari: I went all the way back to when you first reached out to me, and it was like—

Steven: 1948, right after the war.

Ari: [laughs] Exactly. Yes, that’s exactly where I was going with it. This goes back almost 10 years.

Steven: Yes.

Ari: I was just– Sorry, go ahead.

Steven: Hold on. If you really looked, you will find a couple of emails from me where I said, “Hey, let’s get a reconnect,” that you completely ignored.

Ari’s first experience with barefoot shoes

Ari: Now you’re making me feel bad. Actually, the broader picture of this is that 10 years ago is when you first reached out to me. You sent me a pair of sandals that looked something like this. This is the more modern version that I actually just got from you recently, which are awesome. I didn’t know that much about barefoot stuff, minimalist shoes at that time. You were, I think, just starting your now extraordinary thriving business. It was one of the earlier models of sandals. It was extremely minimalistic, and I just didn’t like it that much.

It was a little bit annoying. My foot didn’t stay on the sandal centered properly. I would have to adjust the straps a lot during a walk. It was so minimalistic that when I would go for long walks or runs on cement, my feet hurt afterwards, and I would have to walk more slowly to make it feel better. I never made the transition. I never toughened my feet up enough that I could handle it. I just let the whole thing go. Only recently, a couple of years ago, did I rediscover and get back into minimalist shoes with a little bit of nudging from my brother, who you also know, and you’ve done an interview with.

I tried a few different brands, and I tried your shoes, and I just fell in love with what they did for me. There’s a whole sequence of events related to starting to play tennis a few years ago and experiencing some really interesting things there. I got some really beefy maximalist shoes because I thought that was going to be good for tennis. Then I started suffering all these ankle and Achilles problems from shoe– I eventually figured out that it was actually these shoes, these bulky shoes that are supposed to be really stable and supportive and all these things, that were actually causing my problems.

Steven: Yes, that’s how they sell them.

Ari: Yes. Anyway, this whole process of rediscovering minimalist barefoot style shoes. Now I’ve fully made the transition of conditioning my feet, my toes, my tendons, my bones to handle it. I’ve never felt better. I’ve regained a lot of my athleticism. I’m playing the best tennis I’ve ever played. I also have a few pairs of your shoes. This is one of the only minimalist shoes on the market that you can actually play tennis in, which is phenomenal.

Then I have these pre-O’Neill’s, I have these more casual shoes. They’re all amazing. Amazing build quality, they’re super comfortable, and I’ve just fallen in love with this whole thing and the science behind it. Now I’ve dug really deep into it, and I feel compelled to finally get this message out. Your efforts from 10 years ago are finally paying off.

Steven: Yes, I’m playing the long game. That’s for sure. Look, I am playing the long game because my wife has a great line. She says, “There’s enough shoe companies in the world. You don’t need to start another shoe company unless your shoes change people’s lives.” That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning. We literally hear that all day, every day. We’re up against 50 years of propaganda saying that arch support, motion control, bumps of excessive cushioning, et cetera, et cetera, is all good for you, which it isn’t. The research could not be more clear, it’s not, but research does not convince people to change their minds about anything.

We really are just– the way I describe it as this, I like to use the original Audi TT as an example. If you’re not a car person, it doesn’t matter, but the original Audi TT looked like a VW bug on acid. It was just way too bulbous and bizarre, but it got a lot of attention because people either loved it or hated it. That was really good just to get the attention out there. As time went by, people got used to it, so they didn’t find it as obnoxious. As the level of people getting upset decreased, Audi started toning down the design, until now it’s a beautiful little sports coupe. In fact, if you see it in the rear view mirror, it looks like every other Audi. It’s a beautiful car, and people were totally cool with it.

Similar thing, more and more people are getting hip to this idea of natural movement and “barefoot shoes.” To be clear, this is not about footwear. This is about letting your body do what it’s made to do naturally, which is optimal for almost everything we do. I’m not going to try and convince people to switch to what we do full time. I’ll deal with that in a second, but suffice it to say, this is about letting your body do what it’s supposed to do instead of getting in the way of doing what it’s supposed to do. As more people get hip to it– and there are over twice as many now who are looking for this on a daily basis as they did during the boom back in 2009, 2010, when we got started.

Over time, as more and more people get hip to it and more and more people stop yelling, “Hey, moron, you’re going to kill yourself if you’re wearing those,” we’re going to hit a little point of critical mass where things are going to accelerate and more people are going to be willing to try it. Because the experience of trying it is so profound, as you just described, at a certain point from there, it’s going to go just completely through the roof. The only thing that could prevent that is that we know the major shoe companies are terrified of this.

Ari: Yes.

Steven: Legit terrified. We’ve literally heard from the CEOs or VPs of every major footwear brand, but one in particular that I won’t mention but it rhymes with brooks, he said, “No, this whole natural movement thing is legit, but if we tried to do it, we’d be admitting we’ve been lying for 50 years.”

Ari: Yes, that’s what I was going to say is you’d think, especially given they’re huge companies with a lot of money, that they could easily just do this. They could start making these minimalist barefoot shoes, but it is an admission that everything they’ve been selling you is wrong.

Steven: Oh dude, it’s even better. They’ve already admitted it, but no one cares. On a website of another company, again, I won’t mention names, but it rhymes with fliky, I can’t help myself, on their website-

[laughter]

Steven: -they have a page. It’s the Run Fearless page. Towards the bottom of the page, it published a portion of an abstract of a study. A synopsis of the synopsis is a study that they designed, they commissioned. They called it independent because someone else actually did the study. It was a half marathon training program. Lasted 12 weeks. They tested their bestselling running shoe, the Zoom Structure 22, now you might know who it is, against a new shoe that developed the React Infinity Run.

Now, this study came out, or they publicized this about five years ago, literally about five years ago to the day that we’re recording this. The way it got published and propagated all around the internet and all around the world was new shoe reduces injury by 52%. Amazing. Then you have to look at the numbers. Now, the study hasn’t been published. I have a copy of it because I found the people who did the study, and they sent it to me, but it has never been published, but again, portion of an abstract.

The bestselling running shoe at that time that they had injured 30.3% of the people wearing it in under 12 weeks, possibly a little more because of the way they defined an injury, which would– an injury was something that put you out for at least three training sessions in a row, which is basically a week. If you got injured in the last week, that might not count. I’m not sure how they did that. Anyway, 30.3%, almost one-third of the people wearing that shoe, bestseller, got injured in under 12 weeks. The new shoe, wait, I should put the air quotes in the right place, the new shoe only injured 14.5% of the people.

Look, if I injured 14.5% to 30% of the people wearing our shoes in 12 months, we’d be having this call from my jail cell. It raises a bunch of questions, like is that the best you can do after 50 years of R&D, where, by the way, injury rates go up over time. That 12 week number by the end of the year will turn into roughly 50% to 70%, which is what commonly is known as the injury rate for runners. Marathoners even higher. Secondly, if that new shoe is so much better, why are you still selling that first piece of crap? Still are. Secondly, if that new shoe is so much better, what made it different?

Now, this is not on their website, but is in the information that I got. They “removed” many of the protective features. They made it more like ours, but not enough. What we hear over and over and over and over is stories like yours, my filling the blank went away, not my filling the blank happened after 12 weeks, or within 12 weeks. There’s another question. If that new thing is so good, how many more products are you making with that technology? Up until six months ago, it was just one, now it’s two. It goes back to your point and the point we made, why aren’t they doing more? Because if they did, they’d be admitting that giant thick padded motion control, blah, blah, blah, is a problem.

Again, the research could not be more clear. Yes, you may, A, run faster in one of those new shoes if you are a certain weight, and if you run at a certain speed, because all foam is basically tuned to a weight and speed. If you’re not that weight and speed, they could mess you up. Bunch of research coming out showing that. Even if you are that weight and speed, there’s a research physical therapist who says, it could make you faster, but your risk of injury is about 100%, because it’s changing your gait in a way that your nervous system isn’t used to. There’s no way to train enough to get it used to it because those things are so damn expensive, and they break down so fast.

Anyway, last thought. That company that I just mentioned actually did have a rather robust barefoot shoe development program. They made some really good products. In fact, they made one for Serena Williams, who said it gave her an extra couple of years in her career, but they’ve never done anything with it because, just like you said, how do they tell the story? You need all this arch support motion, blah, blah, blah, end of story of, “Oh no, you don’t.” They can’t. Now, look, if they were super smart–

Ari: The rest of their line that’s essentially been built around all of that mythology, which presumably makes them X amount of millions per month, tens of millions, or in the case of Fliky, I don’t know, hundreds of millions per month, probably, that revenue stream starts to get damaged or maybe severely damaged.

Steven: It’s really interesting because they could do it right– any of the big companies could do it right in one of two ways, if they had the ego strength to do it, for one of the ways. If they had the ego strength, the smartest thing that they could do would be to bring us into the fold, let us do our thing with their resources, and just let us act independently. That would be brilliant. Given how many bad things I’ve said about them in 15 years, it’s probably not likely to happen. Also, people don’t– that’s a stretch. It would be brilliant, and it would be helpful for everybody in the world. It would be awesome, not awesome for me necessarily because I’m not the guy who can have a job or a boss. I’ve never had one.

Ari: You don’t need those.

Steven: My father once– yes, my dad, when I was asking him for money for something I was starting, he said, “Why don’t you just get a job?” I said, “That wouldn’t end well for anybody.” [unintelligible 00:13:11] with you.

Ari: I tell a similar story about myself.

Steven: Yes, I’m completely unhirable. The other thing they could do that would be just as smart, would still be bring us on because, look, we have 60-something different styles of casual and performance shoes, boots, and sandals. You can’t catch up to us. It’s just not going to happen. If they were telling the story, not like switch from what we’re doing to this other much better thing, but if they told the story of how to do the transition, and this is what I say to runners in particular, don’t just switch to our shoes right away.

Minimalist shoes vs. foam padding

There’s research showing that just walking in a minimalist shoe builds foot strength as much as doing an exercise program. There’s research showing that extra foot strength makes your injury risk reduced by 250% over the course of a year. Run in whatever you want, but as soon as you’re done, switch to something like this, so your feet can bend and move and flex and feel, so you’re getting circulation and movement. That’s good for active recovery and for building strength, which makes you more injury-resistant. Start by doing that. Run in whatever you want to run in, wear these when you’re not doing. This is basically–

We have NBA and WNBA players who are wearing our stuff on the court. The way that many of the players who’ve been in big, thick shoes are adjusting is just that they start wearing our casual shoes around the house and when they’re out and about, and then in the gym, and then when they’re doing a shoot around and warming up, and then when they’re doing a little scrimmage, they’ll play for a few minutes. Then when they’re ready, they wear our basketball shoe and have the experience of cutting better and jumping better, and basically having a bunch better game.

One of the things that shoe companies have done over the years that’s as problematic as just more and more cushioning, more and more arch support, more and more padding that doesn’t work, is convincing people that all you have to do is switch shoes and instantly everything’s perfect. Not the situation. Again, in this case, it’s about optimal function, proper form, which basically we’re talking about form, not footwear. It’s just that footwear informs the form.

If you have a shoe with a big, elevated heel, it’s almost impossible not to land on the heel. Once you do that, that’s going to lead to a bunch of problems. Again, running shoe companies have been convincing people, you’re supposed to land with your foot way out in front of you, land on your heel, blah, blah, blah, all these things that are proven to be bad for you.

Ari: Steven, I’m with you 100% on all of this. I fear, however, that given how long you’ve been doing this, how long you’ve been having these kinds of conversations and what a pro you are at doing interviews like this, that you’re about 10 steps ahead of many of the people listening to this conversation, who are like, “What? Foam’s not good for us? Arch support’s not good for us? Elevated heel, what? What is this guy saying?”

Wait, hold on one second. One second. Hold on one second, Steven. I’m going to ask you to do something. I wouldn’t ask this of many people, but I know how knowledgeable you are, and I believe in your ability to do this. I would like you to back up and zoom out and give people a history of footwear and how we got to where we are now. Then from there, we’ll pick apart what’s wrong with it.

Steven: I’m only going to go back to the early ’70s. Is that cool?

Ari: Yes.

Steven: Okay. In the early ’70s, Bill Bowerman, who founded Nike, made a shoe, the Nike Waffle Trainer. I remember putting it on when I was 10, 11 years old. It was basically very close to what we do, very thin layer of foam, that waffle outsole that he literally made in a waffle iron. The one thing that it did that was very clever was the shoe was flat, but the foam was– let’s say it was about 10 millimeters thick at the heel, 10 millimeters thick, and when it got to the ball of the foot, it angled up. What it did is interesting. It tipped you forward so you would naturally land on the ball of your foot, which is proper form.

I remember putting that shoe on at a shoe store where they let me go out and run on the street and try it. I’ve been a sprinter my whole life. I leaned forward to start running, and it tipped me forward to exactly how I run. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, this is a miracle.” That was the first thing. The footwear industry, especially performance shoes, they’re a bunch of mostly not very creative copycats.

If someone does something and it catches on, everybody else tries to copy it because they’re afraid they’ll never make another sale again, and they just do their variation. There’s a trade show every year called The Running Event. If I took you to that show and show you all the shoes from all the different companies, you could literally just swap the logos between brands, and you couldn’t tell the difference.

Waffle Trainer comes out. It’s doing pretty good. Bowerman then had a bunch of runners who were getting Achilles tendonitis. He happened to be sharing a building with some orthopedic podiatrists or sports podiatrists. I can’t recall what they called themselves. He said, “What do I do?” They said, “Well, clearly, these people have been wearing higher-heeled dress shoes and casual shoes, so their Achilles are shortened. You need to make a higher-heeled running shoe to accommodate their shortened Achilles.

Ari: I want to just flag that in people’s mind as an important point to hold on to, the fact that your choice of footwear and how it’s shaped will literally alter the structure of your anatomy.

Steven: I’m going to clarify it. It could, but my argument would be, because no– Wait till I get to the end of the story, and then I’m going to throw in a little caveat to that. They put a wedge of foam in there. When you put the wedge of foam in the shoe– There was another coach at that time, a guy named Arthur Lydiard from New Zealand, most successful running coach in history, I think. From a tiny little country had more runners in more events who won international titles, Olympic titles, world championship titles, than any other coach that I know of. He had them doing a lot of training barefoot and in shoes that looked a lot like ours.

He said to Bowerman, “Those shoes, they’re going to kill people.” Bowerman said, “Basically, we’re selling a shitload of them.” This is the nature of the footwear industry is, selling things is the most important thing. There’s also another thing that’s weird, which is, why do you care what some Olympic marathoner is wearing on his feet? If you are not 105 pound Kenyan running a two-hour and five-minute marathon, why do you care what that 105-pound, 2.05 marathon Kenyan is running? Whole different universe. Again, people started like, “Oh my God, I got to go do this wedge heel thing.”

Let’s cut to about 35 years in the future from that moment. Guy who worked directly with Bill Bowerman for 30-something years developing footwear with him, who understands the value of natural movement and barefoot stuff, we’ve actually designed some shoes together, he’s at a track meet with one of these podiatrists. He says to the guy, “You know that your idea has just became ubiquitous. Every modern running shoe is basically using elevated heel, a bunch of foam, et cetera. What do you think about that?”

I’m paraphrasing, the guy said, “Biggest mistake we ever made. When we heard about this problem, we were making a lot of prosthetics. We immediately looked for a prosthetic solution without even researching it. We didn’t know anything about whether their Achilles had really shortened. We didn’t know what the effect of putting a wedge of foam in one shoe will be.” I’ll show you that in a second. “We just didn’t know.”

If you talk to people who were running in that late ’60s era– a friend of mine did that. She talked to people from the Stanford Running Club. She said, “How did you deal with injuries at that time?” They said, “What injuries?” You talk to Arthur Lydiard’s runners before they got sponsored by big shoe companies in the US. “What did you guys do about injuries?” He said, “What injuries?” They just weren’t having them.

Before I tell you what caused the injuries, let’s address this, what shoe you wear can change your physiology. It absolutely can, but it can do it in one of two ways. It can literally change the structure of the tissue, or it can just change how your brain relates to what that tissue is doing. If you get injured– we’ve all had this experience where you put your arm in a cast. When your arm comes out of the cast, it can passively move often, but you can’t actively do it because your brain is used to thinking this is all you can do is keep it in one place. You as much have to retrain your brain to remind it what you’re able to do as you have to work on just getting things to move properly.

I would contend that most of the people that I see, they’ve just taught their brain they can only move so much. If they start to move a little more, the brain goes, “Whoa, whoa, whao, that’s not safe,” and just seizes up. Look, I had this happen to me a couple of weeks ago. I was at a track meet. I was going to run the indoor 60. I go to the starting blocks before the race started to get one move out of the blocks just to make sure it felt good. I normally set my blocks at 45 degrees. These starting blocks either did 40 or 50. I decided to go to 50, 5 degrees, it’s not very much.

What happened when I pushed it out of the blocks, my heel went back that extra five degrees, and my brain went, “Whoa, whoa,” and just seized up. I didn’t pull anything, but it made my whole calf just seize up like a rock. Oops, I just gave it information that it wasn’t prepared for. There was nothing to change about the tissue. Just my brain put the limits on, and I went, “Oh, well, can’t race today.”

The problem with the wrong footwear

Let me show you what the problems are, and I’m going to do this in a weird way. I’m going to ask you a few stupid questions. Ready?

Ari: Yes.

Steven: Which is better, weaker or stronger?

Ari: Stronger.

Steven: Okay. If you want to make something weaker, like your arm, what do you do? You don’t use it. You put it in a cast. Simple enough. You put your arm in a cast, there’s this one joint, and there’s– I don’t know how many muscles, ligaments, and tendons around that joint. Bicep, that’s two, tricep, that’s three. Then around the forearm, there’s about– let’s call it about a dozen, two dozen tops, something like that. They get weaker over time because you’re not letting them move. Cool. In your feet, you have 33 joints and about 110 ligaments, muscles, and tendons. If you have a shoe that doesn’t let them move, do they get weaker or stronger?

Ari: Weaker.

Steven: Simple. Let’s do another one. Which is better, feeling or numbness?

Ari: Feeling.

Steven: Cool. You also have 200,000 nerve endings in the sole of each foot, more than anywhere but your fingertips and your lips. Why? Your brain can tell what you’re stepping on or stepping in, so it can help you move properly over the terrain you’re on. That bending and flexing is for balance, agility, and mobility. You need to be able to feel things to move properly over whatever terrain you’re on. How much can you feel through this amount of foam or more, because most shoes have more these days?

Ari: Virtually nothing.

Steven: Right, so your brain isn’t getting the information it needs to help you move properly. Okay, let’s do another one. Which is better, restriction or freedom?

Ari: Freedom.

Steven: Okay. Most shoes have a toe box shaped like this, big, pointy thing. That’s not the shape of your foot, or if it is, it’s not supposed to be. When you do push-ups, you don’t squeeze your fingers together, you let your fingers naturally spread apart. That’s better for balance and force production. Same thing, your toes are supposed to be able to spread and bend and flex and move and splay. You can’t do that here. If you can’t move your big toe, you can’t actually use the arch, the biggest arch muscle, the longitudinal arch in your foot, which means your foot gets weaker again. Oh boy, where do I want to go next? Oh, which is better, proper alignment or being off balance?

Ari: Proper alignment.

Steven: When you elevate your heel, it tips you forward just a little bit, but even a couple of millimeters tips you forward just enough that you have to make an adjustment with your ankle, your knee, your hip, and your back. That little adjustment, depending on which one of those joints is problematic, they’re not designed to handle that over time. That’s another problem.

Ari: Let me interject something briefly, which will also give you time to think about the next sequence of concepts you want to explain. My brother and I have been trying to get our parents to adopt, at the very least, and our parents are in their mid-70s, almost 80, adopt at least wide-toe box shoes with zero drop. You don’t necessarily have to go to minimalism as far as the level of foam, which scares them too much, and that sort of thing. We’re at least just trying to make the first step, zero drop, wide toe box. There’s a lot of resistance. The biblical expression, you can’t be a prophet in your own hometown comes to mind.

My brother and I have been telling our parents stuff for 25 years. We go to their house, and we were like, “Really? Really guys, this is what’s in your refrigerator?” They’re way better than most people, but anyway, I digress. Recently, we bought some shoes for them that are wide-toe box, zero drop. Both of them report the sensation of falling backwards. When they just have a flat bottom shoe that is not tilting them forward like an elevated heel cushion in most shoes does, they feel their equilibrium, their brain is telling them, “Whoop, you’re tipping backwards.”

Steven: Yes, that goes away pretty quickly. It’s like when you’re on a boat and you’re on a boat for a while, then you get off the boat and you still feel like you’re moving even when you’re not.

Ari: Landsick, yes.

Steven: Yes. Your brain adjusts to whatever you’re doing and then doing something different feels weird and wrong until it adjusts and does it better. I’ll tell you my favorite weird story about– Now, first of all, back to your parents for the fun of it. If they ever walk around somewhere barefoot, the house, the beach, whatever.

Ari: Rare.

Steven: Okay, cool. When people tell me things like, “Well, I can’t walk barefoot, I’ve got hardwood floors,” I say, “You think that’s normal? That’s not normal. That’s a problem.” I said to one guy– he was thinking of investing in our company. He said, “Well, I can’t really invest in your company because I can’t wear your shoes.” We talked for a bit, and I said, “How are you walking barefoot in your house?” He goes, “Are you kidding? I have hardwood floors.” I went, “Okay, look, I can give you some little foot exercises you can do while you’re watching TV or reading a book, whatever.

“In about two weeks, maybe four weeks tops, you’ll be able to walk from your bedroom to the bathroom without a problem and start walking around the house within, probably, for you, because you haven’t used your feet really for 30 years, maybe it’ll take you 2 months, but it’s probably going to take you about 4 weeks. Soon you’ll be able to walk around, not a problem in your house and bare feet. Then, if you want, I can work with you for another few months. By work with you, I mean, just tell you what to do once, not like it’s an ongoing training program. If you want, I can have you run in a 5k barefoot in 6 months.”

He looked at me like I was insane. I said to him, “Just because I look like this doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” I said, “Just because I’m not wearing a white coat like your doctor, I can tell you, man, I was a pre-med. My friends who became doctors, half of them, morons.” Now, the other half, great people. It’s probably more 80-20, with 80 being the morons, but that’s okay. Suffice it to say, just because someone is in a position of authority doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re doing. As my father, who was a dentist said, “Do you know what they call the guy who graduated last in my class in dental school?” I said, “What?” He says, “Doctor.” It’s a good start with your parents, by the way.

The potential flaws in scientific recommendations

Ari: I want to interject something briefly, something that came to my mind just now as you were talking, and we’re thinking about the history of modern footwear. What comes to mind, two things, as analogous situations. One is processed food. We have the rise of processed food, and for many, many decades, all this stuff has been, “Oh, it’s fortified with this vitamin, and this is good for you. This is heart-healthy,” and blah, blah, blah. Obviously, people who educate themselves ultimately discover that actually whole, unprocessed food is way healthier for them than any of this processed refined garbage.

Actually, a quick funny story on that, my wife, who is from Chile, her and her family moved to the United States when she was quite young, when she was, I don’t know, 8 or 10 years old. This was back in the maybe early ’80s. Her mom saw this processed stuff in the grocery stores here. They had grown up in Chile eating a very wholesome, whole food diet.

Go to America, and the perception of the United States was like, “Wow, they’re so advanced. They’re so scientific here. You go to the grocery store, wow, look at all this stuff, this canned Campbell’s soup and all this stuff. It’s so healthy. They use science to make everything so healthy for us.” She switched everything to processed food thinking that it was much more sophisticated and scientific and healthy for humans.

The other example that comes to my mind is, for a period, I don’t know if it was back, starting in the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s, when exactly this occurred, but there was a good chunk of time in the United States and many, many other countries around the world where mothers of babies were told essentially not to breastfeed because science has developed this really sophisticated formula with all the right compounds and all the right vitamins and minerals that’s much better for your baby than breast milk is. There was a whole generation of babies that were raised with minimal to no breast milk. Yes, you.

My wife, her mom, the doctors in Chile were telling her this when my wife was a baby. It’s like, “Oh, we got to do the right thing. We’re not going to give them breast milk. We’re going to give them formula.” Then, of course, later, what do we discover? Actually, breast milk is vastly healthier for babies than the supposedly scientific formula. I feel like this is analogous to the whole modern footwear.

Steven: It’s very similar. I’m going to actually say in a way it’s more like cigarettes. If you look at early cigarette ads, they were promoted as healthy because you’re exercising your lungs. That was one of the things. I do say about footwear, the only problem that footwear has is that it doesn’t kill you. It just injures you and costs you a lot of money because if it actually killed people, we’d have a R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris Senate congressional hearing, where all their research would come out.

Everything I’m saying is not news to the people in the industry. They know everything I’m saying. They’ve proven it over and over and over, but they won’t do it. You’re absolutely right. I use the food analogy very often. There’s another piece of the analogy that I like, which is, in the food world, they never apologize for what they did in the past. They just do the new thing and claim that it’s better-

Ari: No, they keep doing it. Yes.

Misleading marketing from big brand shoe companies?

Steven: -and then we find out that it’s not. Same thing in the footwear industry. “Here’s our new cushioning. Sorry about that shit we were selling for the last 10 years.” They never do that. They just say, “Here’s the new thing.” The real analogy is to the boy who cried wolf, except in that story, the villagers eventually get smart. In the shoe company that tried cushioning, the villagers never get smart. They just keep running back to the store. By village, I mean all of us. That’s just what we do because they’re really, really good at marketing. They’re really, really good at being misleading about things that we don’t know enough about, like physics.

I started teaching physics to people when I was 14. I was tutoring adults because I’m a dork. One of my favorite examples, and by, again, favorite, air quotes, when Adidas, and I say Adidas because that’s the way it’s actually pronounced in the same way you say Chile. [laughs] It’s one of those debates. You go to another country and you hear how people really pronounce things and you come back and go, “Do I say it the right way or do I just–” Or, when I do that at a dinner party, do I seem like a douche? I don’t know.

Anyway, when Adidas, because it’s Adi Dassler who started the company, they came out with their boost foam. The way they showed how cool it was, was they took a two-pound steel ball, you can find this on YouTube, they drop it on cement and it barely bounces. Then they drop it off “the other company’s foam.” No other company used that foam, but that’s okay, bounces a little bit. They drop it off the boost foam, and the first bounce goes to about 30% of the height that they dropped it from. They drop it from 3 feet, it bounces like a foot. Then it bounces like 10 more times. Cool. Don’t you want to be bouncy?

There are a couple problems. One, you’re not a two-pound steel ball. You’re not just falling at the rate of gravity and just bouncing because you’re totally solid and blah, blah, blah. More, somehow I knew right away, if you go to the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, they used to have, I don’t know if they still do, an exhibit, little exhibit, where you could take a steel ball, you drop it through a– there’s a plexiglass plate a foot off the ground. You could drop it through a hole in the plexiglass plate. What it hits is a steel plate with concrete underneath it.

The boost foam, the first bounce, 30% the height you drop it from. Steel ball on steel plate, the first bounce, hits the plexiglass plate you just dropped it through. Then it bounces 260 more times. They just misused physics to make you think, “This is something good for me,” completely unrelated to who you are, even though the reality tells you that what they just said is complete nonsense. They just do it all the time. They’re very, very good at it.

Let’s go back to the, how shoes became what they are, because there’s an interesting piece. That first thing that these podiatrists recommended was just elevated heel. Now, when you elevate your heel– Let me say it slightly differently. If you’re running in bare feet, and that’s what you’re used to– and by the way, you want to see people who are used to it? Watch kids who haven’t put on shoes. Their running form is perfect. First of all, they land with their foot underneath their body. They have just the right amount of forward lean. Their cadence is just perfect. They do get this weird look on their face, though, that I’ve never understood. It’s called smiling. They’re having a good time. They run until they’re done.

Then they sit down and they goof around. Then when they’re ready, they get up and do it again. It’s amazing. The only thing that’s more fun than just watching them run is when their parents bring these kids to a track meet and you watch them actually in a race. The only thing cuter would be if they were puppies. It’s just adorable. They’ll run the 400, one lap around the track. Some of them will just stop when they feel tired. Then when they’re ready again, they start again. They don’t know. They don’t care. They’re there to have fun. It’s a blast.

Anyway, if you’re running barefoot, as your foot approaches the ground, your heel barely misses the ground, and then you land on your midfoot of the ball of your foot. If you get an elevated heel shoe where your heel is now an inch or more off the ground, higher than it should be, the heel of the shoe hits the ground in front of where you would naturally contact the ground. You’re landing on your heel with your foot out in front of your body.

Now, when you’re willing to do the foot out in front of your body, it’s like putting the brakes on every time you land and then you have to reaccelerate. When you put the brakes on, there’s force that goes into your body. Now, here’s where I use my favorite analogy, and I hope people, if they don’t remember this, you’ll be able to envision it and you can look it up. There was a slow motion video, one of the earliest slow-motion videos made, of this big, fat circus guy getting a cannonball to the stomach. Do you ever see it?

Ari: No. You know what? Now that you’re saying that, I do vaguely recall seeing something like that.

Steven: All right. What you see when the cannonball hits him, first you see the ripples of fat rolling out, like rock hitting going into the water. You see him bend around the cannonball. That’s handling the pressure. It spreads out the pressure so it doesn’t kill him, but the force still has to go somewhere. That’s what sends this 350-pound guy flying back into the tarp that catches him. It’s the same thing happens when you have padding in a shoe. You land on your heel, the pressure gets spread out because of the foam. All those sensory apparati that you have in your foot doesn’t feel the pressure because basically the wavelength of the pressure is too broad. It spreads it out too much.

The force still has to go somewhere. The research shows this. It goes into your ankle, then your knee, then your hip, then your back. Whichever is the weakest link of the chain suffers, for most people, typically the knee. That’s part one. The first problem that happens is that you land on your heels putting force in there, so they try to come up with new and different cushioning all the time. Cushioning is not even the right word because it doesn’t cushion. Again, since your brain can’t feel anything, and it’s trying to feel something, what it sometimes does is makes you land harder to get some feedback.

The next thing is your heel is a ball. Your heel bone, your calcaneus, is a ball. Ball is unstable. When you land on that ball, then you’re unstable. Then they try to build in motion control to keep you from pronating. Pronating made up problem. Pronation is a natural part of the spring and shock-absorbing mechanism of your lower leg. Now, hyperpronation, doing it too fast, where you have no control, that’s a different story, but you have no control if your ankles have become weak because you haven’t been using them. More importantly, to deal with pronation, which is when your ankle rolls in, or supination, when your ankle rolls out, they build in motion control.

Here’s the problem with that. Let’s say you weigh 150 pounds, and you’re an average runner. When you hit the ground, you’re hitting the ground with between 400 and 500 pounds of force. As a sprinter, we never land on our heels, but if you did– when I hit the ground, I weigh about 145 right now, I hit the ground with about 900 pounds of force. There’s no foam in the world that can actually attenuate 500 pounds of force at the speed that you’re applying it when you land. It just doesn’t work.

Next. By the time your foot comes down, it’s basically fully extended and flat. Let’s use a weightlifting analogy. If I asked you to curl a little more weight than you can actually curl, you wouldn’t be able to lift it up. It’s just too much, but if I had your arm already bent 90 degrees and I put that weight in your hands, you could hold it there. You’re stronger when the muscles are engaged, when they’re at certain lengths. Same thing with all the muscles in your feet. If they’re all stretched out, it’s like trying to lift that weight that you can’t lift.

If you land on the ball of your foot and if your toes are pulled up a tiny bit, not artificially, just you’re naturally doing it, what happens, regardless of the height of your arch, because arch height is predominantly genetic, it aligns the bones in your feet to be really strong. If you don’t have that alignment because you just landed with your foot flat because it just rolls down when it’s in front of your body, you’re putting too much strain on your plantar fascia and you get plantar fasciitis, or you can. What they shoe companies do, they put arch support in so you don’t have to use your arch at all. Which is better, weaker or stronger?

Ari: Stronger, yes.

Steven: Now, some people say, “Well, but I put orthotics or arch support in my feet and it feels better.” Yes, sitting on a Tempur-Pedic mattress feels good, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Ari: Quick, I don’t want to interrupt your flow here, but I do have a very interesting observation. When I was starting to play tennis, and I was listening to– there’s a guy with a popular YouTube channel who’s a podiatrist, his name is Foot Doctor Zach, he’s got a very big YouTube channel where he reviews tons of athletic shoes, basketball shoes, tennis shoes, and so I was like getting into tennis thinking I needed these maximalist tennis shoes.

Then there was one video I saw where he was talking about orthotics that were really beneficial because they have X, Y, Z amount of arch support and springiness. I put the orthotics in my shoes, and within 20, 30 minutes of playing tennis, the plantar fascia of my feet were cramping up so badly.

Steven: Correct.

Ari: That was after I had already developed the transition to minimalist shoes, so my feet were developed properly, but then the putting the arch support, the orthotic in the shoe, I guess, prevented my feet and my muscles and tendons from functioning properly.

Steven: Kind of. You’re onto it. So close. If I put whatever your body weight is on your back to do back squats, and I asked you to do squats for a minute, you might be able to do it. It would be challenging, but you could do it. If I asked you to do a wall sit, put your back up against the wall, feet out, a little bit, you scoot down, so you have 90-degree angle between your body and your thighs, 90 degrees between your thighs and your shins, and I asked you to stay there for a minute, way harder. That isometric contraction where you’re contracting your muscles without letting them move, way harder than when you have a full range of motion.

When you put in that arch support, you’re basically just doing isometric contractions, and it’s way too stressful. That’s a problem. All the stuff. The thing with orthotics, especially the springy ones– look, [chuckles] I’m on a panel discussion at the American College of Sports Medicine. The other guys on the panel, one’s from Brooks, one’s from, Adidas, and the guy from Brooks says something like, “Look, it’s our job to propel you forward and give you more spring in your step.” I said, “Can I have the microphone for a second?” He gives me the microphone.

I said, “Can I be obnoxious for a few seconds?” He goes, “I said, nothing propels you forward or puts a spring in your step other than your legs. You can’t violate the laws of physics'” and I hand him the microphone. He goes, “Okay, you can’t violate the laws of physics. There’s nothing that gives you more spring back.” There are things that can give you less suck. All foam, all cushioning, all anything sucks energy out of the equation. Again, if you’re the right weight and the right speed with the right material, it can suck less. Let’s go back to the dropping the ball thing. You just don’t need that stuff.

Ari: Right. They’ve reframed something fundamental. If I can explain what you’re getting at in a different way, basically, the materials that are used, everything creates a loss of energy in that system.

Steven: Correct.

Ari: What they’re doing is flipping that frame around so that certain materials relative to other materials create less loss of energy in that system, and they frame it as energy return. They market it in that way, which makes people think that it’s giving them a boost, it’s giving energy back to them, when actually it’s just– all of the materials are actually leading to a loss of energy.

Steven: Correct. There’s a company that makes an insole. The way they like to demonstrate it is they basically fold it in half and let go, and it springs into the air. Your foot never assumes that position. Even if it did, it wouldn’t matter. Here’s the thing. For this whole idea of energy return, if something actually delivered energy return, you could see it in force plate data. You could see it if somebody runs across a force plate that’s showing where force is applied.

When you hit the ground– well, I won’t get into– I’m going to simplify this a little bit from the moment your foot touches the ground, to the moment you are at what’s called mid-stance, when your foot is right underneath your body, the amount of force you’re putting into the ground increases smoothly. It’s like a bell curve. Then as your foot is coming off the ground, it decreases like a bell curve. It’s pretty much even left to right if you cut it down the middle. If there was something that was propelling you forward, it was giving you more spring, it would change the second half of that curve. It would abbreviate it. Nothing that has been shown does that.

Ari: Another way of stating that is that if such a thing were possible, that it would be the big breakthrough that leads to perpetual motion machines.

Steven: No, it’s a little different than that because there is one thing that can do it not by providing more spring per se, but letting your body be springier without cushioning. I can’t get into the details because it’s a project that I’m working on with a guy, where I gave this guy this idea 13 years ago, and about 2 years ago, he called and said, “I’ve got it.” “Okay, swell, show me the force plate data.” He goes, “Here it is.” I went, “Oh my God.” It’s really interesting what’s going to happen when I release this product. I’m willing to bet that within–

Well, what’s going to happen is I’m going to put it on one high-performance athlete. If that person wins a race within a week, this shoe will be banned by the US Olympic Committee, not because it’s performance-enhancing, it is, but because I will have the patent on the application of that and the big companies won’t, and they won’t be able to copy it. This happened back in the, I think it was the ’70s. Late ’70s? Reebok had a thing they called a brush spike that they gave to some sprinters. These two sprinters won a race, and they had a patent on the brush spike, and within a very short time, completely banned.

The argument was that it messed up the track service. The joke is it did the exact opposite. It was safer on a track than any spike that had ever been developed, but the big companies couldn’t do it, so they had to find some completely cock and bull excuse to get it banned.

The key aspects of modern footwear and why they're problematic

Ari: Steven, let’s go back to some of the key aspects of modern footwear and why they’re problematic.

Steven: Look, the gist is really simple. What they’re doing is getting in the way of the natural function of the human body. End of story. Your legs, your muscles, ligaments, and tendons are designed to be springs and shock absorbers and joint protectors. When you get in the way of a natural gait, where you’re landing with your foot, basically close to underneath your body, where you can use all those springs and mechanisms to keep you safe, you’re just putting extra strain and force into the body in ways that it’s not designed to handle.

Now, by the way, some people give me an argument that I love. They go, “Well, we didn’t evolve to run 26 miles on the road.” You have to go to the places where we evolved. Those surfaces are just like hard concrete with a bunch of crap sticking out of them that you wouldn’t want to step on. We didn’t evolve to do full twisting double back flips, but next week I’m going to my gymnastics coach’s 75th birthday party, and I will do one. We didn’t evolve to fly fighter jets, but we can do that. We didn’t evolve to have conversations on these devices, but we can do that. The way we evolved is to be able to handle things, even if they weren’t necessary for our evolution.

It’s the inverse naturalistic fallacy for anyone who’s into cognitive biases. Again, the short version is they just get in the way. There is not one study that has proven a demonstrable value from wearing a modern athletic shoe in particular, or even regular shoes. Now, again, some people say, “Well, so-and-so is running faster than that.” Congratulations. There are still people who aren’t wearing these “super shoes” who are winning races, who are setting personal bests.

Think about it this way. Let’s say you’re one of the top five 800-meter runners in the world, and you show up at a race and there’s somebody wearing a brand new shoe from some other company, and he beats you. What are you going to do tomorrow? You got to wear that shoe. Especially with longer distance races, the amount of– what’s the word I’m looking for? The amount of, oh, come on, not psychosomatic. What’s the word?

Ari: Proprioceptive?

Steven: No, it’s, boy, placebo effect. The amount of placebo effect that can be involved in– Especially distance running is very high. If you believe that this shoe is going to make you run faster, you can interpret signals that you normally get from your body. First of all, you might not get them because if the foam is not telling you, “My feet are killing me,” you’re not getting the signal that you should slow down, otherwise, you’re going to hurt yourself. If you also are just thinking these are going to make me faster, you either override some other signals that you would get.

There’s a guy named Tim Noakes who came up with this idea called the central governor theory. Your brain is designed to try and keep you safe. There are stories of people who lift a car off of a person who got trapped underneath it, and they lift the car up, and then the next day they realize they ripped every muscle in their upper body because the brain turned off the protective mechanism to say, “Whoa, don’t do that.” You might just reinterpret the signals your brain is giving you saying, “Slow down,” that are very subtle or unconscious, and just lets you go a little further. It may be part of the shoe.

There’s a footwear researcher that I know, he and I both think the same thing. If they make you faster, it’s for the following reason. A, following a couple of reasons. They’re often lighter than the shoes you were wearing before so you’re having to spend less energy moving your feet. Because they’re lighter, they’re not slowing down your gait. They’re not slowing down how many steps per minute you take. Because they’re taller, they may give you an extra half an inch or an inch with every stride. Speed is cadence, steps per minute times stride length. Just by being higher and not slowing down your cadence, that can make you faster.

There are limits that the US Olympic Committee is putting on the height of shoes because they know that.

Ari: It’s the same as having longer legs. It’s the Usain Bolt aspect as well.

Steven: I’m going to pat myself on the back. This is why I like when I go to track meets and I’m a 5’5″ on a good day, 60-meter, 100-meter runner. I show up at the line and there’s all these people who are way taller than me. They wonder what the hell I’m doing there. Then I beat all or most of them depending on where the race is. People are like, “What the hell just happened?” I’m a short Jew. That’s not supposed to happen. Which is very entertaining. [chuckles] Which is why I’ve made a lot of friends with people who are like, “Whoa.” It basically, effectively making your legs longer, which can make you better.

Ari: Just a side note, you’re ruining my joke about elite sprinters never being Jewish. I like to joke that it’s due to systematic oppression of Jews. [chuckles] Now I can’t, now knowing that you’re an elite sprinter in your age group, I feel like I can’t make this joke anymore.

Steven: It’s even worse. I used to say that I think I might be the fastest Jew in the world in my age group, but there’s a guy named Allan Tissenbaum. Tissenbaum, I don’t think he’s much taller than me. Maybe, similar, but Tissenbaum is one of the fastest guys in the world, has been forever, just unbelievable. The actual joke is from the movie Airplane, where someone says, “Do you have any light reading? The woman playing the stewardess says, “Here’s this pamphlet, famous Jewish sports legends.”

[chuckling]

Ari: That one. Of course, people forget the early days of baseball, a lot of Jews, early days of boxing, all Jews, doesn’t matter. we’re not over indexed in those places. That’s what I say. Let me do the opposite thing and show you what we did instead to accommodate the problems that modern footwear creates. Ready?

Ari: Can I say one thing very briefly?

Steven: It’s your podcast. You can do whatever you want.

Ari: Oh, it’s awesome. Can I take my pants off? What else can I do? [chuckles]

Steven: Was I supposed to be wearing pants?

Ari: Yes, obviously you didn’t get the memo.

Steven: No.

Ari: You mentioned something earlier in passing that shoes don’t kill you. This idea that they’re harming us, but they’re not killing us. I actually want to push back on that because they are indirectly killing us. It’s just in a very slow, very insidious process that can actually contribute to certain major causes of death and major causes of disability that lead to death in older age groups. Accidents and falls are one of-

Steven: Let me pause.

Ari: What [unintelligible 00:54:34].

Steven: Simply what you’re describing is what killed my dad. There is a direct correlation in elderly people between two things and mortality. One is foot strength. As we’ve described in numerous ways, wearing something that doesn’t let your foot move makes it weaker.

The second, this is going to sound weird, is walking speed. The issue with walking speed is if you’re wearing shoes where you can’t feel the ground and you’re already getting a little weaker, you tend to walk slower to try to avoid falling. Also doctors will prescribe big, thick giant shoes, which make it even worse. Walking speed, and I wish I knew the exact rate under which your risk of dying in five years is dramatically accelerated. What you’re describing is what killed my dad.

My mom would wear my shoes. My father refused. He is one of these guys, big shoes all the time, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, tripped over a tiny little thing, and tripped, fell, broke his hip, and was dead a week and a half later. By the way, when people complain as they have that I say this very cavalierly, A, it was 10 years ago that he died. B, we didn’t really get along. It couldn’t have been more obvious.

We see this all the time. Balance issues, trip and fall issues, it’s an $80 billion insurance problem right now. There’s research that is coming out that has been positive about the effect of walking in shoes like ours. In fact, they used ours in the study and helping with this situation. Research isn’t out yet. There’s still more to be done. Again, this couldn’t be more obvious. All we’re talking about for the last, God knows how long, is use it or lose it. That’s it.

Steven: If you go to places where they’re not wearing footwear like this, you don’t see the same disability in elderly people. If you go to Europe where they have a bigger, a longer history of wearing shoes that are actually made to fit human feet, that actually bend and flex and move. Birkenstock is a 250-year-old company. They’re not perfect, because they’re still, in my opinion, too thick with arch support you don’t necessarily need. Once you break them in, they do allow for more motion, at least. That’s helpful.

You go to Europe and people walk much more. They stay active much longer because it’s enjoyable. Not the way it is for Americans, because they’re not able to use their feet in a way that they find pleasant. It’s a vicious cycle of doing less and less and less means you can’t do anything but less unless you have a very simple program to turn it around that is not problematic, is not painful, is not challenging.

Ari: Doing less and less overall in terms of activity and the actual, the muscles and joints of the feet are doing less and less because we’re essentially putting them in a cast. They get weaker and weaker. I know that foot strength, big toe strength directly is one of the biggest predictors of fall risk. What’s really interesting about this is this whole thing of falls and accidents really doesn’t get the attention that it deserves, and it’s the leading cause of disability in people over the age of 65. People who have a fall and a fracture of a hip, it’s something 30% die within a year, and another 30% are permanently disabled from it.

This is a major thing, but it gets overshadowed by our whole medical paradigm, which tells us that health and disease is a function of stuff that shows up on our blood tests. It’s a function of biochemical issues, and we need to alter our biochemistry. The reason that we’re all indoctrinated with that is, of course, because drugs are what they want to sell to us to solve those biochemical diseases that are killing us. People just don’t realize that this is a major cause of disability and death.

Steven: There’s a little more to it than that, I would contend. That is the reason that the marketing of drugs work is because fundamentally, we think that what we put into our body is the one thing we can control to change it. The reason people get obsessed about food and different diets, and the weird thing that everyone thinks there’s one diet for all people, which, hey, if it works for that guy, it’s going to work for me.

Ari: It’s all meat, right? No vegetables. Vegetables are the thing that are killing us. No, wait, it’s vegan?

Steven: Nothing but air. My favorite thing when I was living in Manhattan, there was a guy who was a very famous breatharian, claimed he lived off the prana from the sun. Then they found a video of him at 3:00 in the morning in a 7-Eleven stealing burritos from the freezer and eating them right there.

Ari: [chuckles] What do you mean? This isn’t air?

Steven: Right, and he was still able to do workshops for six more months. He somehow was able to convince people, “Oh, no,” whatever. Anyway, but we do have this thing that we look to have control in certain ways. The thing that isn’t life too much. I’m going to eat the low-fat thing instead of the full-fat thing, or the other way around. Doesn’t make a difference. Taking pills is like the easiest thing we can control. Again, it comes from somebody in a white suit and blah, blah, blah.

Ironically, one of the easiest things you can control that would make a real difference is what you put on your feet. No one knows that, again, not enough people know that yet, or they’ve been told again the wrong thing. They’ve been told you need more cushioning, more art sport, more whatever, when that’s the exact opposite and all– Dude, I’m in a business – to say that I have no respect for the majority of the people in the business is an insult to the word respect.

I think most of the people who are in this business are as close to evil as you can get because they know that what they’re doing to put money in the pockets of themselves and their shareholders is harming people. Another version of harming people, it’s not happening so much anymore, but way back when, kids in the inner city were getting shot if they were wearing the right certain pair of Air Jordans. The whole idea of what the footwear industry has done to suck money out of the inner city by making footwear like a massive fashion thing and cultural and social and status-oriented thing for people in the inner city, not just black people, of course, is – it’s morally reprehensible.

There’s a movie called Just for Kicks. It was about the co-evolution of footwear culture and hip-hop culture. Totally fascinating. The guy who made it, I talked to him after it came out, and I said, do you still find it just fascinating? He’s like, no, because I just realized how much money they’re sucking out of the inner city and it’s going into the pockets of these, frankly, rich white guys. Again, I find it – I don’t like when people lie to their customers to make money, and that’s what this industry is 99.9% of the time. again, we’re trying to change that. People ask me what my goal is with this company, and I go, just to change the world. Nothing more, nothing less.

I know it sounds hyperbolic and glib but it doesn’t mean that our company becomes the biggest footwear brand in the world. It means that at some point, what we’re doing is an obvious and acceptable choice, and at some point, maybe the predominant choice because people recognize the value. My only hope is that I live to see that happen. That would be really fun, and it’s appropriate because, again, just like your story from the very beginning, we hear it all the time of people who say, “I’m now able to do something that I either never was able to do or haven’t been able to do for years that I thought I’d never be able to do, and now I can.”

A friend of mine, let’s just say not in the best shape of anyone you’ve ever met, which is an understatement, used to go to a particular amusement park. I won’t mention it by name, just to try to protect the innocent, but he would go for a week because he’d only go for a couple of hours a day before his back and other parts of his body were killing him. Because he knows me, he decided to switch to our shoes, and now he goes for a couple of days because he can do 10 hours a day without a problem.

We’re not a medical device. We’re a coach that tells you how to use your body better in a way that’s more optimal because you’re getting the feedback that you need. Now, in fact, to a point you made earlier, I wish I’d thought of this then, switching to a shoe that’s lets your toe spread, wide toe box, flat, zero drop is certainly a fine step, but the thing that makes you change your gait to something ultimately more natural is the feedback from the ground, that initial annoyance and pain you were getting. I could have coached you through that very easily. It would have been, ‘Do less, you bonehead. Go out for 10 minutes, and when that feels comfortable, add two minutes. When that feels comfortable, add three minutes.”

Ari: Yes, I would go out right from when I got them, just two, three hours, long walks or runs on hard cement, and it was just too much for my feet, for my bones.

Steven: You weren’t ready for it. Again, when you get your arm out of a cast, you don’t immediately go back. If you haven’t been to the gym for a year, you don’t go back to the gym and do the same workout you did a year ago. You do an embarrassingly small number of reps in an embarrassingly small number of sets with an embarrassingly small amount of weight, and then you build it up slowly based on your body saying, “Oh, that feels good. I can do a little more. If you get too sore where you have to lower yourself onto the toilet after leg day, then to pull back a little bit and go back, and it’s a bit of a sawtooth pattern up and down. Yes. That’s the advice. Think of it that way.

Ari: One of the biggest problems with modern humans as it relates to health and longevity is we have been raised in a culture with hedonic eating. Hedonic eating is, as opposed to homeostatic eating, which is eating in accordance with what your body needs, hedonic eating is eating for pleasure. We have come to relate to food predominantly not to nourish our bodies, not because we’re hungry, but to give ourselves pleasure and entertainment.

There’s a similar thing going on with shoes. Shoes have become about aesthetics and how they look and fashion, and we are detached from how footwear affects the function of our bodies, and actually our health and longevity indirectly. I think people need to really connect those dots and understand that your choice of what you put on your feet is not purely a function of how it looks, and high heels are a great example of that as well. I think people need to understand the element– I think one thing I’d like you to speak to is how modern footwear is actually disfiguring our people’s feet, and from a functional perspective, but also the actual physical anatomy of the feet.

Steven: That was really simple. Again, back to the pointy toe box on a shoe like this, or if you are wearing a higher-heeled shoe, the simplest thing is you squeeze your toes together over time, that turns into a bunion. That’s the easy thing. You squeeze your toes from the other side, but I think it was Shaq had his little toe amputated because it was just getting in the way.

Ari: Really?

Steven: Because the shoes he was wearing were too narrow for his foot. Again, this is not complicated. You put your body in some compromised position, and you can literally change the shape of the bones and the function of the musculature. That’s a real simple one.

I’m going to push back on the whole idea of eating for homeostasis. I think that fundamentally we all evolved to get pleasure from things that, at the time,e were beneficial for our survival, but they were also rare. If you watch certain Indigenous tribes, if they find a beehive in a tree, they will drink quarts of honey because, and the way I say it is, sugar doesn’t taste good.

We evolved to like the taste of sugar because it gives us something we need, AKA calories. Now it’s just that stuff is so abundant, we have the option of just hitting those same receptors like, oh my God, this must be good. Those receptors don’t know, yes, you don’t need any more of that. We never had to evolve, A, you don’t need any more of that because we rarely had enough of it to begin with.

In the same way that people are– [chuckles] I was taking a walk with a friend of mine and she said, “I’m just trying to listen to my body so I know what to eat.” I literally fell on the ground laughing. I said, “I can tell you what your body wants to eat, French fries, chocolate cake, ice cream. It wants calories. That’s it. You have this idea that you could listen to your body. I don’t even know what that means, in a way that would make you eat certain foods that you would then enjoy enough that would then change the shape of your body in such a way that when you looked in the mirror, you’d be happy.

All I can tell you is every part of that little collection of sentences is complete nonsense. You won’t go ask everyone on the planet if they look in the mirror, if they find anything that they don’t like, and everybody will tell you at least one, usually 10 things that they don’t like. We evolved to be exquisitely attentive to things going wrong inside of this thing.

We evolved to eat a berry and be able to tell as quickly as possible, did that do something good or something bad? We did not evolve to be able to look into a glass of water and see bacteria.

We had to learn to drink something, and if we started vomiting, going, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do that again.” Now, we don’t have any of that stuff on a regular basis. We just have things that trigger, well, we have what, back to the processed food things, what food companies have done is learn to have, to create food that’s just bland enough that it doesn’t overwhelm you, but triggering enough to make you want more.

The number of things that I sometimes have, I’m going to throw these guys under the bus. There’s a company that makes these little, I think they call them protein pretzels. They’re like little giant Cheerios, but they’re pretzels, and they’re a huge amount of protein for what you eat. They have just enough flavor that you just keep eating them and eating them and eating them.

They’re not bad for you because it’s predominantly fine ingredients. Either way, man, I’m eating way more than I actually intended to. I want to eat 10, I eat 30, because they just have just enough stimulation, but without enough to trigger things going bad. Related to this, just for the fun of it, do you know Stephan Guyenet?

Ari: Yes, I’ve had him on the podcast a couple of times.

Steven: I adore his work, which is just what you said. It’s like one of the points he makes is, there’s two that I love. One is that eating for pleasure, getting that additional stimulation, causes us to overeat because we are getting the additional stimulation. There’s always room for dessert because it’s a novel flavor.

The other was, he turned me on to this research that actually turning calories into energy or fat is a learned behavior. This blows my brain, and tell me if you understand it differently than I do. What they did with mice, they had one group of mice eat the very flavorful rat chow, and the other group of mice, they didn’t get to eat it got pumped right into their stomachs.

The ones who got pumped into their stomachs lost weight, and the other ones gained weight because they never got the signal to process this food in a way that is going to turn into energy or turn into storage, turn it into fat. That is mind-blowing. Now, I’m not going to suggest we put a feeding tube in and just shove everything, a Big Mac down a feeding tube, but man, that makes you really think about who’s in charge of this physiology that we walk around with.

Ari: I don’t want to digress too much. I’m not sure what study you’re referring to, but I think that the key thing about that is that they’re bypassing essentially the taste aspect and the brain’s response to taste. You’re bypassing the relationship of the reward centers of the brain and the dopamine circuitry in relationship to the actual taste and flavors. You’re going to end up more purely, having an amount of food that more purely triggers satiety mechanisms appropriately, such that the rat is not–

What happens when you give them overly rewarding food, and this relates to our overly palatable food, that this is something Stephan Guyenet actually turned me on to in 2013, ’14 and had a big influence on my thinking and led what was one of the big influences behind my book Forever Fat Loss at that time.

The food reward hypothesis of obesity basically says that these hyper-palatable processed foods rich in sugar, usually a combination of sugar, fat, and oftentimes refined starches, and then sometimes salt and crunchiness are factors as well, essentially overrides our satiety mechanisms. We start to go, wow, this is so good, this is so tasty, this is so pleasurable. I want more and more and more. That’s that hedonic eating that I was making reference to before.

Steven: I wonder how much of that is that we’re also just bypassing that initial processing of carbohydrates in the mouth or even the signal that we’re getting. It’s like there’s something related to cyclists where they have them either drink an energy drink or just put it in their mouth, swish it around and spit it out, and they both have the same improvement.

Ari: There’s an interesting effect there.

Steven: There are various signals to the brain. There could be a signal to the brain that tells your gut, “Oh, get ready, food is coming.” If it doesn’t get that signal, it just isn’t prepared to process things the same way. I haven’t taken a deep dive in that for quite a while. Again, to the point that we were making, it’s actually exactly analogous now to the heck of it. When you’re wearing a big, thick, padded motion control shoe, you’re not getting the signals to your body about what you should be doing that’s optimal to your body.

Same idea.

When you’re wearing something like one of ours, and here, I’ll do the world’s fastest show and tell, wider foot-shaped toe box. You’re not squeezing your toes together. They can spread and splay. Low to the ground for balance and agility. No heel lift to mess with your posture. No toe spring to artificially bring your toes up, which means the toe spring means the shoe can’t get flat to the ground, which you need to be able to do. Super, super flexible so your foot can bend and move however it needs to. Obviously, if it bends like this, you’ve been in a horrible accident, you should get to the hospital. To be able to bend at all is important.

We make the soles designed so they’re giving you traction and protection, but also that ground feeling that your brain needs to help you move. Every one of our shoes, you can either keep in the removable insole or sock liner if you want a little extra protection, take it out if you want an extra barefoot feeling. The other thing compared to normal shoes is our stuff is so much lighter weight because we’re using less stuff. We’ve literally had people go to bed still wearing our shoes because they said they forgot they had them on. Last but not least, we make them to last. We have a rubber that we developed that we call FeelTrue rubber, that we back up with a 5,000-mile sole warranty.

A shoe like this one, a normal running shoe, they say you need to replace it every 300 to 500 miles. The reality is they start to degrade after about 150, and the new super shoes even faster. We made these things just to last longer. Even if you could go to Walmart and buy a $20 shoe, if this one is $80, I’m sure that this will last more than four times longer than the $20 version. It’s just a better deal in addition to being better for you. Again, what’s happened in the 15 years that we’ve been doing this is people would say, “Oh my God, I love what you’ve given me, but now I also need one of these.” We started out with a do-it-yourself sandal-making kit. People would say, “But I don’t want to make my own.”

I figured out a way to make a ready-to-wear version of that same idea. They’d say, “What do I do when I have to go to work or when it’s cold?” We made our first closed-toe shoe. “What about if I’m running in a track meet?” Then we made a running shoe. It just kept evolving from there until we have 60-plus styles of casual and performance shoes, boots, and sandals, I’d say, for everything you do, but we’re not there yet. That’s our goal is to have something for everything that you would need to do, where you can get all those benefits of using your body naturally.

Ari: I’m pretty amazed actually at the quality of these shoes. They just hold up so darn well. The other thing I’ve noticed with some other brands on the soles is oftentimes they’re falling apart on the seams. They wear out, the rubber wears out really fast, and everything on these is just pristine quality. I’m pretty blown away in the sandals too.

Steven: A, thank you. B, we’re always trying to make things better. C, we can’t violate the laws of physics. If you’re starting and stopping your car like Fred Flintstone, rubber’s going to wear out. We had a guy, [chuckles] a couple of times this has happened where someone emailed me and said, “The rubber on your shoes is worn out.” I said, “Show me.” They’ve shown me a big hole in the heel. I go, “Oh, you’re overstriding and landing on your heel, your heel striking.” The person would say, “I don’t do that.” I go, “Send me a video.” I get the video and I show them on the video frame by frame. Here, you’re landing with your foot way out in front of your body.”

Here’s the way to know if you’re overstriding. If when your foot hits the ground, if your ankle is forward of your knee, you’re overstriding. If it’s basically underneath your knee, then you’re not. He shows me this video, and I like drawing lines on the screen. I’m just like, “Here you are, you’re overstriding.” I swear his next line was, “Yes, but I don’t do that.” “This is a video of you. You sent me the video. It’s you.”

I’ve heard that a couple of times. Look, we’re not perfect for everyone. Manufacturing is never perfect, which is why we have a 24-month manufacturer’s warranty. We stand behind our stuff, but one day there’s somebody on the line who just drank a little too much last night and didn’t apply enough glue or didn’t keep it in the oven long enough. We do the best we can knowing that nothing is perfect.

Ari: Last thing that I want to ask you about is I think just to help people– Actually, maybe before I get there, we’ve touched briefly on big toe strength, foot strength. I know that some people, as they become aware of this research, certain researchers or foot health experts have invented foot strengthening, foot exercise programs. I believe there’s some research that has actually compared that to just wearing minimalist shoes.

Steven: Correct. What we’ll do, I will give you a link to a place where people can download something that shows the exercise program and talks about that research. The original research, someone might’ve done it before, but the first one that I knew about was done by a woman named Dr. Sarah Ridge when she was at BYU. The gist is just by walking in a minimalist shoe for eight weeks, built foot strength as much as the exercise program people were doing every day over that same eight weeks in every muscle, but one in the foot, but predominantly, almost the exact same benefits.

Again, there’s research from Dr. Isabel Sacco in Brazil showing that exercise program, if you were a runner and you did that exercise program for eight weeks, no matter what shoe you were running in, it didn’t matter. Your injury risk was reduced by 250% over the course of a year compared to people who didn’t do that exercise program. The strengthening studies have been replicated a number of times, and it shouldn’t be surprising because, again, use it or lose it. It just so happens that– By the way, I don’t know where it gets the point of diminishing returns. You can keep getting stronger for quite a long time.

Ari: I spent a lot of time just doing walking and hiking in minimalist shoes, and then playing tennis in them is a whole other level of foot and ankle strength.

Steven: Rucking. This is a conversation. I haven’t had this one with Peter Attia. Peter has happily name-checked me a number of times. He posted some stuff on Instagram way back when wearing our shoes, and I called him and went, “What the hell?” We’ve chatted quite a few times. He has commented that when he’s rucking, when he’s got a big pack on his back, he has to wear a more supportive shoe. I would contend that he doesn’t have to, but he just hasn’t built up that foot and ankle strength yet. Because I put a 40-pound pack on me, and again, I only weigh 145 pounds, and my feet feel fine at the end of an hour of doing stuff in that. Not a problem. I’ve been doing this for 17 years now.

Ari: I’ve only gotten to the point where I can sustain tennis in these shoes for probably half an hour.

Steven: Again, it’ll build up.

Xero Shoes

Ari: Steven, are there any final words you want to leave people with, just on the importance of minimalist footwear or the problems with how people have been sold on this lie of arch support and heel cushioning and elevated heels and toe springs and all these things that they’ve been indoctrinated to believe are good for their feet for so many decades? Anything you want to just leave them with? What if people are just still convinced, no, the formula really is better than breast milk?

Steven: [chuckles] I’m going to do it this way. I’m going to assume a character right now and pretend that I have a particular prop in my hand that’s different than the one I actually have. I’m actually holding a pen. Let’s pretend it’s something else. It’ll be obvious what that something else is. “Oh, Sashen, you’re telling me that big companies do things that knowingly hurt their customers just to make money? That’s absurd.”

Ari: [chuckles] There you go. That’s a good way to finish it. Steven, this is an absolute pleasure. How can people get Xero Shoes? Where do you want to send them?

Steven: We’re findable everywhere. Obviously, the social media stuff, wherever you @ or / Xero Shoes. Most importantly, Ari, you going to post a link where people can go where they can find stuff, whether it’s .com, .eu, et cetera, et cetera, because we have a couple of different websites depending on where you live. Just click there. Find what you like.

We have a little shoe finder quiz that’ll help you pick the thing that might be right for you or give you some suggestions.

We have a brilliant and very, very experienced and helpful customer happiness team. You can contact them. They will give you some info as well. They’ve been doing this a long time, and they’re really happy to help you find what’s right for you. Again, keep in mind, it’s a transition, not just a switch, and you’re done. Most importantly, we just want you to be able to put something on your feet to let you just go out and have fun and live life feet first.

Ari: One quick thing, do they get a discount? Does my audience get any discount here?

Steven: We actually don’t do initial discounting typically. Actually, I don’t know, because we’ve been testing some things. We haven’t done initial discounting, frankly, because we already cost less than most of our competitors compared to the inexpensive shoes that don’t last as long. We’re a better deal than those as well. I know we’re testing a few things, so I don’t know what’s currently happening.

We typically do discounting things when we launch new products in the spring, when we launch things in the fall, and of course, somewhere around Black Friday, which I think now starts somewhere in July. We know that people really appreciate the value that we’re providing with something that lasts long and gives them these benefits.

Ari: Wonderful. I’ll have a link in the YouTube description for people who want to use that and get their Xero Shoes. Steven, are there any particular models of shoes that would be good for people who have been decades-long in maximalist shoes with arch support and cushioning and all that stuff, or are they all pretty similar?

Steven: All our stuff has the same basic DNA. The differences you’ll find, it’s like when we have our trail shoes and our hiking shoes, they have a luggier sole that’s a little thicker, a little bit of extra protection if necessary. Some of our court shoes, we have a basketball shoe that’s coming out the very end of March, and that one’s got a little more in it because of what you need when you’re playing basketball or tennis or pickleball or whatever you otherwise do on something.

Ari: Will that one work for tennis as well?

Steven: It will.

Ari: Nice. Is it an evolution of the 360 of this guy or a different shoe?

Steven: No, the 360 is a great shoe. It’s something that we made explicitly for basketball, but it actually just has all that value everywhere else. It’s heavier than what the 360 is. It’s just built up a little more because of what we need for when guys who weigh 280 pounds are scooting down the court back and forth for an hour.

We haven’t had it out yet, so I don’t know how people would compare the two, but it’s definitely designed to give you more lateral support, a little bit of extra something where if you don’t know how you’re going to land on the ground, which basketball players don’t when they’re coming down from a rebound, for example. I don’t have a good answer because we don’t have it out in the wild enough for people to have their opinions about that.

Ari: Got it. Last thing, do you have any quick recommendations for people who have been in maximalist shoes with all the cushioning and all the arch support and all this stuff for many, many years or decades, just to start to– How should they ease into this transition?

Steven: It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re just mostly sitting down working all day and you’re walking back and forth to the bathroom and the kitchen, then you’re probably fine. If you’re standing on your feet all day, if that’s your job to like standing, then maybe try 20 minutes or whatever feels right and see how you feel the next day. If it feels like you did a little too much too soon, like muscularly sore, but not problematic, back it off a little bit and then build up slowly.

If you’re a runner, A, like I said before, you can start wearing your regular shoes and just wear these when you’re not running to build up, strengthen, and have some active recovery. Then, when you’re ready to start running, start like really small, 20 seconds. I know that sounds crazy, and see how it feels the next day. If that feels good, then add 10 seconds. If it feels like muscular sore, wait until you can try it again and do 20 seconds.

If it feels like you did something worse, even if you’re muscularly sore, the biggest thing to think about when you’re running is while you will build strength, while your body will adapt, the most likely thing you need to do is less, is relax more and use less effort. You want to maybe pick up your cadence a tiny bit, so you’re moving your legs faster but not running faster. You want to think about getting your feet more underneath you. Again, your ankle behind your knee or under your knee instead of in front of your knee.

Another thing to think about is lifting your foot off the ground by flexing your hip instead of pushing your foot off the ground with your foot. That’s another cue that’s very helpful. Other cues are things like, imagine lifting your foot off the ground before it even hits the ground. You’re ready to lift it off the ground, so your foot is touching the ground, not landing on the ground, is an image I like to use.

Think about Fred Flintstone starting his car. Your feet are always a little behind you in that image. That’s not actually possible, but it’s a good thing to get. We’ve got stuff on our website about, oh, if you’re just doing a lot of walking, same idea. It’s actually like running. You want to not land with your foot too far out in front of you.

There’s a video on our website. If you go to the website in the learn more section about natural walking, there’s a whole thing that I did about how to walk in a way that takes less effort. It’s not as fast, I will confess, but it’s better for you. We’re going to be making a similar thing for running at some point, but there are other people who’ve done that as well.

The gist is, the biggest thing is just when I go to events with a bunch of physical therapists and researchers, they’re all in agreement now. The number one cause of injuries and problems is overstriding, landing with your foot too far in front of your body, landing on your heel.

You don’t want to land with your foot in front of you and point your toes. That’s a stress fracture in the making. It’s, don’t over stride is again, ankle underneath your knee. When you do that, it’s almost impossible to do anything other than land on the ball of your foot, which is ideal.

Ari: Last question, Steven. Do podiatrists hate you?

Steven: Some do, some don’t. The ones who hate me the most are the ones who make a lot of money selling orthotics to their patients.

Ari: Steven, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Steven: My pleasure. Thanks, Ari.

Show Notes

00:00 Intro
00:32 – Guest intro: Steven Sashen
09:26 – Ari’s first experience with barefoot shoes
22:02 – Minimalist shoes vs. foam padding
31:04 – The problem with the wrong footwear
33:37 – The potential flaws in scientific recommendations
41:07 – Misleading marketing from big brand shoe companies?
56:03 – The key aspects of modern footwear and why they’re problematic
1:28:44 – Xero Shoes

From Heel Strike to Health: Minimalist Footwear Will Change Your Life with Steven Sashen

Links

Table of Contents

Transcript

Ari’s first experience with barefoot shoes

Minimalist shoes vs. foam padding

The problem with the wrong footwear

The potential flaws in scientific recommendations

Misleading marketing from big brand shoe companies?

The key aspects of modern footwear and why they're problematic

Xero Shoes

Show Notes

Recommended Podcasts

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Melinda Dianna

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