Born to Run Farther with Dr. Irene Davis and Chris McDougall

[Music] this is star talk sports edition i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and one time athlete actually today's topic is born to run farther i got my co-host chuck nice check hey that's right uh no time maybe you just joke about athletes when you're doing stand-up that there you go there it is and i got gary o'reilly gary former hey neil former uh pro pro footballer over in the uk giving authenticity to this show and this topic is all in i mean we're talking about the bio mechanics i love that term the concept the profession the biomechanics of running and we're going to talk about like what what do we need shoes what are shoes for we spent you know hundreds of thousands of years without shoes and all of a sudden somebody's making money off of selling you shoes we're gonna talk about running technique ancient versus modern uh we're gonna get all up in the shoe situation and what it has to do with running and especially running far so now since we don't none of us have any particular expertise in this we have to we got to reach in and and do our thing as we do on star talk and we go into the the the the academic pool to find out who's actually thought hard and deep about this and who do we have dr irene davis irene welcome to star talk thanks neil it's great to be here yeah you're the founding director of the spaulding national running center in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation harvard medical school that sounds like exactly where athletes want to go exactly when they're hurt okay it also sounds like a place where everybody there just has to jog every place from me from meeting to meeting no matter what a good example is that yes you just have to be at a light job no matter what you do at the national running center and you're also professor emeritus at the in physical therapy at the university of delaware so all of this is really important cool uh pedigree and what we're doing is we're featuring in an interview that i conducted with a best-selling author and runner chris mcdougall and we'll be playing clips from that interview just because he's thought a lot about this and as a journalist it's taken him to many places and and we see the influence of his research on his own life and on the people that he studied and written about so we'll be featuring clips from that as this show proceeds oh by the way irene rumor has it you're a barefoot runner yourself yes um i think everybody should try it it's a way to kind of free your feet and get all that sensory input that you're supposed to have oh okay we'll get into that i like that it's not that you have bloody feet from running on pavement it's sensory input that's right that's that's that's quite a euphemism irene i'm just saying that's such a that's i mean you say it in in a clinical term but for thousands of years um there's a thought in many cultures that in order to connect with who you are and where you're from you have to put your bare feet into the ground like that there is something spiritual and something connective about that experience that has nothing to do with what we're talking about so let's get to the bottom of it then so irene if you look at the evolution of humans as a species all right we spent much more time not wearing shoes than wearing shoes so are are we living the lives our bodies have been adapted to lead oh you touch on a very good point neil so that that is the basis of the mismatch theory of evolution um and i'm sure that's the thing the mismatch theory it's it's definitely a thing we need brilliant academics to come up with something called the mismatch theory i know chuck could come up chuck that's your theory of evolution exactly the mismatch theory of evolution yeah who knew all right all right so go on what so what do you have there so so the mismatch theory of evolution does basically um hypothesize that we're not living the lives that our bodies were adapted for um and it relates to a lot of different uh features like the air we breathe the food we eat our activity level but clearly the way that we run so we did evolve to run barefoot we started running about two million years ago and the first shoes that were found were about 10 000 years old there may have been some before that but for the majority of our evolutionary history we have run barefoot or in minimal shoes so let's go straight to my first clip with author and runner chris mcdougall and i asked him to highlight in sort of biomechanical terms what changed in our early primate ancestors that turned us into runners and was it just this sort of nuclear ligament that stabilized our head let's check it out everything you need for like a running animal is all piled up in human body we have springy tendons we have this nuclear ligament we have arches in our feet which give us lots of recoil energy we have an achilles tendon excuse me i have flat feet so just be careful when you talk about arches and your feet i'm just just i just want you to know before you step someplace where we gotta fight about it just so you know all right not trying to single you out as a walker but uh the achilles tendon for instance every runner is always complaining about their achilles tendon like what's the first thing that people say hurts oh it's my achilles the reason why is because the achilles tendon plays a huge role in the running stride and so that's basically where we started to diverge we went from being these walking creatures into the running creatures as soon as we took on all these tendons wait so tell me again where this neck ligament connect it connects what to what yeah so it's a ligament which runs down between the skull and the lumbar vertebrae so it basically connects the back of your skull to your spine so you look at this pig and the head's wobbling around if you wanted to stabilize that head what would you do you take a piece of wire stick it on its skull and just anchor it to the back of its spine bam nougal ligament so what's really weird is we somehow are enchanted by bobble head dolls we have reversed out this key ligament to who and what we are as humans and then we have humans with bobbly heads that's that that's sad you know head bobbles around as a baby right so those bobble heads are like steven j gould would have a field day with this kind of stuff you know we've you know turned the baby into something cute but babies because they haven't stabilized yet they got the bobbleheads yeah just to flesh out that reference stephen j gould was one of the early anthropologists biological anthropologists to suggest that we think babies are cute because they have these huge eyes and huge head relative to their body and then when doll manufacturers figured this out they started making all dolls for kids with these huge heads and it was oh isn't that cute it's that cute so uh fascinating uh steve gould we he's sorely missed on the landscape of of biologist so irene how many how many markers coming out of homo erectus can we identify that enabled empowered them to become good runners so based on the article by dennis bramble and dan lieberman and actually titled born to run there were 26 markers of endurance running and the nuke ligament is one because it keeps your head from bobbing but the medial longitudinal arch is another one because it helps to attenuate the loads when you run larger joint surfaces because the forces are twice that in running than in walking a long achilles tendon because you need to be able to store and release energy so these are just some of the markers of endurance running that really demonstrate that we needed we evolved for running they optimized us for running just to be clear when you say store energy you don't mean for long term effect you mean store it the way you stretch a rubber band it's stored and then you let it go and it snaps back exactly right okay so an immediate return immediate return of energy that you don't lose uh in in in some other way okay so our ancestors had it they were all they were pre uh we we we had good ancestors for this it's not it's not a weird fact that we have running contests and running is a part of our culture because it's a part of our past before we extol the virtues of humans running aren't we slower than practically every four-footed creature that's out there right they're i mean seriously the only only turtles look at us and go god i wish i had an achilles tendon right if only i had an achilles tendon or a new leg yeah you try carrying your house on your back homo sapiens you think you're slow turtles will totally go all up in your face about that so you know i don't you know so maybe we're better runners than we would have otherwise been as primates but in the animal kingdom i think other especially the four li four-legged felines i think they pity us really yeah so we are among the slowest for sure but we have the ability to run for very long distances and that was important for us for survival because it we we our brains were getting bigger and we needed protein at a time before we had projectiles like spears and those kinds of of tools and so we had to carve a kudu out of the herd and run them to exhaustion and then we would club them to death wow nice i gotta tell you that sounds like a party it sure does never have one so finally something evolutionary that humans have an advantage physically over over other other animals you know so so none of them were wearing shoes so i had i had to ask chris i said you know chris why do we wear running shoes at all i asked him this just let's see what he tells us i think the reason why we wear shoes is because in the 1970s someone thought it'd be really cool to sell people a bunch of shoes running shoes that's when it took off the 1970s that's right you know what's fascinating neil is if you look at a running shoe prior to the early 70s you basically take the top off and it's a sandal you know the early running shoes like your father wore they're basically sandals with a little top on top for laces you know that's interesting you you point that out because my father uh he showed me his track shoes one day when we went to the track my father used to run track and long enough he didn't in in high school and college and then he continued outside of school and while we my brother and sister and i were born so i got to see sort of the tail end of that and i saw she pulled his shoes out of the trunk and they were as light as a feather there wasn't all this extra rubber and texture and healed it was like hardly anything covering his foot and this is this is old school now i'm talking right so what what happened in the 1970s was it just marketing those early running shoes because they looked like nothing there was nothing to modify you know a running sandal uh it will last you a lifetime there's nothing to sell and so in the 1970s what happens you have bill bowerman who was a coach at the university of oregon teaming up with one of his runners phil knights and they thought well i can't really sell a sandal but what if we put it in right but what if what if we put a swoosh on the side what if we put a waffle sole on it what if and they just started adding sales gimmickry to this very very simple device over and over again that's why every six months you go to the running shoe store hey i want that shoe i got last month and last year worked great now sorry that's gone here's a brand new one that you have to buy is 150 and this was born nike yeah yeah so this is it basically what it came down to is there was nothing to sell with a simple sandal but if you tell people hey if you don't buy these shoes you're gonna get injured that's a real motivator man that's like mafia based uh motivation you know if you don't do this thing you're gonna get hurt we're gonna take out your knees right we're gonna take out your knees that's that's the running shoe industry's whole promise either by the show we'll take out your knees so i i mean is is chris right about the running do you agree with that that perspective this 50 years of being sold a product that we really don't need gangs gangster running gangster yeah yeah gangsta you know i i love chris mcdougall let me just say that but i think this is a place where we have a slightly different perspective so i have spoken with jeff johnson who was with nike back in the day um and when when in those very early days and what happened is that in the early 70s we had the running boom right and a bunch of people who were not trained they're probably more fit than you and i are today but they were they were untrained most of people running were running and running clubs or in collegiate teams and they started to run and these are people who were walking around in shoes that had maybe two inch heels on them just normal shoes now you're putting them into a racing flat so now you're increasing the load on the achilles and you and they ended up with some problems and so what happened is they that nike actually brought some sport podiatrists in who saw a lot of these injuries and these in these new runners and asked them what is it and and they came up with a number of different changes to the shoe and this is what this is this is what jeff told me so by adding a heel to toe drop you unload that achilles so that's one way of adapting the shoe to these individuals who are not used to landing on a flat surface then the podiatrist also felt that they were landing hard and they had a lot of pronatory problems so they started to add cushioning and they started to add motion control and then it became more and more and more and more and so my view of this is that the running shoe companies rather than have the runners adapt to the sport which is what everyone did in the past they took the shoe and adapted it to the runner and ended up actually i think doing more harm than good wow so doctor is it as simple as playing on our fear of getting sports running related injuries that these empires have been built and they are empires they're global empires fear is quite the motivator in all things in everything the problem is that there haven't been a i'm not going to say any because maybe there's one or two but there's very few studies that show that these shoes have reduced running injuries and even today when you look at the epidemiological studies running injuries have not reduced they have not been on the decline if you put into pubmed a search for running injuries there's almost nothing prior to 1970. everything starts at about 1970 and has just continued to increase in terms of reports of running injuries yeah but but why but why are the shoes so comfy when you try them on they're like you're putting on pillows because you they're they're like the barca lounger same thing you just want to get in there and sit and be comfy but you know comfortable is and i'm not saying we should never do that and we should only you know squat and go back to caves but just keep in mind that when you are doing that you are not using the muscles of your core and your back um it really de conditioned you it's so funny that you actually mentioned squat because that is another thing that um is a recent invention in human history is you know sitting down and sitting down for long periods of time this is not something that we have done throughout history you don't find chairs no wait wait wait chuck we adapted that's why we have butt cheeks okay those are our cushions for sitting we've i think that's all been taken care of in the last couple years no no the butt cheeks were not designed so as you could sit on a rock for an hour or two yeah they're actually an integrity before we go to break okay so the butt cheeks are actually we needed larger glutes when we ran the gluteus maximus became much broader and because now you're coming and you're landing on one foot with two and a half to three times your body weight you need that stabilization so those butt cheeks i tell my husband that they go honey this is why i have this gluteus but basically those butt cheeks are are really to help us to stabilize and damn i i'd like my hypothesis better i like my we evolved to have butt cheeks so that we could one day have rap videos so that was the evolutionary driver the the need for rap videos okay all right we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we're gonna talk more with irene davis and chris mcdougall on the biomechanics of running and in particular technique when star talk returns we're back star talk sports edition i'm with chuck nice and gary o'reilly you're my peeps dudes all right and today we're talking about running running technique the biomechanics of running and we're wrapping it around my interview with best-selling author and runner himself journalist chris mcdougall and the we since we don't have the academic expertise here we brought in irene davis from the department of physical medicine at the harvard medical school so irene are you based up in boston at mass general is that where that happens i'm i'm based out of spaulding yes in boston in cambridge okay in cambridge okay that's spalding center that we introduced at the beginning you know we've been buying ever more sophisticated running shoes for decades do we need them or do we need to change the way we run he gleaned insight from studying a group of people in mexico in his journalistic voyages to understand running let's check it out i would try to run to get in shape i would get injured doctors have said your body isn't designed for this you're too big the impact's bad then they're going to have the copper canyon copper cannon in mexico where you find the the taharah tribe exactly yes yeah so i'm down there and i think i'm going to find a group of people that are um genetically predisposed to this but what i also find is a guy who looks just like me he's my same height he's my same shoe size and when he came down to the copper canyon 15 years earlier he had also been chronically injured a guy named micah true and at the point i met him after 15 years of running with tatar umara this guy is just cruising for 50 miles at a time and what he told me is it ain't the shoes it's not the genetics it's how you run and he taught me a different running style and the thing about it was it all hinged on the lack of footwear the less obstruction i had between my foot in the ground the better and more injury free i became so all right so let me praise what you said and then criticize what you said so if this is the case then the less footwear the better and everyone should be running in bare feet but we have like cement roads and asphalt and dog poop and you know so so shouldn't some protection of the foot be in order here exactly protection but not correction your dad had protection we have correction we have four years of podiatry school is somehow supposed to trump two million years of evolution so someone gets an idea like hey let's put a wedge in it it'll help it doesn't help so why so tell me now i mean we're dancing around this this blunt question why is barefoot better than a shoe why isn't the shoe supplementing what you have to make your running stride better rather than supplanting what you have making it worse the reason why is because it doesn't sell that answer is too easy i want a more complicated answer all right i'll give you more complicated answer then okay because when most people start to run the first thing they do is walk you walk first when you try on a pair of running shoes in a store there's not room for you to go running back and forth so you're walking and so what they did was they stuck a big cushioned heel underneath your foot because that's very comfortable for walking so what they did was they took a shoe that's really designed for walking and they market it as a running shoe and that's basically the problem it's the big fat heel so so irene are we just trying to retrofit evolution i mean what of the notion that yeah we've been doing it for you know ten thousand years the fifty thousand years hundred thousand years and now we're claiming something's wrong with it but what's also true is back then people didn't really live much past 30. so i kind of like modern technology and what it has done for civilization even in spite of where we landed on the evolutionary arc so we have where do you land in all of this well i think i think it's very difficult right this moment for someone to just immediately go back to not wearing shoes because over the past 50 or 60 years we have deconditioned our feet and now our feet need it because our feet are unable to cushion our feet are unable to support themselves well when you run if you took someone who runs in a modern day cushioned supportive shoe and put them into a minimal shoe or have them run barefoot i guarantee you and have them run their normal miles i guarantee you it's guaranteed they're going to get injured so that's the problem is people have become comfortable and in order to move away from it it takes a lot of time and patience and a lot of people don't have that time and patience but i think if we had not accommodated the shoe to the runner and actually tried to get the runners to accommodate to the sport and that we didn't go if we didn't develop these cushioned and supportive shoes we wouldn't have the musculoskeletal injuries that we have today that is my hypothesis why didn't you push back on all this when these shoes started rising up it's your fault do you want to know the truth please because okay so you know but when i started it's all about the truth on this show all right good so 25 years ago when i was getting out of pt's phd my phd and and uh and i really believed that there were some feet that actually could not tolerate the loads of walking and running and they needed orthotics and i became the orthotic specialist in the in at delaware at the in the department of physical therapy just to be clear orthotics means supplements to your feet for whatever reason yeah right and i was i was promoting motion control and cushioned shoes and i was in that mindset so i didn't push back on it and it was kind of an aha moment for me it was sort of i caught a perfect storm of some research that came came around it was chris's book that made me think a little bit differently but i was also my research showing that when people land on their heels they have big they get impacts ground reaction force impacts that are not there when you land on the ball of your foot and when you're barefoot you land on the ball your foot so all of this kind of came together and slowly changed my thinking well my my father who ran track he used to run on his toes people commented he was he was swift as the wind and you watch him is like is he running or is he floating you know you would ask that i was going to say that when you look at different styles of running that's that was a movement a few years ago that really took flight excuse the terminology but uh where staying on the balls of your feet the entire time that you're in your during your run was supposed to be a healthier and less degenerative means of establishing a running regimen is that the case or was that just another kind of marketing trickery type deal again i go back to the mismatch theory of evolution i think that landing on the ball of the foot is the way that we were adapted to run and we know that because if you studies have shown that the less time people spend in footwear the more tendency they have to run on the ball of their foot it's that cushioned heel that chris referred to that causes people to land on their heel because they can but when you land on your heel you get this impact transient that your body experiences you don't even really feel it but it's there and research has shown that it's related to injuries we'll talk about a three-hour experiment the new york city marathon run every year in november i think it was it was postponed from covid but it's an annual tradition i think it's the largest marathon in the world more than 30 000 people compete you just sit there and watch how everybody's running and nobody's running the same way as anybody else is running and they can't all be right however if you look at cross-country runners they all have the same form so okay with that well let's go to my next clip with chris mcdougall and see where that goes check it out you could universalize all those 30 000 runners in like one second if at the starting line you said everybody take your shoes off and run in place and then and then and then run in place now when you run in place and you can do this experiment yourself neil um if you take off your shoes and you just run in place in your apartments what you're going to find is you're going to have to keep your back straight because if you're slumping forward you're going to move forward you're going to have to land on your forefoot because you can't run in place and land on your heels it doesn't work and that's basically it there's a guy who created a thing called the 100 up back in the 1800s this was a carpenter's apprentice who had to work inside and he competed in track events on the weekend so he invented the hundred up and the hundred up is if i run in place for a hundred strides and don't move forward then i did a perfect repetition and what he found is just by trying to do a hundred strides running in place in his bare feet he was able to develop perfect running form and that's basically what it comes down to is so anybody wants to change their running form take off your shoes run in place and you will automatically start to mimic how the tatumata run people who described my father's running gate they said it was like a gazelle uh he had very long stride but he also basically ran on his on his on the balls of his feet off of his toes and that gave him a particular uh spring and mobility to to his his running style and the gate so uh that's that's fascinating all right so now you now you're challenging me now i really gotta do this now why are you doing this to me i was perfectly happy on the couch now i got to run and barefoot around the block on the cement and all right if something bad happens i'm coming for you i just want you to know so irene is there an ideal surface on which to run because you haven't you you've been suspiciously ignoring whether running on spikes or grass or tartan track what you want to run barefoot but on what surface does it matter so that's a really good question um we what's amazing is that we were adapted to run on many different surfaces so the tama humada think about it they're running in the copper canyons of mexico they're running on some hard rock they're running on dirt we run in grass and what happens is you adjust automatically your leg spring to the surface that you come in contact with so if you come in contact with a hard surface you make your leg spring more compliant when you come in contact with a soft surface like sand or grass you make your legs stiffer so you can adjust your stiffness to the surface that you come in contact with wow so our brains are like the computer chips in our cars for limited slip differential no matter terrain it doesn't matter the terrain yeah i love that yeah but does it have positive if there is a correct running technique we're all different shapes and sizes all four of us are a different shape so can we just give that's the correct technique you do it but you're different to you and you're different to her and he's different to me so is there the correct technique and the correct technique only or do we have some area that we have to change in developing look i we all are different we all are unique we're all going to move differently but there are some fundamentals about the way that we move and i'm going to make an argument about our structure that actually suggests that we really are adapted to land on the ball of our foot so let me just give you a couple of examples our heel pad there have been studies have shown that when you apply a force a load to the heel pad you hit your pain pressure threshold at the point the force exceeds the forces of walking what that means is your heel pad is there designed to attenuate the loads of walking not running the stiffness of the forefoot pad is higher than the stiffness of the heel pad meaning that it's better able to dampen the loads of landing so those are just two examples the achilles tendon is there it developed in order to be able to store and release energy and you have a much larger calf than you do in anterior tip muscles so those are just some examples that show that really we were adapted to and if you look at i get in this argument a lot with my colleagues because 95 percent of modern runners who wear modern shoes are rarefor strikers and they say to me irene then that's normal and i say no i think it's abby normal i don't think that's normal i think that we are maladapting and we really were adapted to run this way and we did for most of our evolutionary history if you look at ancient pictures of vases greek vases and figures it portrays man running on the ball of his foot if you look at the boston dynamic robot named atlas who's a very cool he can do parkour he can dance um he's awesome um but they're all creepy these that these are creepy robots when they no you gotta see he's so cool though he's huge he's so human let's just say now until we be they become our overlords okay but but he runs on the ball of his foot and so you're they're not going to design something that's not efficient so they're just there's so many so many indicators to me that this is the way we were adapted to the run the way we were meant to run and you know we may get into talking about injuries at some point but but i can can give you biomechanical examples of how it can reduce risks for injuries as well i'll say this as you were making that explanation which was uh um quite specific thank you it was very tight it was a very tight explanation in my mind i was picturing a person running and what what struck me was the heel strike method gives you an extra unnecessary movement in running you strike your heel then the rest of the foot comes down then there's a return of energy the other way you eliminate that extra movement the uh the ball of your foot comes down and a spring action actually happens eliminating that extra movement and then there's a more immediate return of energy so it makes sense why so many people one of my close friends just had this surgery they had to take a tendon from another part of her body and replace her achilles tendon because she's addicted to running and ran her achilles tendon into oblivion so i mean what you say just makes absolute perfect sense chuck you should come work for us national running center i'd like to see that happen today in the news the spalding center closed down any time so doctor just not the efficiency of running right because we've sort of identified earlier in the show that we're not the fastest species um but we are able to run these long distances we're built for efficiency but that efficiency came with a package of injury prevention am i am i getting that right is that the way it's supposed to work well i mean if we were and if we were meant to run and we had to run for survival it doesn't make sense that we would that 50 of us would get injured in a given year which is on average so i i don't think that we were designed to get injured i think we were designed to be able to run without injury now there's it's not so simple you know i don't think we were designed to run you know even 26 miles in a straight line on hard surfaces we ran on multiple surfaces we ran in many directions our ancestors did with persistence hunting and that varies the load that the body experiences and that helps to reduce the risk of injury but having said that i still think that the injury rate is much higher than it should be based on the fact that we evolved to run so if i if i run correctly with the correct technique in my mind i will then strengthen i can't strengthen the ligament can i it's a ligaments the ligament but i can strengthen the muscles yeah around the length so i will actually have a stronger and i'll call it healthier foot where else does this develop from the foot through the achilles through the calf muscles where else um the biggest change the biggest change in load when you go from a rear foot to a forefoot strike is from the knee down and we do know that habitual forefoot strikers have stronger stiffer and you want a stiff tendon because they store and release that immediate energy quicker they have stronger stiffer tendons because they land on the ball of their foot and they're constantly strengthening them your arch muscles have greater demand put on them when you're landing on the ball of your foot greater demand means that over time they're going to get stronger so clearly this kind of a pattern in the beginning transitioning those are the areas that can get injured because you're not accommodated to it so calf arch sometimes metatarsals but if you take it slow and transition slowly then you can t you can train the body to adapt to that load and then those tissues will actually get stronger i mean i just realized something correct me if i'm wrong almost all fast running four-legged animals their vertebrates their heel never touches the ground because it evolved up higher up on their leg aren't they basically running on their toes like horses and and the big feline uh you know lions and tigers isn't that am i correct about i think i'm correct you are yes you are now we just said forget the heel i'm not even going there i don't think you want to do that i just want to make that point we i think that we do want to come down and land on the heel and then come back up again you don't want to land on the ball of the foot and keep the heel up that helps to to actually give that calf a break and let you go through the full range of motion but you're right a lot of the animal kingdom does not land on their heel at all right right and their legs bend like our elbows so what's up with us there no portions of the long bones are different so it looks it looks freakier we've got to take a quick break but when we come back let's talk we'll spend some time chewing the fat and exploring whether we can out engineer evolution itself in human performance when star talk sports edition returns we're back star talk sports edition got chuck nice co-host chuck you're tweeting at chuck nice comic yes sir thank you everyone check that out and gary o'reilly hey looking at my three left feet three left feet yes i gotta sort of remember that yeah that's that's a challenge for the doctor by the way okay one day you'll explain we've got uh with me as our in studio academic expert uh professor dr irene davis i irene do you are you active in social media i am irene s davis easy on twitter twitter very good right very good okay uh we're gonna find you there and you're an expert on all things feet so uh why don't we go straight into my final clip with chris mcdougall um because we always seem to be striving to reaching for the next bit of technology to improve our performance and either by engineering or by design and are we looking in the right place for our answers i brought that up with chris let's check out his reply i think there's a natural ancestral pull you know that early humans if you saw something new interesting or more effective you would be you gravitate toward that's a reason why we went from spears to bows and arrows the better technology is going to give you an evolutionary advantage that's fantastic the problem is that's so hard grained in our minds we can't stop shopping you know we keep looking for the thing that's going to be better and we just need to cycle back every once in a while and just say hey what has worked for two million years as opposed to 10 years you know you look at like sports drinks you got to have the special sport drinks in the bottle dude a cup of water is all you need a little water a little salt you're good to go and i said that's basically what it comes down to is rather than being sold look back as to what you can actually practice what behavior can you change that will provide the difference so you're a living nightmare of at least a dozen different companies who want you to buy their products yeah i think so especially when it comes to things like running uh you're you're pre-equipped with everything you need so so i mean what what advice do you have for parents who want to do right by their kids are you just going to send them off barefoot what are you going to do you know it's such a good question because i think the holy grail to um reducing musculoskeletal injuries is starting with kids i think that if we put our kids i have grandkids and my grandkids are in minimal shoes i buy the minimal shoes all the time when they grow out of them i buy a new pair because i think if you teach if you put them in minimal shoes their feet will get stronger they'll develop the the kind of lower extremity that we evolved to have and they're going to be much much less likely to land on their heel when they go to run they're going to be more likely and studies have shown this to land on the ball of their foot i would i would tell them to let their kids be barefoot i mean i used to step in dog poop and you know when i was a kid i spent a lot of time barefoot and i think kids should be allowed to have that sensory input so yes let kids go barefoot and try to keep them in minimal shoes and not go don't be don't be tempted to go to the the highly cushioned and highly supportive shoes chuck how do you think that goes over in elementary school hey so tell us about your grandmother oh she she told me to step in dog poop and uh come on next i need more sensory input so excuse me what's that on your foot sensory input thank you okay which big deal okay got a problem with that you got a problem go sit over there on your own yeah so let me ask you this uh dr davis i have fallen arches i passed that on to my children is that a problem is there anything that can be done to correct that i have a seven year old so is it too late um when in your development when in your development is it too late or is it ever so i i mean we all have different structure not everybody has perfect arches and and i think probably from an evolutionary standpoint that was the case as well there's a lot of variation in our anatomical structure that doesn't mean that you can't strengthen your arch muscles and and once you once your ligaments are stretched out you can't really shorten them short of surgery but you can train the muscles to hold up that arch and so i do think that there is the ability for kids to develop that and even adults we work with adults with flat fee and we've gotten people to actually get rid of their orthotics and use the muscles rather than the insoles to actually support their arch so there's hope look at that that's i've never even heard of that before that's amazing yep and let me just say i like i said i was born with flat feet had flat feet my whole life and and it's so flat it goes it comes out the other way he's got concave feet i come out of the shower bigfoot just flat flap down duck flap and i could outrun everybody uh when i was growing up so just what i talked to i'd hear you coming though [Laughter] excuse me who's applauding right now who is applauding oh wait that's just me flapping my way down the track so gary how does all this apply to soccer you know when you're running up and down a soccer field any questions you have for irene that comes from that angle well because we we need i mean our human hand is so dexterous but our foot has nothing like that mobility but we caress a soccer ball with our foot we need to move it we need to do certain things with it and the ability to have not a completely loose ankle and foot would be really advantageous if you could sort of develop that flexibility in the foot or are we kind of kidding myself with that no i i agree i think you know running is the easiest case to make for minimal footwear because our feet were designed to run although soccer people ask me about basketball and skiing and other sports but soccer really is running and it's running in multi-directions there are there are still communities that play soccer barefoot um and so i think i think soccer could also fit into this um same kind of paradigm yeah through the show we've talked about how we've got running shoes that have been built constructed engineered are we are we trying to out engineer the human body and it's i mean the cure you've talked about for fallen arches is a natural thing you are strengthening a muscle by bringing in your toes and developing certain areas are we really just out engineering our foot i don't think you can now engineer mother nature i think we need to really rely on mother nature and there are caveats to this you know if somebody doesn't have the ability as long as those muscles are not paralyzed they can get stronger but if you have someone that has a developmental disability cerebral palsy maybe a stroke or you know diabetes where they don't have good sensation there are lots of applications to correct as as chris said but the large majority of people that are in these shoes have normal intact musculoskeletal systems and those are the people who i think we need to let mother nature do it's it's it's it's work yeah i suffer from something called chiptitus it's where you lay on the couch and eat chips all right so doctor no that's potato chip items oh yes oh sorry oh that's a specific variety i think there's a shoe for that yeah yes and my father said it goes in a particular place so okay doctor i mean with this stolen the virtues of running in minimal shoes or barefoot in 10 years time are we all going to be running in barefoot or with minimal shoes or or is it just you know the guys who run barefoot are going to do it at midnight when no one's watching well i mean i can tell you what i hope i hope that this catches on i think that more and more parents are not putting their kids into those really rigid shoes that we used to put our kids in and i was in as a child what was that about you know remember those yes those little frankenstein shows they were awful and the kids would couldn't walk you know exactly so they're now putting kids in soft shoes and now a number of podiatrists that i know are not putting people in foot orthotics for their whole life just temporarily so i think that the pendulum's swinging a little bit and i hope i just hope that with more evidence and you know more and more of these kinds of shows where people listen because when i talk people go wow i never thought about it that way you know you wouldn't put a neck brace on your on your neck for life because you wouldn't be able to hold your head up and yet we put these supportive shoes and orthotics in our in our shoes for life and we don't think another thing about it so if we all do this we're going to put you out of a job that's okay okay so so what about the the the feet shoes do you guys know what i'm talking about with you with i see some people at the gym wearing these i love those and uh you know they look weird but is there any benefit to them because i'm not gonna make fun of those people if there's a benefit but if there's not a benefit you need to take your planet of the apes butt and take those shoes off man wait wait let me lead into that let me add to chuck's question because no time so far have you spoken to the consequences to your skin on the bottom of your feet for having your body weight slammed down on pavement or anything else all this time so what i'm wondering is whether this shoes that chuck is referring to which is just basically a covering of your foot that highlights each of your toes it's kind of cute a little creepy but cute when you see it is that really just replacing your skin so that you don't have skin injuries because otherwise it's clearly not structural right chuck i mean exactly it looks like a glove for your foot it is a glove for your foot and in all minimal shoes i i put those fight they're called five fingers and they've got individual pockets but they're really not that much different than a minimal shoe a minimal shoe is a shoe that has a very thin outer sole maybe a canvas type of top one that you can roll up and put in your pocket right that's some that is a minimal shoe just like the five fingers so the five fingers are a minimal shoe some people like the individual movement of the toes other people find it a little uncomfortable because their toes are you know toes are kind of weird as you know and they don't always fit in the pockets well that you have to break them in i've had them and you do have to break them in but they're not the only kind of minimal shoe a minimal shoe could be something you get at target for ten dollars a pair of white cheap canvas shoes i mean that's what a minimal shoe is oh i'm so happy to hear that but did jesus have minimal shoes he would probably have just these samples without a doubt no doubt i guess you're not a big fan of these carbon fiber shoes that got the plates in them that are going to reduce running times all right so well you know i here's some here's my feeling about that so clearly these shoes have been shown to increase performance or reduce running time well just a quick so gary are they shoes that have that store energy better than your feet would and so you get it all back yeah so they have carbon fiber fight fiber can i speak english no um they have carbon fiber plates in them small little plates and the whole idea is to return energy and for an elite marathon runner all you need is a three or four percent kick yeah or less you're gone say here's one percent at one percent get you 10 minutes so i mean are you all for this or not well you know so they're called the four percent shoe because that was the average improvement that they saw with these shoes and and to be honest it's more in the foam gary than in the plates plates provide rigidity but they don't have as much energy return as this special foam of course the foam gets worn out pretty quickly um so the problem that i see with it is that i believe in purity i want the person who's up on that podium to be up on that podium because of their own ability and not because they have footwear that's you know giving them spring so let's have people run on springs you know um i know and i know that they're they're struggling with this you know world athletics is struggling with this they're struggling with this because you know and the other problem with this is that not everybody can wear them you know nike's the one that have these shoes but not everyone's sponsored by nike so then you have a disadvantage and i don't know i just um i'd rather go back to just flats racing flats like we had before in the 60s and early 70s and let the person's ability be what puts them up on the podium that's my feeling now if i were a high level elite runner i'd probably love those shoes yeah especially the idea of running on springs okay i won the boston marathon in the fastest time ever too bad i was on a pogo stick you know the pogo gotta start the pogo pogo is first if we do all convert to barefoot running um and you your clinical aspect of things we'll be probably able to answer this what sort of percentage reduction and injuries would we see so all right that's a really good question first of all i'm not advocating everybody go out and run barefoot because i think that people especially if you're running a race you don't want to cut your foot you can cut your foot you expose it right so there are times when you want to protect your feet so and minimal shoes and barefoot running are very similar they're not the same you don't get the same sensory input you don't get that dog poop between your toes but they but the mechanics are very similar between barefoot and minimal shoes that's what you're after here and i'm really so i'm really i'm really proposing that people go to footwear that just basically protects and doesn't correct as chris says how much will that reduce injuries it's really hard to say i think it will significantly reduce injuries we know that when you run on the ball of your foot it reduces the load at the knee and the most common running related injury is at the knee we know that when you run on the ball of your foot it reduces the load to the anterior compartment the lower leg the front of your lower leg that is where shin splints occur that is also where anterior compartment syndrome occurs where you get high pressure so i know that that's going to be reduced i know that it strengthens the achilles tendon so i believe that there's a 52 percent likelihood of achilles tendinitis in males over the course of their running history their running career so i i know that that's going to be reduced so i really believe that these kinds of of muscular skeletal injuries are very common are going to be reduced when you when you when you reduce the impacts and you run in a way that we're adapted to run man i feel like taking off my shoes now i was going to say at the least everybody especially if you're a dog owner get out there and get some sensory input but you still can't you can't shake the sensory he's locked on that you know i'd like to ask you guys all to take your shoes off and see if you can spread your toes because um gary you said you know your hands have this mobility but your feet don't but you know what you have every single muscle in your foot that you have in your hands and you're supposed to be able to spread your toes oh i used to pick stuff up with my toes all the time well i think it was just too lazy to bend over and grab it with my hand so but then you have to be able to lift your leg up high enough to then reach it yeah so you need a double thing going on there but i have pretty i have pretty dexter dec deck is that the word dexterous toads myself i don't mean to brag or anything you just did yeah i just i'm pretty sure my toe dexterity is suffering quite a bit so yeah maybe i'm going to start working on that you should work on it yeah i'm i'm more i'm more concerned about the sprains in my ankles so you've got many more years to keep this movement uh keep a force behind this movement yeah and we'd be delighted to sort of check back in with you to see get sort of an update well i really appreciate you giving air time to this particular topic because i think it's really important very very cool all right dr irene davis from the harvard medical school thanks for joining star talk and gary always good to have you here pleasure neil thank you all right chuck always a pleasure all right and um i don't want to smell your feet where whether or not you've stepped in poop okay oh well okay all right now well i'm disappointed now what am i going to get you for christmas [Laughter] all right this has been star talk sports edition all about defeat neil degrasse tyson here your personal astrophysicist keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

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Id: qj2YwC3Ssus

Length: 55min 3sec (3303 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021