33: Why Mark Sisson Stopped Running! The Truth Behind Footwear and Health.

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And we have completely screwed it up with footwear. It's abysmal what the industry has done with shoes and hasn't recognized how important foot health is to overall health. When I was a sprinter 20 years ago, you know, obviously, you know, sprint is forefoot, you know, kind of work. You don't land on your heel. But when we would go for a jog, for a run, I would heel strike. And my coach always said, stop doing that, you know, run on your forefoot. Weak feet and how modern shoes have...

rendered everybody's foot a basically a useless appendage. I mean, it's horrific. It is your feet that should inform your brain how to direct the foot to bend, the knee to bend, the hip to torque, all the muscles to absorb the shock. When you remove that sensory input of ground contact with the bottom of the foot and the brain now has no idea of which way the knee should bend, I'm pretty fit now. I weigh 171. I weigh 30 pounds more now.

than when I was a marathon runner. And I was a big marathoner. I should have weighed 131, not 141. And I lifted weights. I just couldn't keep any weight on. You're listening to the Primal Shift podcast. I'm your host Michael Kummer and my goal is to help you achieve optimal health by bridging the gap between ancestral living and the demands of modern society. Get ready to unlock the transformative power of nature as the ultimate biohack.

revolutionizing your health and reconnecting you with your primal self. Stop running if you want to improve your health and fitness. That's what I said a couple of episodes ago and I got a huge blowback from the running community on how humans are supposed to run and we are natural born runners, et cetera. So for this episode, I'm super thrilled that Mark Sisson joined me. Mark Sisson is one of the most influential food bloggers and health and wellness.

authors and influencers that I've been following for a long time and Mark used to be a distance runner, a triathlete and an Ironman competitor. So he knows a lot about endurance running. And in this episode is going to share with me how doing so has actually ruined his health and what his take is on what humans are supposed to do to improve their health and fitness. And spoiler alert, it's still not running. So we're going to talk about what are the best.

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types of exercises for to improve health and well -being and how foot health can really influence everything else in our body and why the right type of footwear is so crucial regardless of if you're a runner or just someone who appreciates having feet to get them from A to B. So join me in this episode and welcome Mark Sisson. All right, Mark, I'm super excited to have you on the show. I look at your face every single day because that's our kids.

eat a lot of your ketchup and mayo. I see the face every single day and I'm excited that I finally get to talk to you about two important topics. I think one is more exercise related and how we can, you know, leverage exercise, certain types of exercise to stay healthier and what are certain types of exercises we might not, we shouldn't maybe be doing every single day and then leading into foot health.

Right. Especially if you're a runner or if you're a lot on your feet, you know, that type of shoes that you wear, if you wear shoes, you know, are important for our posture health and, you know, and many things that we'll talk about in this episode. But maybe let's start out with your take on whether or not humans are supposed to be or are endurance athletes and are supposed to be running every single day, jogging, you know, doing marathons and ultra marathons and all of those things. Because I think that you've done some of that in your past, right? A lot.

Too much. Yeah, right. And so I'd like to hear your take on what makes us runners or sprinters or, and should we be doing either war or, you know, what's the deal? Yeah, well, my take on it is, it's quite nuanced because I was an endurance athlete. I was a marathon runner for years and years, and then I did triathlons. So I'm guilty, if you will, of spending that amount of time in trying to achieve greater human performance by training every single day, by running every single day. You know, in the early days of the fitness boom,

Ken Cooper wrote a book in 1968, All the Robics, in which he posited that perhaps the more cardio respiratory activity you did, the better it was for your heart. And I think a lot of people bought into that. I was one of them. It made sense, kind of. You trained a lot and your heart muscle got stronger and it beat more efficiently and effectively. Maybe that would prolong your life on the back end of your life. And so a whole generation bought into this idea of, I mean, that's how the running boom came about. It was kind of a perfect storm of, of -

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That book, aerobics, then it was Frank Shorter in 1972 winning the Olympic gold medal in the marathon in Munich. Then it was Jim Fixx's book. And the next thing you know, everybody is pushing this concept of running. And at the extreme, pushing the concept of marathon being sort of the ultimate bucket list achievement. In 2010 or 2011, Chris McDougall wrote a book called Born to Run. And he suggested that we were born to run, that our genes...

want us to run on a regular basis, that we are set up with various evolutionary adaptations. Daniel Lieberman talks about the nuchal ligament behind the neck that allows us to maintain an upright head while we're bounding along chasing animals in a persistence hunt. Right. A lot of anthropologists would say that the evidence of persistence hunting, this notion that early proto -comitants would chase after ...

wild beasts and outrun them and basically out maneuver, out run, out strategize. They would track them. They would spread a little bit. They would hide behind a tree. They would, and they would eventually tire the animal out because we also developed sweat glands that allow us to cool off more in the heat and particularly if we're undergoing hours of strenuous activity and exercise. So a lot of this really sort of would lead an anthropologist or a scientist to maybe suggest that we were born to run, that we are obligate runners. Right.

So the book came out and it was all in defense of Chris McDougall. It wasn't that we were born to run. It was we were born to run a certain way. We were born to run on with a gait that was that of a mid -foot or four -foot landing, a very light tap on the heel and running that way. Which makes sense because if you run barefoot, you're not going to heel strike for very long. No, it's like if you tried to jump off a one -foot box and land on your heels, it would hurt. So anyway, so.

The running movement, and I'm leading into this because I'm writing a book called Born to Walk, and it's going to trash the running movement. So you can see where I'm going with this. And it basically, in the book, we point out the fact that humans are, we are born to walk. We are bipedal. We walk. Everything we did through millions of years of evolution was primarily walking.

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walking and sprinting. So you either walk to get to one place to the other or to, you know, to carry stuff to the camp or, or you sprinted away from danger or away from or towards maybe something that you wanted to eat. But this idea that a human...

would want to engage in running five, six, seven, eight miles a day at a metronomic pace is absolutely idiotic. It was antithetical to our evolutionary imperative, which is to conserve energy. Like humans, all animals are designed to conserve energy. We're designed to store excess calories as fat, energy. We're designed to not even burn that fat unless we absolutely need to in certain contexts. So the idea that humans in our past ran...

frequently, I think is completely misplaced. I think humans ran when they had to, which meant every couple of days, once a week, the men of the tribe would go out and they would hunt an animal and they would persist in some, they would jog a little bit, stop, spread a little bit, jog a little bit, and it might take a couple of hours, but it wasn't metronomic running. And most importantly, they didn't train for it. Their life trained them for it. So walking every day, lifting stuff every day, moving their bodies in planes and ranges of motion.

trained them every single day so that when they chose to go on the hunt, they were able to do that. It's almost like saying, I'd like to run a 10K once every six months, but I'm not going to train, run. I'm just going to enter the 10K and I'm going to rely on the fact that everything else I do in my life, all the walking, all the cycling, all the lifting, all of the sprinting, will add up to my being able to not win the 10K, but certainly survive it and have a good time doing that. So I think we were not...

born to run, we were born to walk, and the fact that we can run is nice, but now you come down to like, okay, well, what about these elite marathoners? They're so light and they're so bouncy and it looks so normal and natural for them. Well, it's probably 0 .1 % of the population. If we're generous, maybe 1 % of the population, one out of a hundred people as the genetic constitution, which includes the aerobic capacity, the VO2 max, which is a genetically endowed -

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concept, the body type, an ectomorph with very long legs and very slight so they don't weigh very much. Those people are probably okay training for and competing in marathons. But the rest of humanity who's 10 pounds overweight or 50 pounds overweight, thinking that by engaging in a running program, you would somehow extend your life, lose weight, improve your health, improve your mental wellbeing, it's a fallacy. It's just wrong. Almost everybody would be better served walking.

walking long distances, walking for a length of time, an hour, hour and a half. You know, it's funny if you do the math and you go, okay, but Mark, running is so much more vigorous and it seems to give you so much more benefit for the amount of time spent doing it. Well, I don't know many people who can run twice as fast as they can walk. So if the best you can do is only run twice as fast as you can walk, let's say you can walk a 13 minute mile for an hour, which is working. Most people can't run a 630 mile.

They can't run 630. So you can't even run twice as fast as you can walk. Meanwhile, every time you run, you are courting injury. 50 % of runners get injured every year. At any point in time, 25 % of all runners are injured. Like how is that even considered a health benefit if you're injured in the pursuit of health most of the time? Plus, I think for the average, Joe, especially if you're already overweight, going for a run,

takes mental effort to make the decision, oh, I'm gonna do it again. And for most people, they won't do that for very long, but I can go for a walk every single day and feel good about it. And moving my 250 pounds across the trail and coming back burns exactly the same amount of calories. If I go for a run, yes, I'm quicker, I'm faster, maybe not twice as fast, but a little faster at least. I risk my Achilles at some point giving out because it's not very well supplied with blood. And once that thing hurts,

It might take a while to stop hurting, or if you're injured, it might take a while to recover. It's a mental effort. You're doing it. I'm not saying that you should always take out the easy route, but if you really want to improve your health, it's about consistency, right? Do it every single day. I can walk every single day. I probably wouldn't want to run every single day 5K. And even if you wanted to run every day, you couldn't, unless you're one of those 1%, or 1%, it's not good for you to do that. Now, you can do it, and you can force yourself to do it, but then if you're somebody who is beating yourself up,

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in a way that says, I'm going to do it because it hurts and it must be good for me. And, you know, it's part of my psyche. I'll feel better about myself when it's over. And so there's a whole aspect, the mental health aspect of running should be examined pretty closely. And again, I don't want to, I don't want to trash too much because a lot of my friends run and I don't run anymore. And I haven't run a mile in 25 years. Now I ran a lot of miles a week for seven years and the height of my career, I was one of the top marathoners in the country. When I sort of hung up my spikes, I said, I don't,

One, like my whole life was built about managing the discomfort of running relatively hard every day. Right. So when I said, I'm not going to run anymore, I didn't say I'm not going to spread. I didn't say I'm not going to play games that involve running. I didn't say I'm not going to find myself on a nice hike in a mountain meadow and break into a half mile jog and just breathe it in. I just said, I'm not going to put on the shoes, lace up the shoes, go outside on the pavement and run four miles just for the sake of running four miles.

because so much more can be accomplished by walking. And people might say, well, wait a minute, Mark, I mean, what about your heart rate and all that? I walk with a 20 -pound weight vest sometimes. I do rucking with a backpack on. I walk up steep hills. So much more can be accomplished by walking and avoiding injury. Running is catabolic, and it breaks you down. Over time, you say, well, so how is running catabolic? Well, you look at every top runner. Even if they lift weights in the gym, they can't put on any upper body mass.

I'm pretty fit now. I weigh 171. I weigh 30 pounds more now than when I was a marathon runner. Right. And I was a big marathoner. I should have weighed 131, not 141. And I lifted weights. I just couldn't keep any weight on because it was so catabolic. It tears the body up so much. Now, again, if you're an elite athlete, you don't want to weigh very much. You don't want to carry upper body mass. You look at these guys setting world records in the marathon now.

and they're like five, seven, 105 pounds, quite literally. So running is catabolic, walking is anabolic. When you are catabolic, you're breaking stuff down all the time. Now, if you eat well and you're an average US runner, you build back the glycogen reserves, you know, you carboload every single day to go out and do it again the next day, but the event itself is catabolic. Walking is anabolic. So walking tends to build...

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or preserve lean mass. It's not building in and of itself, but it's creating the hormonal input that will accentuate what you're doing in the gym, for instance. So there's no reason to be thinking that running is a good choice as either a weight loss program or a muscle building program or even a general cardio program. Look, Michael, everything you do in the gym, everything you do in life is cardio.

It's just a question of how hard you're doing it. You know, if you're doing sprints, if you're doing a salt bike, if you're doing VersaClimber, if you're doing sprints on a bike or whatever, those are high heart rate. Those are as cardio as some metronomic zone three, zone four workout you might do, right? And there's no lesser benefit from that sort of cardiac output. Right. If I go to the sauna, you know, and crank up the heat, you know, my heart rate is at a comparable level.

where it would be when I go for a light jog, you know, and I get all the benefits of sauna bathing, plus the cardio workout. You read a book or listen to music. Exactly. And isn't it also that females are generally the better endurance athletes? It seems that the longer the distance is, the better women tend to be relative to the men. In other words, the discrepancy between the world record for men and world record for women is a much higher percentage in the sprints and the middle distances. And as you get up into further into the distances, you'll see that, I mean,

Most recently, a woman ran 2 .11 in the shoes, in the spring shoes, and the men's is two hours and 37 seconds or whatever it is right now. As you get into ultra running in the 100 mile races, there are some women who are actually winning ultra races when they're competing directly against men. Now, what does that look like? Well, the longer the distance is, and again, not to demean people who do ultra races, I have a lot of friends that do it, I would have done it myself, I would have been good at, but the longer the distance is,

The less intense the activity becomes. You have to meter out, meet out the energy output over a day, 24 hours sometimes. And that's where I think women with their, who knows, maybe their superior mental fortitude in combination with their body fat stores. They have more body fat. And this really low level endurance activity that is ultra running, the longer you go and the more time you allocate to it, the higher percentage of energy comes from fat and less from -

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depleted glycogen stores and having to rely on glycogen, having to rely on sugar and stuff like that. But it's an interesting observation that it's great to see that there's an athletic pursuit that women are as good or better at. Right. But I would also indicate, because we say, well, men used to be the hunters, and then the endurance athletes. Well, it looks like if it comes to ultra endurance, that doesn't add up either. There was no rationale for that. Right. Yeah.

All right. Now we've established, okay, running might not be the best thing you can do if you want to improve your health span, your longevity and really your overall fitness and also mental health. There are better things you can do. You mentioned sprinting. What's your take on biking, rowing, you know, those kinds of things that are also quite endurance disciplines, but not quite as tense on the body as running. Absolutely. And I think we mentioned briefly the heel strike nature of running. That's one of the things, if we go back to the running boom and how it got...

way out of hand was the thick shoes are what encouraged, not just enabled, but encouraged anyone who wanted to put on shoes to go out and run with a poor gait, with a poor stride. So the overwhelming majority of three and a half to five hour marathoners are heel strikers. Clop, clop, clop, clop. But they depend on a thick heel to cushion the blow of that heel strike versus the front of the pack runners, the elite runners, who are landing lightly on their feet and...

largely on the front part of their feet, just a tiny heel tap because the Achilles is loaded the whole time and the Achilles is really allows this forceful forward motion and propulsion that creates a longer stride. If the turnover is high enough, that's how you get a world record. Right. So the clomp, clomp, clomping of the masses in marathons or 10Ks has been somehow fostered by the shoe industry, which obviously wants to sell a lot of shoes.

And the more thick and the more cushion and the more, you know, forefoot stabilizer, rear foot motion control, all these little bells and whistles they can talk about in their marketing and add on, makes it seem like it's better for you and that you could run with ease and grace and without getting injured. The irony is in the history of the modern running shoe, the number of injuries has not decreased by one percentage point. So it's just more people doing it, same percentage of injuries. So again, it's just not a great choice.

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Again, if you want to do it, do it. But I wrote a whole book called Primal Endurance six years ago on how sort of antithetical to health it is to compete in a marathon. But if you want to do it, I can show you how to do it with the least amount of pain and suffering and sacrifice and damage. Would you say that most people in our population cannot run properly? In the sense of when I was a sprinter 20 years ago, you know, obviously, you know, sprint is forefoot, you know, kind of work. You don't land on your heel.

But when we would go for a jog, for a run, I would heel strike. And my coach always said, stop doing that, you know, run on your forefoot. And I noticed it's, I can't do it. I don't know, I have fatigue so quickly. You know, I can do it over a hundred meters, maybe 200 meters, maybe 400, but going for a 5K, running on my forefoot, impossible. And I don't know anyone personally. I mean, I'm not, you know, associated with the whole lot of professional runners, but most people that I know that I run with occasionally as part of the warmup or whatever, nobody can run.

extended periods for an extended length on their forefoot. And I would argue that most people out there running and jogging can't do that either. They have clean heat strike because they can't do any better. That's exactly right. And it may be, again, genetic. It may be they're just too large. It may be that they haven't trained. And so one of the things that we're doing in this new book was we say, if you want to run, there's no reason that you need to run metronomically for six miles at a time or three miles at a time. If you want to run, run as long as you can with a proper forefoot mid -foot strike. And then when you're tired,

walk until you're ready to go again and sort of work into a workout that doesn't require that you complete it running the whole way. Right. But take advantage of the notion that there are two basic running gates, or two basic human gates, walking, which is a heel strike. It's a land on the heel and softly roll off the big toe. And then running, which is largely sprinting, because that's pretty much what we're designed to do, we're designed to sprint, that is a mid -foot or a four -foot strike with a tiny heel tap. And

One of the things that happened with Chris McDougall, and again, I love the guy, I love the stuff that he's done, but the book, which encouraged this style of running, this foot running, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of runners went out and bought minimalist shoes and started running that way. Well, if you have a minimalist shoe with no cushion, you can't heel strike, right? You feel like it's like running barefoot. You can't heel strike running down a pavement or a sidewalk for 200 meters. You can't heel strike, you'll hurt yourself. So you have to learn how to, it's sort of running barefoot encourages you to run with ...

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with a proper stride. By the way, we were all born barefoot. Everyone that existed before a thousand years ago was barefoot all the time. So everybody had a proper stride when they ran. Right. Right. So it wasn't even a thing until the cushioned shoes came along. So when the book came out, people said, okay, I'm going to go do this minimalist barefoot type running. And so good runners who were running, you know, 60, 70, 80 miles a week, decent Yolen runners would put on these minimalist shoes and get hurt because they hadn't trained.

muscles of their feet. And that's going to get us into the second part of this conversation about weak feet and how modern shoes have rendered everybody's foot a basically a useless appendage. I mean, it's horrific. So the shoe industry is really responsible for obviously promoting running as a thing. And 1%, maybe less than 1 % of people can actually run that way. I could, I was one who could run midfoot striker. I mean, I was a 220 marathoner. I had pretty good four. I ran 220 several times.

I went below once in the US national championships in 1980. I had good form and I could do it, but I trained for it. I spent years building up to it. I didn't heel strike because when you're a good runner, heel striking becomes a, it hurts. You know, and you lose energy, no? Yeah. I had other issues with the padded shoes because I was wearing cushioned shoes. Even though my running form was good, I was landing easily on the, on the metatarsal part of my foot with cushioning. But what that did for the good runners was it forced everyone to run.

couldn't force them, allowed them to run maybe twice as far as they could have run in minimalist shoes. When I started running, I was wearing Chuck Taylor covers and I was wearing Onitsuka Tiger flats. It was your feet that told you when it was time to stop running. Right. So I could do 50, 45, 50 miles a week. And then it was my feet or my achilles or my calf, which is tight from the ground contact and from the appropriate foot strike. And my feet would say, okay,

45 miles, that's enough this week. 50 miles, that's enough this week. Along comes Nike and their thick, thick shoes, and guys like me, and thousands of other elite runners in the US in the mid -70s could now run 80, 90, 110 miles a week. And the effect that had was it made US runners competitive with the rest of the world in distance. And we had a period of time in the 70s and 80s where we were the top marathoners in the world until the North Africans came along. But that's because we were able to do so many miles because of the...

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Now you say, well, you might say, well, that sounds like a good thing. Well, I wear this device, this heart EKG strap, every time I do a workout now because I messed my heart up by running too much. So the shoes actually allowed me to train more than I should have. I should have listened to my feet with minimalist shoes and my lower extremities would have said, Mark, that's enough for the week. But because the heart has no innervation, has no sense of pain, has no say in the matter,

When the brain decides to go out and do a 10 mile run today, the heart goes, ah, okay, let's do it. Let's pump, let's pump. And then the brain says, oh, let's do that. Let's do 15 tomorrow. The heart goes, wait, okay, let's go. The heart doesn't say, no, no, hold up, we can't do that. Michael, if you go to the gym and you say, I'm gonna build biceps, you don't do 100 reps of 90 pounds every day to build your biceps. Your biceps is gonna go, whoa, that's enough, dude. They will hurt. Heart doesn't have a say in the matter. So one of the things to have it from the running boom,

was my generation, the guys that are now in their 60s and 70s who ran hundreds of miles, thousands of miles a year. Now we have AFib, premature ventricular contractions. I've known 30 or 40 people who've died of heart attacks, people that I knew who were great runners, who were healthy runners. And I think part of my thesis is part of that was the shoes, which allowed people to do a lot more work than they should have done. Does that make sense? It absolutely does. It's basically masking.

what your body is trying to tell you. I know - It's a little bit like when you go to the gym and you see guys lifting heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy weights with weight belts on. Yeah. Okay. So I get it. You want the weight belt for the rigidity, but the theory behind weight training, if you're not an Olympic lifter or a world record holder, is to strengthen the entire body. And if you put on a weight belt, you bypass maybe the weakest part of your body is that core, is that lower back.

But putting on a weight belt allows you to, it only allows you to lift more weight. It doesn't necessarily make you a stronger human, and it doesn't necessarily improve the kinetic chain, because you've eased off the pain of a thing that was going to prevent you from going any further until you've corrected the deficiency. I saw that with shoes. So the corrected deficiency is your feet should have said, hey, that's enough running for this week. But bypassing that important sensory information loaded up ...

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the knees loaded up the lower back caused other injuries further up the kinetic chain and overburdened the heart on a lot of people. That's a very good point, man. I see that a lot, not only with weight lifting belts, but with wrist wraps and you know, with shoes with, you know, that are extra high and stuff for, if you want to, you know, what lower than you would normally be able to, because if you're lack of range of motion or mobility and a couple of years ago, I stopped wearing, you know, any of that. I mean, now I work out, you know, in, in Piluvas, you know, I do everything from front squats to deadlifts to really anything. And it really helps me.

assess how my body is doing with certain movements and if I should stop or use less weight or modify or whatever the case might be instead of just mitigating the problem or ignoring masking the problem really is I think is the better word and moving on and then getting hurt at some point because you know I have a weak spots that I kind of mask with a tool or with a gadget. Exactly. By the way all in the pursuit of just adding more weight this is the thing that people don't understand is that the reason you lift weights unless you're an Olympic lifter and a

and you're going for world records and you're going for personal bests, why are you in the gym? You're in the gym to improve your health. And if improving your health is going to be impeded because you put on a belt that allowed you to lift more weight, almost cheating because you're not lifting the full amount of your body, what's the purpose? Just so you can say that I dead lifted 485 instead of 405. I mean, I guess if that's something you're going to write down in your diary, great. But if you're really looking to improve the entire kinetic chain, fix all the problems,

train yourself as one unit, not as different separate parts of a body. That's the way to do it. Right. Totally agree. Now let's maybe talk about, regardless from running, I mean, the right type of shoe for running is obviously important, as we've discussed, but you don't have to be a runner to be either positively or negatively impacted by the type of shoes you wear. Right? So what's the issue with modern shoes? Well, the issue with modern shoes, several fold. Number one, in the interest of fashion,

Most designers have pushed the big toe and the little toe on the foot so that they make a nice pointy shape at the end of the foot. And that became fashionable a few hundred years ago and stayed in vogue. If you look at people's feet from the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were horribly misshapen because of the cowboy boots or because of the fashionable shoes they were wearing. Again, all in the interest of so -called fashion. Now, even today, we have some athletic shoes that are, they're cushioned.

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So they're in the pursuit of relieving discomfort. Shoe manufacturers add pillows, cushions to the bottom of shoes. And so you put these on in the shoe store and you go, wow, this is, feels great walking down the aisle of the shoe store. It feels cushiony and bouncy and it might feel good for a few minutes or maybe an hour, but over time, that lack of contact with between your foot and the ground burdens the rest of your kinetic chain from the ankle up through the hips. So.

It is your feet that should inform your brain how to direct the foot to bend, the knee to bend, the hip to torque, all the muscles to absorb the shock. When you remove that sensory input of ground contact with the bottom of the foot and the brain now has no idea of which way the knee should bend, because sometimes the knee bends, has to bend a little bit sideways, and sometimes the knee bends forward, and sometimes the ankle rolls quite a bit in a good way to offset a shock. If you step...

barefoot on a medium -sized rock the wrong way, your foot curls around the rock. Your ankle bends so that your knee doesn't tweak. But when you put on the type of restrictive shoes that we're talking about, either the modern fashion footwear or almost all modern athletic wear, you bypass the sensory input, you restrict the feet. So now the big toe, which is supposed to be...

pushing off almost by itself, leading the way on a push -off when you walk through your gait and you land with your heel and then you push off the big toe. Now it's scrunched over into the second toe. Now the little toe has become so pushed in that when I see people barefoot now, it looks like the little toe is almost shriveling up and going to fall off. It looks like a vestigial organ. It's really scary what people have done to their feet. And unfortunately, especially women, right? Especially women. The high heels, all of the, again, the fashionable footwear.

And if you stop and you think everything we do starts with our contact with the ground. Feet are the most important appendage we have. It's how we get from here to there. It's how we walk anywhere. It's how we climb into our car and press the gas pedal if we're driving somewhere. It's how we initiate a golf swing, a baseball throw, a basketball shot. Everything we do in sports depends on the feet being strong, being resilient, being flexible, and we have completely screwed it up.

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with footwear. It's abysmal what the industry has done with shoes and hasn't recognized how important foot health is to overall health. Everything starts with that kinetic chain, with that contact with the ground. Now, if we talk about people being injured and running, 77 % of people over a lifetime will have a complaint at one time or another, quite often frequently, about foot pain. And that might be bunions, it might be Morton's neuroma, it might be fungus.

It might be plantar fasciitis. It might be an Achilles issue. Almost all of those, if not, you know, like 99 % of those are directly related to your footwear, your choice of footwear. Some people will say, well, but Bunyan's run in my family and, you know, my grandmother had them and so I have to have them. No, you don't have to have them. You have them because you learn how to wear shoes of a certain style from your parents. And...

You didn't do the kind of barefoot work that you need to improve foot strength, range of motion, mobility, flexibility, and resiliency. A feet have to be resilient. You can't be laid up for weeks at a time because of a foot issue. It's the most, like it's so debilitating to have a foot injury. You see people walking around with a boot on or with scratches or whatever. It becomes the entire focus of their life for as long as they are injured till it resolves. And so much of this, Michael, so much of it is a result of the choice of...

footwear and shoes. And it starts with kids. That's really the if at some point during your adult age you decide to wear certain types of shoes. Okay. You know, if you have worn their walked barefoot for most of your life until that point, there's probably a lot you can still do, you know, the backpedal and avoid most injuries. But if you look at most footwear for kids at the other day, I saw a video where they took like regular sneakers. I don't know if it was converse or something. I don't know exactly the brain and they cut off the top basically. So you could see what would happen to the toes when you start walking and you could really see.

With this motion, it presses together the outer toes inwards and leading exactly to those type of issues like bunions over time. Imagine if you do this for two decades of your life until you realize that you've been wearing the wrong types of shoes. And by the way, two decades makes you, what, 27 by the time it starts to kick in. Imagine people now who are four or five decades into wearing shoes and assuming that the shoe that they bought in the shoe store, which was sold to them by a well -meaning salesperson who didn't know the difference but said,

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Don't they feel comfortable? Right? Aren't they nice and cushiony? And what do you think? Well, if you don't understand foot health and how feet are designed and how they're supposed to be in contact with the ground, look, we would be barefoot all the time. Certainly we were born that way and our ancestors lived that way for millennia, but we've created this civilization where we have concrete and pavement and marble and hardwood floors and very hard surfaces. So we do need some type of footwear. And that's really what prompted ...

me to get into developing this new shoe, this Paluva shoe, which is designed to give you the feeling of walking barefoot on a putting green. So if you can imagine the putting surface has just enough give that you could walk barefoot at all all day and it would feel great. So we wanted to design a shoe that had individual toe articulation because as important as it is for toes to splay outwardly and fully, it's also important for toes to individually articulate. And so every time you step on an uneven surface,

or a little rock, whatever toe is underneath or that rock is underneath, that toe should rise up and should feel it. Have a smile on its little toe face for the feeling that it has. Right. Rather than scrunched into a normal shoe, you should be able to feel the surface of the ground you walk on. We call this ground feel. It's a very important aspect of the whole minimalist shoe movement. And what we've done is we've introduced this five -toed shoe called Paluva, which I think is going to revolutionize the way we look at footwear and foot health. We're already seeing amazing results from people who've had

decades of foot problems and they struggle to get the shoes on the first time because their feet are so deformed. But after a few times wearing them, they're like, oh my God, this is like transformative. And we get these stories every day about people are feeling like they want to walk now, not like, oh my God, I have to go for a walk because my doc says I'm supposed to, but my feet hurt so bad or I hate the shoes that I'm wearing or my knees hurt when I walk or my lower back hurts when I walk long distances. That's all a result of the cushioning, by the way. I get lower back pain if I wear regular shoes, like I...

Every once in a while I do an experiment and I have normal sort of thick athletic shoes and I'll go for a walk in them. And I'm like, yep, that's the back pain because my feet are not telling my body, the rest of my body, how to bend, flex every single muscle, which it knows how to do. It just misses the information if you have all these different types of footwear. So, pullovers exciting to me. I know, I appreciate the fact that you've been wearing it and using it and experiencing the benefits of it. I think you can see where we're headed. Yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, speaking of back pain, I wanted to share it.

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A little anecdote as well, I used to be in sales for a software company and, you know, I tend to love trade shows and stay behind, you know, stay at the booth and talk to people, et cetera. And I have my few hours in my lower back would always hurt. You know, experimented with different types of shoes, even, you know, athletic shoes, then with cushioning and everything, the back pain would not go away. And then at the last conference, that's already when I, you know, had my first pair of Beloo was actually I purchased a pair.

before you guys reached out to me and I wore them at a conference, two days in a row and no back pain. And for me, I think it was the lack of heel raise, right? Because raising the heel means you have to somehow compensate for that because otherwise you would be leaning forward all the time, right?

And so taking that out of the equation, having a flat type of sole without the heel raise made a huge difference for me. Now I can wear them all day. In fact, I'm not sure if you've seen it, but we went to a Mallorca in Spain not too long ago, my wife and I, and we crossed two mountains. I clocked all in all 120 ,000 steps wearing only the Peluvas and I did not have any pain anywhere whatsoever. It's pretty compelling. I mean, I was just at a trade show. We were at a trade show last week in Austin. It was called the Running Event. It's a running shoe.

store, specialty store event, because I want to get these into running shoe stores, not so runners run in them, but that they walk in them, that they wear them all the time they're not running. And in so doing, they'll strengthen their feet, they'll work the small muscles of their feet, they'll build their arch back up, because most people, many people depend on the arch support of a cushioned shoe, which all that's doing is causing diatrophy. Some people wear orthotics for that reason. And again, it's like, why don't you fix the problem instead of putting a bandaid on the pain?

So, and we have a lot of ultra runners who are now rucking and walking and training in Paloova's doing six, seven, eight hour mountain rucks with 40 pounds on their back as part of their training. Now, when they race, they're going to run, they're going to jog the ultra, but they're walking, they're hiking as part of their training to build the strength up in their legs and build the strength up in their feet. And that's one of the things it gives out on a lot of the long distance.

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is the foot muscle, because they're bound up in these shoes that, again, feel good the first two miles, but then as the miles wear on, they're not feeling good at all. And that's partly because the feet have not, it's the same thing, they haven't become as strong as the rest of the kinetic chain. You need the feet to be the strongest part of that posterior chain. Like this leads to one question. If someone has been wearing regular shoes for decades, maybe, and now they want to, you know, they realize that...

the issues with that approach and they want to switch to minimalist shoes. They want to get a pair of Beluvas. Do you recommend them to kind of ease it in, to get used to it over a period of time or just wear them every single day from the get go and be okay with some initial discomfort? Because I can tell, especially when I'm wearing for CrossFit, when I jump a lot, when I box jumps, et cetera. If I do that a lot, I can tell at some point my feet are fatiguing and I need to give them a break. You don't want to go past that point because otherwise you might get injured. Right?

So what is your recommendation there? So the recommendation is if you're just walking around the house, standing, walking, doing easy, you know, movement around, then, you know, a couple hours the first day is, is great. If you're going to go to the gym and you're going to do planted foot planted exercises like squats and lunges or leg presses, same thing, wear them for the whole workout. If you're going to go for a walk, you know, don't walk more than two or three miles the first day, just to be sure. I tell people, look, if you're going to go on a long walk, wear them for the first two miles, bring a backpack with your other shoes in.

I would trade them out. Just to be sure, the first time, my next door neighbor is a woman. She's 65 years old. She walks every day. She was walking in traditional, either Nike or New Balance thick, thick shoes. She just transitioned over to Paloova's. She got her first pair like four months ago. She's worn the gym every time. She loves them, but she didn't dare walk with them. And I told her this whole thing about, well, take them out on your next walk. She does six or eight miles at a time. And bring your other shoes with you. And she said, I went, and it was unbelievable. These are my new walking shoes. Like, it's unbelievable, the difference. I'm like, again,

things that didn't hurt or that hurt before don't hurt now. It was for somebody who was so staunchly into her routine that she didn't dare make a change. And that's admirable for a lot of people, right? You do what works. But now she's completely fixated on the paluvas and the strength of the feet and improving her gait and improving her leg strength all the way up the kinetic chain. I know you've experienced this, but when you're hiking, when you're on an uneven surface hiking,

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It feels so good and you literally feel the strength in your legs. You feel like a sinewy animal covering this ground. And it's such an amazing feeling versus when you wear a thick, stiff hiking boot and you're just clawing along depending on everything from your ankles to your knees, to your hips, upward to do all the work. It's almost like you're wearing stilts, right? And you don't have any ground feel. And then if you step slightly sideways on a wrong rock,

your knee will tweak because everything is stiff and the foot is, like if you did that same rock again with either barefoot or with pelugas on, the foot would kind of nicely collapse around the rock. It would bend, the knee wouldn't tweak, and you'd take the next step as if nothing happened, right? Right. There's one more thing that just reminded me from our last hike. One thing that I was concerned was because it was a fairly rocky path that we hiked on Mallorca, and I was afraid I might bump my toe, which I have done plenty of times hiking with regular hiking boots.

Yep. And I did not. And I'm like, I wonder why that is. And my theory is that because I have better feedback from the ground, that I'm not as clumsy. 100%. So you're not as clumsy. You're lighter on your feet, which is sort of the same thing. I think you also now have a situational awareness. You'll see two or three steps ahead of you and you'll plan for the outcome, for the landing. I do a very rocky, I'm talking about sharp.

and all kinds of different things in France. And I get to the point where I can run through some of those and just bounce from one to the other. And every time the foot lands in a different position, and it's great. It feels perfect. And it's not the kind of situation where you say, well, I'm going to turn my ankle doing this. No, because as your feet get stronger, it begets even more strength. So then when I go play ultimate frisbee, shall we say, on a grassy field that's full of gopher holes and stuff, I can still sprint down the field with my pelotas on.

If I step wrong on a hole, I don't twist my ankle. By the time I weight the foot, everything in the body knows how to bend and how to accommodate that. I might have to take a little fake limp step or something like that to get through that. It's almost like if you're walking at night in the darkness across a carpet with Legos. Tell me about it. So your feet, because they can feel what's going on, you don't crumple to the ground. And you just sort of, by the time you've weighted the foot, you know exactly how to. Right. How you do.

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How to compensate for it. Exactly. Very good. I know we are way over time, but one last question. You know, I'm someone when if I see something that's better for my health, I go all in and I disregard everything, fashion, style, what have you. And now there are some people who are not yet comfortable with the individual toe boxes that would prefer that want to do minimalist shoes, but maybe regular looking ones, if you will. Yeah. What is your take on this? Are you pushing those?

people to say, you know, give it a try, do it anyway. Are you planning on coming out with a, what I would consider a compromise to kind of ease them into the barefoot movement or what's your take on that? So our take on this is we are so invested in the individual articulation of the toes, including the up and down. So if you have a flat, just a regular wide, you know, like a Vivo Barefoot, which is a great shoe or an Altra, which is a running shoe or a Zero, which is a great shoe. Those are just, just wide toe boxes.

Right. So you don't get the toe articulation. And our whole point is you want to feel the ground and you want the toes to articulate. So we've thought, well, maybe that people said, maybe put a skirt over the top. You know, you cover the top, but then it just looks weird. It just looks funky. It's we want to have this five -toed, this gloves for your feet be a thing. And I want it to be a fashion statement. And I have people already wearing them at events and proudly, right? And it becomes a little bit of a conversation piece, if you will. But there are, these are people who are all in on the health benefits.

and are not worried about, you have to also admit, from the side, you can't even tell that they're five -year -old shoes. I can have a conversation with you at a black tie event, unless I said, hey, did you check out my feet? You'd never look, you'd never notice. I agree. I do the same. I appreciate if someone comes up and hey, what is this? What are you wearing? For me, it's like a chance to educate or to share what I know. Whether or not they take advice or do anything with it is not my problem, but at least I can show and I can talk about and I can educate.

I guess ultimately that's, you know, one of the problems. Comfort, number one. Function, number two. And style, number three. So comfort was first. It has to be the most comfortable shoe you've ever worn. It has to be functional, which we certainly are. And then we think we're pretty stylish in some of our offerings. I agree. I mean, there have been especially the gray strands that I have for working out. I mean, I really like looking at that shoe. I mean, I like all of them. I wear all of them. But in particular, there are certain, you know, color combinations with the toe articulation that I think look really slick. Yeah. All right. Cool. Well.

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Again, very much appreciate your time. Maybe at some point in the future, we're going to talk again about your, what's your latest take on nutrition. I think I first ran into you with your Mark's Daily Apple. Then we have, you know, one of your cookbooks, but I'd really like to hear your evolution, I guess, as far as diet is concerned and your take on some of the current like seed oil, high salt intake and some of the other things that I'm sure you have an opinion on, but that's why we got to make the part of another episode.

And with that, we're going to wrap it up. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening. And thank you, Mark, for spending your time with me. My pleasure.