Mark Bell's Power Project - Josh Stiles - This Man Runs THOUSANDS OF MILES Each Year in SANDALS || MBPP Ep. 811

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Josh Stiles, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about  strengthening feet through minimalist sandals, how big cushy shoes can cause weak feet, and how Josh started Shamma Sandals. Shop Shamma Sandals and use code POWERPROJECT to save: https://shammasandals.com/ Follow Shamma on IG: https://www.instagram.com/shammasandals/ Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #shammahSandals #PowerProject #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Power Project family, how's it going? Now, we like to look good in the gym and out of the gym. That's why you always see Mark and I and Andrew is stepping up on the short, short game, wearing shorts from Viore and clothes from Viore. And honestly, the number one compliment that I've seen that I've gotten and even Mark's gotten is, damn, your butt looks good. And that's because, well, the clothes we wear make our booties look delicious. Andrew, how can they get it?

Yeah, you guys both have pretty big wagons. You guys can head over to viore.com slash powerproject. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash powerproject to receive 20% off the most amazing apparel that looks so good inside and outside of the gym. It's going to make your ass look fat. And your ass will look fat. Links to them down in the description

as well as the podcast show notes. God damn it. That was a good one. That was a good one. Make your ass look fat. Hey, thanks for these sandals, man. I'm really digging them. And Seema told me about them a while back.

I gave him the skeptical hippo eyes. And I was like, I don't know, man. I don't know about these. The very skeptical hippo eyes. Yes. But I like them the skeptical hippo eyes and I was like, I don't know, man, I don't know about these. The very skeptical hippo eyes. Yes, but I like them a lot. And I think probably the hard thing for some people when it comes to their footwear, they're so used to their Nikes, they're so used to the Reeboks and the different shoes they had over the years of Jordans. And they're used to the look and they got a certain look to them. But as I've learned more and more about shoes which I thought I knew a decent amount

years ago like learning some stuff from what's that down a little sorry oh you're from uh Kelly Sturette you know learning some stuff from Kelly Sturette about about foot the foot and uh footwear and even making a shoe with Reebok and different things like that. You know, I thought I had a pretty good understanding, but I didn't really, I guess, recognize how much of a problem it is to put your foot into a regular shoe. And putting your foot in a regular shoe, it's kind of hard to put into words, but it's almost like what we do with a lot of our children. We have them sitting all day, most days in school. And we expect them to behave themselves.

And we're like, oh, man, a kid's got a behavioral problem. It's like, well, maybe he just doesn't want to sit for six or seven hours every day. Oh, yeah. This is crazy. Yeah, we actually homeschool our kids. It's another thing we do. But, yeah, I always thought of school as basically like prison yeah it kind of yeah it can be i couldn't stand it it was a it was a really hard time for me um

just to be kind of locked away and you know watching the clock go day in and day out but uh for our kids you know we've we've uh fortunately been able to not i have to put them in that situation um let's see andrew is it is it still really loud i think something got adjusted on this other side in one second i feel like you're yelling at me mark i am yelling i'm yelling at everybody yeah it takes a little bit of getting used to because the the sound is right in your ear it's like we're whispering to you like this i'm one of those people where where if you get that reverb, that's a little better, yeah. You know, like you hear it twice.

I just shut down completely. I can't even talk. Is that better? It's a lot better. Yeah, thank you. Okay. You actually don't need to wear them either. Yeah, okay.

You just got to keep close to the mic. That's all. Yeah, you just want to ditch them? Go ahead. Yeah, let's try it. Okay, let me just stay close to the mic. Yeah, okay. You got good hair. We got to wear them either. Yeah. Okay. You don't have to, just got to keep close to the mic. That's all. You just want to ditch him? You want to ditch him? Go ahead. Yeah. Let's try it. Okay. Just stay close to the mic.

Yeah. Okay. You got good hair. We got to show that off. Oh yeah. Also guys, he has size 14 feet. So why are his feet so big?

Why are they so big, bro? I have no idea. Big feet, big sandals. That's right. Exactly. They did say that.

I have no idea why that happened, but I'm not particularly tall. I'm like six foot, but yeah, long feet. And it's always been a swimmer. Did you ever try swimming with those things? You know, big ass fins. I think actually one of the reasons that I'm doing this is because I've always had a problem with my feet. And I think the more I look into and read about and just get the feedback from our customers and stuff is realize a lot of people have had problems with their feet, like more than you can imagine. In fact, I'm thinking of a guy right now. It's Patrick Willis, one of my favorite football players of all time. He was amazing. He was amazing. He was amazing, but you know what? I'm pretty sure what took him out of the league was all the surgeries on his feet. What kind of surgeries did he get?

Do you know? I don't know, but I just recall that he had injuries and he was just tired of dealing with the injuries. And I think in particular, I don't want to speak for him or something like that, but I think he was having foot issues too. Yeah, left big toe. Left big toe. So he just kept getting that done, yeah.

Yeah, and I bet you if I had to guess that his left big toe was, you know, in a shoe that was shaped like this. And they want your left big toe to be somewhere in the middle of your foot. That's the fuckery with cleats. You're producing so much force too. I mean that's when you're asked to like, it's a game. know it's game time it's competition time you're running as fast as you can you're trying to slam into people as hard as you can do you remember having because you play horrible yeah so like do you remember because you have wide feet too yeah so how was your

experience in cleats it was always awful yeah um we played against a couple of schools that had turf and you got to wear more like a uh like a like a sneaker, which was at least a little wider. So I remember that didn't happen until my junior year, and I was like, oh, my God. Thank God we get to play some of these teams here and there. My foot gets a little bit of a break. But I remember we were all bitching about it. We had calluses, and we didn't know though we're just like oh you just it's normal because you're i think you think the cleat is supposed to be super tight and it probably is supposed to fit tight probably

supposed to feel snug but it's not supposed to like hurt you and be detrimental and to jam all your toes together yeah part of the game but see i didn't even know this because like i was just like super bitter when patrick will retired. Me too. Sad. So, let's see. Here we go. His tender feet, size 13. Tender feet? Yeah, that's what it says. Twelve and a half when they're bent. Can no longer handle the grind of NFL practices

let alone the demands of game day. And we're talking about, in that time, this was the best middle linebacker in the game. If you'd given him three or four more years, he's one of the best middle linebacker in the game. If you'd given him three or four more years, I mean, he's like one of the best middle linebackers of all time. He would rack up so many tackles, it was ridiculous. Like an average linebacker, like a good linebacker in the NFL,

he might get to like 100 tackles or something. He was like doubling that every year. He would get interceptions and shit, but I'm just wondering. He was all over the field. Just blown away. It's like if other NFL teams and people know like know like oh he retired because cleats are fucking stupid yeah like there should have been a totally like whole change across the board oh yeah i don't i really don't understand why they couldn't have found him something better and but i think people

are so um there's so much misunderstanding about our feet and they just, I think we're so conditioned to our feet going into whatever looks popular, you know, whatever we're used to. And there's this saying, this one professor I had years ago, he was like talking about this one issue and he goes,'s not he goes it's not profound it's obvious and that's like i think part of the problem with modern footwear we're so accustomed to it it's like so i i brought this shoe maybe i'll show it i've been using this dude you're really fucking strong by the way you just ripped that shoe right and it didn't even make a sound it was just like yeah this is jedi shit so christ so i have this shoe here i know it's kind of silly but i just threw this on the bandsaw cut it in half and um you know you covered up the branding i just realized i bought it at ross too i just went in and got like the cheapest like this looks like what i

think a shoe most people think a shoe looks, but we're just trapped in this paradigm. It's simple, but you look at this, like on the outside, you see a shoe kind of flat, but then like so many things, I think that when you ask one or two or three questions, you realize there's not much like holding up, you know, this idea. Yeah. and I call it like three questions deep why sugar bad and you start to go down the thing and it's like the person doesn't have a great explanation like zero yeah a lot of times it's even like one in the then you find out there's the man behind the curtain you know it's the Wizard of Oz so in this case what's going on with shoe companies it's

totally nuts. But this is – you think of your foot just sitting there flat. Well, it's presented as flat. But then when you cut it in half, you look into it. This is the resting position. I don't know what they see or don't see. But the resting position for your foot. Imagine if you were barefoot and your foot was like – you're standing on a flat surface. And you go – your foot would would just your heel would be down it would be the heel would be at the same elevation as the big toe

like that's obvious you know you might have a little bit of an arch built up and your toes would kind of be splayed and you'd be nice and comfortable that's another thing i could spin off for quite a while and i'll actually come back to that why they'd be comfortable but so their idea of a resting position is that your heel is three quarters of an inch higher than the middle of your foot at rest and then the toe i mean this is crazy and you just look at it for a minute and you can see all this stuff the idea is that your toe that's your big toe is going to be lifted up elevated so what we know about tendons is they're basically just like big rubber bands and if you just let a rubber band not be stretched it'll it'll shrink and so they're putting your big

toe in a position where you're actually shrinking it and your foot's never actually relaxed you're never going to be comfortable in this um and then there's other huge problems like you know you've got this i mean look where the big toe actually is and this is probably what patrick willis was dealing with yeah his big toe is moved over here it's being shoved in the middle of the shoe and that like maybe you can get away with that for a while when you're just you you know, walking around in the, you know, in the mall. But when you, like Patrick Willis, one of the most amazing things I've ever seen him do was, was it against the Cardinals? He ran down a wide receiver over like 70 yards. It was just like, that was crazy.

235 pounds or whatever the hell he was. Just sprinted faster than the wide receiver. Just nuts. But if you put those tendons and ligaments and all that stuff under load, they're going to start to conform to this shape, and you're going to make them do things they can't do. I have a little story. I didn't play college football or anything,

but I used to play men's slow-pitch softball. It's a big deal. Why is it called slow pitch? Yeah, why? Why? Because it's underhand. It's never going to – No, I know, but do you have to pitch it slow?

You do because the minimum height has to clear at least six feet. So like – and the strike zone is on the plate. The pitching mound is different than in softball than is in baseball right yeah it's oh there's not a mound there's no mound it's just flat so that ball's got to get over six feet and you have to have an arc otherwise if you threw it hard over six feet it would just like shoot off into the you know i like it you got a good opportunity to hit the ball yeah so anyways it's where you go when your dreams are dead oh sorry when you're when your dreams are dead and like all your you know hope of like

being a major league baseball player when you're a kid it's just low pitch you get like three swings like in the cartoon and it gets serious you got some guys that can throw a strike and the ball is like 20 feet in the air before it drops down so it gets

you know there's still some competition but I mean I always like part of my game was speed and I would play the outfield

and one of the things when I did kind of get into minimalist footwear I was still having to wear regular cleats and I had this pair of I don't mean to knock them, but it was like Deodoras. I think it was Deodoras.

And it was like a good, it might've even been Sambas. I'm not sure. I think it was Deodoras. So there was like a good cleat, but it was narrow. And so it was a leather cleat. I had my feet tight in there. You know, I'm laced up because I'm going to sprint to first base.

And I would get plantar fasciitis, sprinting to first base. What is that? Can you describe that a little bit? Like, what's that feel like? Terrible. It's the fascia, like those connective tissues just tearing off the bottom of your foot. tissues just tearing off the bottom of your foot. And so I think my conclusion was I got that because as I was running, my foot was tensed and it wasn't able to relax and go through its full cycle. Yeah, your foot needs to kind of like do like a little mini explosion every time it lands,

right? It like webs out, right? So yeah. And boy, man, these are, there's so many deep topics, like everyone I want to share with you, but I would tear my, my foot and I would be out there trying to run and I have this terrible pain. It's like a burning pain and it'll take six weeks, six months to get over it. And then you re injure it. And then there's a little plug for Vivo Barefoot. So I wore my Vivos out to the – they had this shoe. Please bring it back, Vivo. It's called the Breatho Trail. Breatho Trail.

It was an older one, super soft upper, and it had these great lugs on the bottom. It's a nice-looking shoe. I've seen it before. It's got like netting or something in it or something. It's super soft on the top, just a phenomenal shoe. And I would just wear those barefoot. I wouldn't wear any socks, so my foot could really spread out, and I kind of had that good connection, and I could run as fast as I want. I wouldn't tear my plantar fasciitis.

I wouldn't have plantar fasciitis anymore. But I noticed it was just a matter of letting my foot relax and I could sprint as fast as I wanted. So you were saying, Mark, like what our foot needs to do, it's kind of a... I'll send you a clip of it, Andrew. I found something today. But yeah, you can kind of continue talking.

I know like that ground contact time we were talking about a little bit, and there's some differences between like just kind of starting out with like a nice brisk job versus somebody trying to be super fast. But the ground contact time, like if you're trying to sprint and trying to be fast, you don't want a lot of it. But your body has to be able to handle those impacts. be able to handle those impacts. And I think that we think, I think generally it's thought that if we're going to be able to handle that impact, you should be real springy and real pliable. But a lot of times what we actually see in sprinting is these guys are pretty stiff because you need that stiffness to kind of spring back up out of there. Right.

Yeah. So that's a lot of topics. Um, I think it all kind of starts with the foot and our concept of what the foot does. I think when you see this, mostly you're thinking that, I'll say one other thing is that most shoe companies are telling you that your foot's wrong. They're just like, it's broken and you need to fix it. You should have had three quarters of an inch more heel than you were born with. And when most people put shoes like this on, they're like, Oh, it's so soft. It's so comfortable. It's for the first 10 minutes in the store, right? You know, that little sugar rush. So they, they think your foot is broken and they, there's no concept of like what a foot does. So this basically is like foot's broken, and we need to make it stiff.

We need to make it a block. And the whole idea when you see all this padding, you're like, oh, good, there's padding. Because if I didn't have padding, I would crush my feet in three or four steps. But the reality is our foot is our hand. It's the mirror image of your hand. And if you had to walk everywhere on your hands, how would you do it? What would it be like? That's really a lot closer to what your foot's job is or the way it moves itself. And so a question I ask people all the time,

you know, I've been doing this for years now and I kind of have to sell people on, you know, I've been doing this for years now and I kind of have to sell people on, it's okay to just have like, you know, five millimeters, 10 millimeters and flat. Please don't lose your train of thought. But as I was thinking about what you were mentioning about the foot and the hand, I was thinking of like maybe somebody doing handstand walks, but even rewind to somebody just doing, just trying to crawl, right? If you were wearing normal shoes and you're trying to crawl on your feet,'d be clomping and then you'd feel like some you'd feel it go up your elbow you'd probably feel some shit in your shoulder because your your hands are not able to actually move they're clomping like most shoes have your feet do they clomp and you don't realize it but

it's going to your knee it's going to your lower back it's going up the chain yep so i have a like i have a lot on that one in a minute but the hand imagine if you've seen like a skilled gymnast and they're walking on their on their hands can you get on the microphone oh sorry about that yeah they're a skilled gymnast is probably just placing and we want to think about running or walking as placing the foot and then so this is this is our huge piece of it so i ask people all the time do you even know why you have an arch do you know nasima uh do you know mark i don't all right here you go an arch is the structure of tendons and ligaments and muscles and bones and its whole job is to compress with each step pretty simple it's just a spring we've all been this is that whole like obvious and profound thing

it should be pretty obvious there's a structure on the bottom of your foot that compresses each time you step yeah it's there for a reason but if you look at these shoes you know they've built in arch support i kind of cut it i understand like if you're and people do end up with like a flattish foot right but like your foot kind of has nowhere to go if it's already tilted inward and so the design is so that you're a little bit on uh i guess toes three four and five and rotated out a little bit especially like when you're running you're going to kind of rotate out towards those other toes, right?

Yeah. So when we think about pronation, pronation is literally like our foot kind of, because your foot could be really flat or it could be taller as an arch. It's building itself and it's loading. It's getting ready for that compression cycle. And, you know, it's something good for everyone to think about because you, I mean, if you have

a goal in mind at any aspect, any area in life, you know, you want to know how to accomplish that goal. If your foot is just, you know, a hoof, right. And you're just going to pound it over. And that's not even true. Even a horse's hoof has an elastic quality. I didn't know that. I'm thinking of that scene in Jurassic Park when that giant foot comes down and it just squishes. That's kind of like what my foot looks like a lot of times. It just turns into this big giant circle. But everyone's foot kind of does that. Like people don't realize it. It doesn't matter if it's Hussein Bolt or doesn't matter how great an athlete

you're talking about. If you slow down the footage of them in a full sprint, their foot is like exploding down towards the ground. And it looks like, it looks like they're going to hurt themselves. Yeah. Because of the, there's so much force being produced. It's going into the toes, kind of on the outside edge of the – there's so much force being produced. It's going into the toes kind of on the outside edge of the foot. And sure enough, that inside will collapse a bit.

Maybe it won't touch the ground because maybe they have an arch there. But the heel definitely comes down too. So the whole foot just starts to slam towards the ground even though the intention is not to like – we're not trying to heel strike. But the heel is going to at least tap the ground no matter what you do. It is going to – and that's actually like one of those things where – so I made a lot of mistakes when I first started. I was mentioning I was out there playing softball and saw this guy wearing his Vibram FiveFingers and was like, what's the deal, dude? Because I thought he was wearing booties because I'm from Santa Cruz and we got surfers. But I'm like, we're all competitors here.

We're playing a pretty high level. And it was just weird to have this guy wearing booties. And I looked into it. I investigated. I loved the whole concept behind it. But one of the things I did early on is I thought, you know what, maybe we're more like a dog. You know, a dog's got its foot

and it's kind of got its heel is kind of where like our knee is, you know. And maybe like so we're not supposed to touch that heel and we're supposed to just be running on our toes. But that can cause a lot of damage too. And the reason is because that heel, we use the heel when we walk and then when we run. So it's okay to land on the heel when you're walking, but when you're running, it's a problem. And the whole point is that arch is going to compress with each step. And once it compresses, now the whole foot is flat. And that gives you time in your cycle of running to rest.

If you don't get rest each step, you will burn yourself out. And then you're going to put a lot of, you're going to change the, like the forces of your body on the ground. You're going to just transfer it always like into your knees or in your tendons or whatever, and you'll burn yourself up. Just imagine, just imagine how quickly something like this would stop. If we were talking about something different, imagine instead of talking about shoes, we're talking about a bed. Oh yeah.

You know, like I'm going to get into a bed where I'm going to be like this every night where I'm going to be fucking crumpled up and I can't, how many nights in a row am I going to sleep? I mean, you're putting your shoe, your foot into a shoe six, eight hours every day. Yeah.

And it's got to be shrunken into this screwed up position and we're supposed to just be able to adapt to it. But the body's not going to want to ever adapt to it and your foot will go the other way as soon as you get it out of those goddamn shoes. You know, I think there have been studies like on pronation and it's like the people that are trying to stop the pronation and movement because of the arch support and stuff like that

end up creating another problem further down the line. Anyways, we kind of have this machine, these biomechanics that are incredible i mean i always think about like could you you know look at boston dynamics and their freaking scary you know robot that jumps around oh god i know dude i i'm like terminator two fridman yeah i know i've never been afraid of robots to be honest with you that one's terrifying did you see the black mirror episode based off of that I didn't but I can only imagine oh god did any of you guys see it I don't remember a robot thing you've seen it it's terrifying oh jesus because

we all know they're gonna put a gun on it they're gonna teach it jujitsu for sure dude it's jumping and rolling what the fuck you're gonna show up at Casio's and that guy's going to come get you. Dude. Is that a real clip? No, this can't be real. This is fake. Yeah, that looks fake. Yeah, it's real.

No, this is fake. Is it? I think so. I think it's CGI. Have you seen the one where it's on the boxes? Wait, really? I don't know. Put noise to it.

Does it have any noise? Like, wouldn't it be making some... Unfortunately, it's probably real. Oh, man. I have seen some of the stuff they to it. Does it have any noise? Like, wouldn't it be making some, unfortunately it's probably real. Oh man. I have, I have seen some of the stuff they've done. It's pretty wild. It looks like we just got music.

Oh, no, no, no. We got, now I believe it more with the noise, the fake noise they put in. Like,

here we go. Yeah, we're fucked. They had the thing doing fucking CrossFit. yeah we're fucked there's one with a little dog at a shooting range and they just put like an ar-15 on it and it's just like oh no i know it's hard to like make something out of nothing but like it's it's really cool that the design of some of these things that they're making are designed of the human body like with the human body being uh or at least i mean there's animal stuff too i guess they're taking like the leg of a fucking deer or whatever but interesting it's unnerving but i always would say like you know look how many billions of dollars they're spending to do this. And you.

They just had guns. I'm sorry. I'm going to turn this off. We'll give you nightmares, man. Those guys are going to need some shamas. Those tires are going to wear out. Oh, my God. Yeah.

You know, they spend billions of dollars trying to recreate what you actually have hardwired into your brain. And then whoever, we won't name whoever, is like, oh, you need this padding that costs us. You know, I guarantee you this is so ridiculously cheap, this foam. And they want you to rely on their foam rather than to rely on your own equipment. I mean, it's that simple. The crappy thing is that it continues actually to lead you down that rabbit hole. Yeah. Because, number one, those types of shoes.

I mean, I wore cleats. When I started doing the barefoot thing, my feet weren't nearly as strong as they were now, but it was an uphill battle. Like there's different things that were happening to my feet, different pains, et cetera. But if you continue going down that rabbit hole of normal shoes your feet can get weaker and weaker you're gonna keep needing more art support different types of you know just fancy shit in your shoes because your feet are fucking weak oh yeah right so it's it's pretty crazy and one thing that was very interesting when we were watching you here you were doing some stuff with your foot and your sandal, is I wish we were able to see the tendon on your big toe. Graham, once he saw it, he got an immediate erection

because the tendon on your big toe is so thick. What did Little Richard say? He heard Jimi Hendrix and he said it made his big toe shoot out of his boot. But it does make me wonder, Mark, myself, Andrewrew we have noticed our feet changing over this past year like the tendons are getting thicker my feet have gotten wider i put my feet into my crocs that i have and i was like wow my feet are now feeling the edge and the width of the croc my croc is now too not not wide enough yeah for my feet but you've been doing this for almost over a decade, like about 13 years.

How have your feet changed? What did you notice? Well, um, my feet have, uh, I will say that the first six months was not, Oh,

sorry about that guys. I'm a rookie here. Um, so the first six months were, uh, I about that, guys. I'm a rookie here. So the first six months were, my calves especially were just like on fire. Like everything, I was tight and I was tense. And I was on the verge probably of tearing a muscle, like every muscle in my leg. And I did this at 30 years old. It was just like, oh, this is something I got to do.

And I just absolutely loved it. But my legs were just so tight and so tense because essentially my calves, you know, you had just, I had this new engagement of everything below the knees like I'd never had before. new engagement of everything below the knees like I'd never had before. And I went from being a guy who was willing to, I'd run to chase a ball or I ran a little bit when I was dating my wife because I wanted to be, you know, impress her and just hang out, whatever I could do to run all the time. Yeah. I love this. You got like shin splints. You're like totally dying. We're married. And I'm like, oh yeah yeah i just can't make the run today it's i have to yeah i gotta wash my clothes darn it so um so like that was why i would run and then all of a sudden i'm like wait a minute i want to run and it i feel like it's such

a deep issue this whole running thing it's like so mean, I'm kind of amazed at you, Mark, you're like power lifter. Now you're just like into running and there's something like deep in us. It's the foundation of everything we do in terms of our athletics. It's always a part of us. So, you know, it's not surprising that we want to run and, you know, we have this, this great ability to, but I was, I was running way too much. I went from like zero to a hundred, like real quick. If I had been older, I would have killed myself. Um, and so I saw a Chris McDougal. He was the, he's the author of born to run. And he, he did this, uh, this little talk at Google one day and I watched it online and, and he was saying, it's not a

panacea, this whole minimalist thing. You cannot just throw your vibram five fingers. You can't just take your shoes off and like, everything's going to be perfect. Yeah. You know, like anything you do in life, you have to train for it. You have to like, uh, acclimate yourself. And, um, it. You have to like, uh, acclimate yourself. And, um, so there's a, there are a lot of, a lot of problems. And I think that's where most people have had problems going to minimalist footwear. They enjoy the first mile. I actually talked to this guy. He, he's a good athlete. And, um, he was telling me that he's like, I tried the five fingers and, you know, I'd go on these 10 mile runs and then, you know, my feet were, were sore or I was hurting myself or whatever. Right. Yeah. And, uh, he's

like, I liked it at first, but then I didn't. Well, there's a reason he liked it at first because he had enough, uh, strength and stamina in the muscles in his feet to run two miles, but he didn't have enough to run 10 miles. That was going to take him training. It's that simple. And so all these things like, you know, someone might, you guys know the weightlifting thing a lot better than I do, but maybe somebody jumps on and they can throw some big weight up like once or twice.

But try it three and four times and then you get the muscle fatigue. Now you really hurt yourself. To add on to what you're saying right there, the amount of comments that I've seen because we've been talking about this stuff for a while now. So there are a lot of people that have been going down this journey too and they're having massive benefit. But you'll see comments every now and then. People like, man, I did the Vipers for a few months and I got injured. Or, man, I did this barefoot thing for a few months and my Achilles has been on fire. This is not okay. This is bad. But it's because again the shit's gradual there's a you you

you you progress and then you regress a little bit you got to calm down yep and then you adapt and then you progress a little bit more it's it's a slow process with your body getting used to all this yeah exactly um i think like it's amazing what you can do like training wise. I started doing more pull-ups in this last year, right? And it's like I was hurting my shoulder at first. But then I like gradually over six months, now I'm doing an extra 80 pull-ups a week. Let's go. And it's like my shoulder is not hurting. Well, because I'm, now I'm doing an extra 80 pull-ups a week. And, and it's like,

it's like my shoulder's not hurting. Well, cause I didn't do it all at once. Right. You, you have to work into these things and your foot is no different. And, and, uh, so the, you, and then there's also issues that are confounding, like, um, like your technique techniques, always huge. like your technique. Technique's always huge. And so why do we think, I've had my foot, this is neat. Your technique might not matter as much when you put the shoes on. That's the selling point of the shoes.

That's why they get you. It's also – It is helpful. Like if you put a shoe on, your run might feel better. And the ones they make now with the carbon foot plate and everything, it's like the super shoes, they feel amazing. They spring you along. They help cushion the blow. There's less pressure on the knees, less pressure on the calves.

But if you return to other forms of shoes, other types of shoes, you'll notice you'll get – the way I look at it is like I don't view anything as necessarily being good or bad. I just view them as being different. Like if I want a different training stimulus, I'll hop back into these shoes. If I want a little bit extra spring, I want to see if I can cut back my time. Maybe I will put – I have a pair of Nike Alpha Fly. My foot does not fit very well on it.

So it's really rare for me to put it on at this point because I'm like I don't want to take any steps backwards. I want full access to my feet because I think one thing that some people are missing, like there's people listening to the show right now, they may have already tuned out and they're like, I don't have any problem with my feet, but their knees hurt, their back hurts, their hip hurts. And it's like, if you investigate the feet, you might find, you might find that you're going to notice some relief upstream. Yeah.

So I think a lot of people aren't maybe paying attention to some of that. And when we had Anya on the show, she was mentioning that her beginning stages was to just simply, I think, not wear shoes inside the house. Yeah. That was her first step because she was in so much pain. And I know there's people listening that are probably in similar pain. They got to put on sandals or slippers or something like that just to walk in their own kitchen. And that's when you know that there's a problem and it doesn't take hokas and you don't just keep stacking up a bunch of foam underneath your foot, which is a logical thing to think about. Yeah.

It does make sense. And I know that some people do get relief from that and that's great. But, again, if you's great but again if you investigate the feet if you can help strengthen them and what i like about your product uh the shama sandals is that it's a way to like train your foot yeah just while you're on a walk yeah and so like you know why not okay maybe you don't maybe you're not used to the way they look yeah and maybe you're not used to is there something wrong with the way they look. And maybe you're not used to... Is there something wrong with the way they look, Mark?

Yes. Jesus Christ 11s? No. No, it's just people are used to Jordans, right? People are used to, oh, these are $130, even though these are well-made and they have a cost to them as well. But it's just people aren't used to it as much. It's so funny when you wear the five finger shoes and people go, those are ugly.

And you're like, that's the human foot, my brother. That's all that is. I actually think that, I'm sorry if you think the human foot is ugly, you're going to have to talk it up with this guy. I have a... And look at what Jesus is wearing real quick. He's got sandals.

Oh yeah. All these are Adidas. Yeah, what does he have? He's got sandals. Oh, yeah. He definitely has sandals. Oh, these are Adidas. No, I'm just kidding. He's got Adidas slides on. He's all chill. Feet pointed out. AD 30s. He's got easy AD 30s.

So, yeah, I think actually it's a funny thing like with our product too is that it's very unisex. And I think they actually actually i think they look good oh sorry about that sorry we're just gonna have outtakes of you yeah there's a list we just want to hear your story that's all it is it's really choppy um so i think that yeah we actually i think our our customers it's like 60 40 males to females females, which is crazy. Let's go. Cause I'm not exactly the most stylish person. I've never been, uh, it's never been like the thing that like I would get accused of. Um, and here I am like making a product that men and women are putting on their feet, which I think is cool. And I think the reason it works is that it just, it's again, it's a

minimalist design. Like that's kind of a key thing for me and our design, but it's, uh, it just highlights your foot. And I think the human body is beautiful. It's an incredible design. Um, and I think most people like, uh, you know, when you highlight it and show it off, you know, it looks great. So it's not the sandal. It's your foot. You know, feet are great. People have beauty to them. I actually get a lot of compliments on them.

And it's just a conversation starter. Some people are like, oh, what are those? Yeah. Because they recognize them right away because it's unconventional. Yeah. People aren't used to. And then some of the people I've talked to, this is when I was in Hawaii, they were like,

I just have these flip-flops and I was like, well, let me explain to you. Flip-flops, they kind of make your toes crunch and you've got to hold on to them and it's better to have something that straps to your foot, makes it a little more secure. And they were like, really? I never knew that.

There's so much that you can do to benefit your foot on a flip-flop if it just had a heel strap. There's other problems. Like a lot of flip-flops have the heel toe drop, which I don't like, the arch support. But man, if you just put a heel strap on, you would be in much better shape because at the end of the day, you want your foot to be relaxed. If you notice, we were talking about plantar fasciitis when you're running, you know, your foot's got to do a lot of stuff. And I think this is an important concept. And maybe you guys can see, maybe it rings true with like weightlifting, but like when I would do construction, I did construction for a lot of years. And when you're doing something wrong, you're pulling a nail out wrong, or using

your saw wrong, you're struggling. You're just struggling when you're doing it right. When your technique's good, everything lines up, you're relaxed. That doesn't mean you're not working, but you're in a much better place. You know, you're using the muscles properly and you're leveraged properly. Construction is perfect example that your back will be on fire trying to handle like a saw or something like that. You're like, I must be doing something wrong. And then it gets dangerous. You're like trying to push it along and it doesn't work. And when you're doing it right, it's just smooth, man. Everything kind of lines up. Well, that's the deal. I really think that when these are set up right and when you're walking, your foot should be relaxed.

So it can just do its job. In fact, so one of the things that – I did this little series on YouTube years ago. I'm not plugging my YouTube channel or anything. But if you subscribe, that'd be pretty cool. Just kidding. Super lame. I'm on my part. I was totally joking uh so in any case the uh the first thing you need

to do when you're actually running or anything you just need to stand up straight i mean your body is and that's the first thing you got to do if If your form is all over the place, you're not going to run well. You're not going to walk well. You're not going to move well. I'm not talking past, like stretching out as far as you can and talking about like your reasonable, natural, proper posture. So we got to start tall because if you think about it, if you are trying to run and maybe you're like three or four inches lower than your actual height. Now, you've changed all the biomechanics throughout your whole body. You can make problems with your foot the same way.

It's like – so we have to get ourselves into good positions, good technique. And anyways, I'm not quite sure where I'm going with that. You mentioned earlier your calves getting on fire and I've experienced some stuff like that. We had a guy in here, Ben the Bounce. He came on our show, and Ben had a lot of great information. You sometimes forget sometimes some of the people that we get around. He's world class. He does a bobsled, and he's really, really fucking fast and really explosive.

And he was telling me with my runs, he's like, Oh, he's like, you might want to like, just get off your toes a bit. And I was like, I was thinking like,

you got to land on your toes when you run, aren't you supposed to kind of, and I know like you're not specifically trying to land on the toes. You're trying to land a little bit more like, like mid foot strike, I guess. But I guess I just wasn't really realizing that because of that, of me being conscious or me being self-conscious of heel striking, I was just continually on my toes and my calves

were super tight. And he's like, if you just land more in the middle of your foot and probably don't worry about it as much, he's like, your calves will be fine. And that made a huge difference. Now I'm like massaging my calves and they're like lighter. Before they were so stiff. I couldn't even really massage them. I couldn't get any relief in them because they were just like blocks.

I didn't feel anything in them hardly. How about the bottom of your feet too on the Nebosa thing? It's probably not as painful as it used to be, right? Yeah. Yeah. All of that's starting to heal up quite a bit. And then if I do find like a little ridge or find something down there with this little tiny black ball that we use, this little marble, it seems to help and give me like almost some immediate relief, especially for the next day for running. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just standing up straight and kind of relaxing.

So like, you know, there's, that's, I guess this conversation started with maybe some of the problems I said, it's not a panacea, you know, people like, okay, I tried the footwear and it didn't fix it instantly. Um, it's such, I mentioned the word deep. It's a deep problem. It's a deep issue. You know, we run, we don't run in two dimensions. We run in three dimensions. our whole body is engaged and there are so many problems from top to bottom so like one thing i have a uh this this therapist um friend i was mentioning earlier um he runs this company called power lab and it's uh it's a good name it's got power in it you know it's uh but uh he's he's a great uh. It's got power in it. Always good. But he's a great therapist.

And he was telling me like, look, okay, Josh, one of the problems you have is you stick your chest out too much when you run. And so what that will cause, if my chest is out, now I can't raise my knee as high. I wouldn't have known that unless I had this great therapy. Because maybe like overextension, maybe like, um, well, yeah, I've, I've created less space now, I think for my knee to come up and then you can do the opposite thing. You can go too far forward. So for me, he tells me like, Josh, give yourself a hug when you're running. It'll look kind of silly, but just hug yourself for like a hundred yards and then stop and then do it again.

So the point – Do you like to lean forward at all or not really? Yes. Yes. So you start straight and then you just get a little bit of a lean forward. Yeah, there's always a little bit of a lean. I think they – some people have said like the faster guys that do not necessarily sprinting. It gets to be confusing between like jogging and running and sprinting, but they have like a 20% lean or whatever.

Yes. I think a 20% lean sounds, or maybe I'm saying 20 degrees. I don't even know, but it's just a slight lean forward. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

And it should be from the ankle. Right. And so it's definitely not at the waist. Little Michael Jackson, right? Yeah. Just when you feel like you got to fall that's about where your lean should be right yeah exactly and that's one of the things they say is like you watch a

child when they run they almost like when they start they look like they're falling over you know they're standing up straight and they just kind of start falling and they they move they go with it oh yeah they use their head like your son using that big bunker yeah he's very top heavy right now and it's weird because like to put to put on the brakes obviously is like the like part of that freaks me out the most but like he stops but his head like i don't i gotta pay attention to where that goes when he starts to slow down if you like like he's like a uh like a floating like bottle or something you know yeah that's a funny thing with your kids too you don't realize like i got four daughters and my um first hat

i know it's it's heaven amazing it's pretty good yeah actually do you have sons daughters mark i got combo got a boy and a girl okay yeah so like i have four girls though i have two my brother has four girls and it's a lot i have two boys one girl two boys one girl joel rogan did a whole sketch on having uh four girls it was amazing does he have four yeah i didn't know that yeah or at least maybe four if you count the wife maybe yeah yeah i'd go to my buddy's house and he had the he had the uh he had two boys or i'd go to my brother before he had his third kid which was a girl and it'd be like there's there's dirt and there's snot and there's

yelling and throwing and you go to my house they're like reading books and cooking oh my it's peaceful like this isn't so bad because i have five brothers wow so yeah so i'm used to just chaos just chaos yeah my poor mom. Any sisters or no? No. Well, my brother Joel. He may as well be. That's great. But yeah, I don't even know what we were talking about.

It doesn't matter. The lean. The lean, yeah, yeah, yeah. The leaner the better. That's what we were saying. The leaner the better. Yeah, get on a diet. It's pretty simple.

the leaner the better that's what we're saying the better yeah get on a diet it's pretty simple yeah so i guess maybe the you know that just kind of opens up a whole like pandora's box because you're talking about the lean and like well how do you actually run like most i was talking to nasima earlier and it's like he was a talented runner now he wasn't like sprinter, but he played soccer. Okay. If you're a good soccer player, you have some type of talent in running. Now I'm not saying you've been professionally coached on how to run or anything like that, but you have this like kind of talent that's innate. Um, and so a lot of us, we just, we do it, but we never think about it. I consider myself a good

runner. You know, it didn't matter, soccer, baseball, football. I'm, I could run as fast or as quick as anybody out there, but I was never taught. I never like even considered like, well, what are the actual steps? What am I trying to accomplish here? And when you start breaking it down and considering it, there's, there's just a lot going on. And I think it would benefit a lot of people just to consider like, well, how does my foot work in relationship to my legs for walking and for running and for hiking? And then you'd realize, well, maybe I've got too much on my foot. Where did you look? Did you start to look, you know, as your calves were feeling like they're going to look? Did you start to look, uh, you know, as your calves were feeling

like they're going to explode, did you start to look around maybe the internet or something like that and try to investigate how to run? Or you mentioned some books maybe? Yeah. I read born to run pretty early on. I did a lot of silly things early on. Um, like what? This is good stuff. What did you do? Well, one of the silliest things I did was it was like just this total eye-opening experience that, wait a minute, I don't need shoes and maybe the barefoot thing will work. But instantly I'm like, I can't go barefoot. That's just going to be too hard on my feet. They're going to be abrased and all that. And so there was this chain of stores in California called Mervin's. I don't know if you remember. And we used to get, my mom would give us these moccasins every year, you know, the slippers. This is pretty silly. I tore

the liner out of the moccasin. And if you've been to santa cruz um we have west cliff it's this pretty nice like you know two and a half mile uh road that everyone runs and and bikes on i wore moccasins and i ran the whole thing in moccasins because when i tore the liner out there was just like this thin like two three millimeter sole in it and i looked like a complete moron but i did it you know and then um i didn't do that too long and i was trying to like cut the bottoms off of shoes and i was just like anything oh my gosh i it just made sense and i was doing whatever i could um and then my father-in-law he's gonna hate me for me for this. I'm sorry, Mike. I got to tell this story again. But he worked for the water department and I told him about it.

And Mike is the kind of guy that anything like new idea, he'd give it a try at least once. And so I told him about the barefoot thing. He's, oh yeah, we're in it. Like he was just like ready to do it. oh yeah, we're in it. Like he was just like ready to do it. And so he went online and he found out how to make the sandals like from scratch,

from like some paracord at the hardware store. So he bought some, he got the little punches and he figured out how to do it. And so he used to work for the water department and he brought home this like clamp. They used to put this rubber clamps on a big hose or big pipes to to keep it from leaking and so i'd like to say he stole it from the water

department he made me a pair of sandals he hates that though he didn't steal it he just borrowed it yeah and uh fired so he he made me this pair of sandals and it was my first pair of barefoot sandals and I ran West Cliff in them and they're tied on with the paracord and they were terrible. And they were slapping and flopping and all over the place. And so anyways, I would do ridiculous stuff like that. But that actually is a really important thing. I think it kind of – all these things are like little pieces to the puzzle maybe is how i think of it um like why why we shouldn't be wearing stuff like this and why we should be focused more on you know uh like it's funny a lot of the shoes that are out there that

could be they could be all right if they were just changed like 20%, 30%. They won't be. Specifically widened, right? Yeah. It's like wider and just not a raised heel. And we don't need to get too mad about it at that point. Yeah, totally. Well, the thing about the slapping.

So the reason these sandals were so bad is I think this is a real – this has been a challenge in making the sandals like how kind of developed them is that so there's this concept and i was talking to you guys earlier about this how um when like you watch a gymnast stick the landing right so when a gymnast you know does their thing on the pommel horse or whatever and they stick the landing after this big jump you watch them they push their hand they push their feet in and their hands go up but importantly their feet push in they keep pushing in because until your body feels something firm it's not going to stop pushing in. It's just going to keep going. Well, imagine if you've got a whole bunch of soft cushions or pillows under your feet.

Your body is just going to keep pushing in. Your body is searching for something firm so that it can stop pushing in and start the next part of the cycle. It's doing that because you are loading the arch. You're letting your foot do its compression cycle, essentially. the next part of the cycle it's doing that because you are loading the arch you know you're you're letting your foot do its compression cycle essentially and so this is a big piece of the puzzle to me it's like what's your foot doing well it's finding the ground so the same thing

happens with the sandals and and one of the things that i'm proud of that's been like a huge piece to all of this is how do you take something that's like razor thin and attach it to your foot and keep it from flopping around? Yeah. So those sandals I wore that my father-in-law made, um, you know, and,

and now that he's out of prison for stealing the, no kidding. Life's a lot better. No, uh, he, uh, it,

the material was really floppy it was just pure rubber yeah basically and so it's got a lot of flex a lot of wave and the lacing system couldn't control it very well and it's hard for me too because i have big feet 14 14 so it's a lot of real estate that you got to manage so i feel like people with maybe like, you know, a six or seven or an eight, like, and you're going to be able to hold anything on there pretty easily. So coming up with a system to keep the soul, a thin soul,

because then the thinner it gets, the less rigidity it has keeping that on your foot in a way that it's going to track with your foot. Cause like I was saying, it was slappy, but ultimately it was my foot was still searching. If part of that sandal meets the ground before my foot does, or yeah, before my foot does at the same time,

that's going to be a delay in the response of the sandal. That's a delay in your foot actually compressing. So it's going to make a less responsive experience of the sandal, that's a delay in your foot actually compressing. Yeah. Right? So it's going to make a less responsive experience and you're going to search longer than you need to. Pat Rodger, family, how's it going? We talk about sleep all the time on this podcast. That's why we partnered with Eight Sleep Mattresses.

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I know that sounds weird, but actually the bed starts vibrating around your head, and it doesn't wake up the entire household the way my phone used to do back in the day. So now I just kind of have the bed wake me up silently, and it's amazing. You guys got to head over to eight sleep.com slash power project. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash power project. When you guys go there, you'll see a banner across the top saying that you're going to receive $150 off automatically. So again, that's eight sleep.com slash power project to receive $150 off your pod pro cover or your pod pro cover and mattress combo links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes let's get back to the podcast i think a lot of these shoes that are out there they're in regard to like

we're just assuming that you don't know how to run yeah and so like that curved this kind of rocker style is really common in a running shoe where it's kind of leaned forward so that way you can lean forward and that way you can like start this kind of lean yeah uh if i heel strike if i mess up a bunch i'm fine you know but there are like a lot of repercussions to it as you're saying it's like blunting the vibrations that the body's supposed to kind of naturally feel has a little bubble shock thing on the back so you don't feel the heel quality really advanced technology there yeah and uh you can also like my experience in some of these has been every once in a while you're running and then all of a sudden you go and you just like your foot rolls and when your foot rolls and something that has this much rubber

underneath your underneath your uh foot that is pretty damn stressful to the ankle. And if you roll in something that's minimal, it's no different. It's not that much different than rolling barefoot. It's not going to hurt. Well, I hear like two really cool questions in there. One of them has to do with like rolling your ankle. And that, I had a friend, it was nighttime. It was like, I was like in college or a little after, and we had a buddy that we were all going to go out and

play soccer. And it's at night. So we went to a tennis court and my buddy was wearing something like this, you know, circa 2000. Yeah. And he rolled his ankle real bad because you're, it's just a high heel. You've've now created i did this one time on instagram um i was just showing like if you take this point here if there's a fulcrum point like on the side of your like this part of your ankle for instance now now you've got X number, whatever the physics are on the leverage to that point from the bottom of your foot. Now if you add an inch and a half, you've created a bigger lever to roll your ankle with. It's crazy. And again, I wouldn't play any sports in high heels, yet that's effectively what people are marketing all over the place.

what we're mark people are marketing all over the place the other thing you were saying which is like i feel like this is so big it's so huge is is um it's pain like people don't like pain we do everything i mean addiction is obviously a problem we do everything we can to avoid pain you know our chairs like most triam was pointing out this shoe has like a bubble on the back yeah it's trying to sell you on this is very cushiony this this is airy it's going to feel like you're running on clouds feel like you've got air underneath you and people are envisioning that's going to be a pain-free run exactly but we have this terrible idea about pain that pain's bad. You guys know, right? We all know this.

Everyone knows this is another obvious one. It's not profound, but it's deep, which is we need pain to help us learn in life, right? To grow. Just a small amount of it from like a pebble. Oh, yeah. Right? On the ground. Whether it's your foot or whether it's social situations. I mean, it's everything in our lives we need that feedback and if we cut it off we usually kill

ourselves you know it's funny the you you know the the idea of like a child putting their hand over a fire right and if there's some reason to have no sensory feedback there they can just hold it there for a long time yeah and their shit goes to a crisp it's the same thing with the feet man the amount of it no i know so many older athletes um in my life that i've known and i've looked at their feet in recent years yeah and i've just i just constantly see big toe just pointing in this direction their feet are like just it's not good over a long period of time yeah but even if you're older, you can improve. But right now, if you're in your 30s, 20s, whatever, fix this shit.

Yeah. Andrew, can you bring up that thing on the Nike site? Do you still have that kind of handy? I do. And it's funny because you guys were talking about like the high heel and how like, I don't know if they're like hiding it or dressing or whatever, but like on Nike's website, they are literally telling you that this is a good thing yeah um so this is a basketball shoe but uh i'll just read this whole um nike will never sponsor us now so you can bring this just don't want to

get sued by them that's all yeah two up on the screen as well okay let me um i watched the u.s open this year i've never i've never watched that much tennis in my life my wife's friends were into it and they were watching it and i i actually found myself like getting into it i was like this is fucking amazing like these are insane athletes that 19 year old kid that won it was ridiculous but i was like there is no fucking way they are playing at this high level in stock nike shoes yeah like these are bullshit nike shoes these are like custom like there's just it's not possible like i don't know the truth on that but i was just thinking in my head i'm like they cannot be running back and forth

like this in regular nikes you know die yeah nba players i've heard they have cussed like of all the the curry shoes all that one's out everybody, and this one's made specifically for him. Specifically for them. So all those high-level guys, they have specifically made shit for their feet. Yeah, well, this one is the Giannis shoe, I guess, whatever. Giannis. It's called Giannis, sorry.

Is that the guy in the Bucks? Yeah, fucking savage. So drive downhill. The lightweight midsole is hollowed out under the foot where the zoom blah, blah, blah position. This allows zoomsole is hollowed out under the foot where the zoom blah, blah, blah position. This allows zoom air units to be compressed underway and expand to help

energy. Also, they are slightly tilted forward and primed for your forward motion, like a 100 meter sprinter emerging from the starting block. So that way you can attack the rim. That's me. Did you know that Wilt Chamberlain apparently at the end of his career did a 50 mile ultra marathon holy shit and what did he wear his entire career chucks chucks right chuck taylor's yeah you know and the only problem i think chucks are heavy

and the big problem might not have been super wide, but- They're not that wide and the toe is messed up. But aside from that, it should make us all stop and think like, okay, he did it. It's not the, one of the things I, like I try and tell people, like why, I would ask people that are skeptical about the sandals and they say, well, doesn't that hurt? Isn't it, doesn't it hurt to walk around? It's so thin or whatever. And I go, well, at the end of the day, when you go home, do you ever take your shoes off and they go home? Like, yeah, sure. Like, do you walk around your, your kitchen on the tile or the hardwood and does it hurt and like no it doesn't well that's because once you have a hard surface you don't push in any harder than you need to in

fact your reaction time just speeds up yeah and you you're not actually i wonder if you guys have noticed this now he brought that up i don't think about taking my shoes off and having that be like a relief yes i don't yeah i used to i used to like i'd be on my shoes off and having that be like a relief. Yes. I don't. Yeah. I used to, I used to like, I'd be on my way home and I'm kind of like,

I can't wait just to kick these shoes off and just chill. Yep. I don't even think that I, I never, I didn't even think of it until you mentioned it. Now I'm like, Oh, that gap has closed a lot. Cause I might still be wearing these in my kitchen.

Just, just without even recognizing that you're still on. Yeah, totally. No, that's so true. That's a big deal. Do you guys like walking around the pool on the cement? Does it hurt?

No. No? Well, again, you're just being sold something you don't need. It's crazy. You know, the cool thing is that this is something that anyone who does strength training or has been lifting for a while kind of already understands. Within lifting, yeah, there are Olympic lifting shoes and squat university just came out with the first barefoot Olympic lifting shoe. But either way, the shoes are flat.

Like if you're an experienced lifter, you know that you want the bottom of your shoes to be flat. A lot of lifters choose to go with the deadlift slippers, right? Because it allows them to fully flex their feet into the ground and create as much force as possible. Now you wonder though, why am I only trying to wear the best shoes to create strength within my foot while I'm in the gym? Why don't I have something for when I'm moving around all day long, standing, doing everything else? Should I have something that allows me to, I don't know, express the most amount of strength

that my feet can? And you're not, and you're like we talked about earlier your feet will get they'll get stronger but they'll be in a relaxed position oh yeah this is not this is not your relaxed human it's not human it's like somebody's just telling you you are wrong and we have to we gotta fix it yeah this is you're not gonna change that structure of the foot and the way we're meant to move, you know? And here's the other thing that's kind of funny. We always think about this being the predominant view, but just all of human history. I mean, think about the Romans, how did they

conquer all those different lands or, or the Persians or whoever it was at whatever time they're running around in literally almost nothing. In fact, up until the 70s, all our running shoes were just like super flat, super thin. It was so – Do you know what changed that? His name was Coach Bowerman and Phil Knight. So they teamed up. There you go. And Coach Bowerman –

He knows his history. I like it. His whole idea was and he personally he created nike and he created his first uh shoe was called the cortez i believe and so what he did maybe you should if you could pull up an original cortez it's kind of interesting so his idea was that and he personally wasn't a runner himself. I mean, he coached a lot of runners,

but from what I've heard, I could be wrong. He wasn't like a great runner himself. He, his idea was if we add more padding to the heel, the runner can lengthen their stride. Okay. And this is another gigantic piece to the puzzle.

And there's some truth to that because you can relax your stride a bit but there might be a cost to it there's actually no truth to it sorry mark oh let's go what do you mean no i so the deal is watch so when you the way we're meant to land and run, we think that we're running past the vertical line on our body. We don't. Watch, like slow down a sprinter, an Olympic sprinter. They always land right underneath their body.

Running happens. I mean, your leg is coming forward, but it finishes underneath, and then you push down and back, kind of like the road the roadrunner i mean that's actually a very helpful idea but it's or like you maybe think about if you do tow it too much you will shorten your stride you're not towing it right you're landing midfoot and and so we're built vertically we're stacked vertically and that's what i'm talking about you got to stand up tall and when we're in our proper position we um and we're running right we should land underneath the body every time so his idea was let's have a longer stride because he actually didn't know what he was doing he basically created jogging the exercise

he created jogging paul so people don't. People don't know that jogging was created. It was created by one of the original co-fighters. He's right underneath, like as he's striking. Watch. I don't know. His foot looks a little forward. It was fine. Right there.

Right there. Like you paused it when he was ahead. No. Oh, when it lands. When it lands. When it hits the ground chill out bro i'm sorry i'm getting all hype pop right there and look how flat it is in that moment yep so if they if they don't flatten out they'll hurt themselves and the crazy thing is so

he's in a perfect pose method too i don't know if you watch about the pose stuff, but that's beautiful pose right there. You can't even see his other leg, which is fucking wild, but he's kicking his own ass basically. He's amazing. So if you think about it and look, so he's like top to bottom, it's straight. So here's the problem. If he lands out on his heel you're

actually in a breaking position that's why i was challenging you there mark and i'm sorry to disrespect oh no no it's it's not disrespectful at all no back and forth yeah so um yeah he he came up with a concept that was just like it was just contrary i mean he was just trying to change the way people run it's it's this you're changing us and he could have uh he could have literally uh from a standpoint of being like kind created exercise for people for your average person to get into because he did create a giant wave of running now Now, he did have a product to sell as well, but I don't know how well those two sank up. I don't know if that was his only intention.

His intention may have been more a little bit from an exercise base, but I don't know. He didn't have all the conjecture that we have now about it because now we know more stuff. Well, okay, according to Born to Run and Chris McDougal and his retelling of it, so I don't know. I'm just going off of that. But he says that he had a friend in Australia who was doing running.

He had started this whole jogging thing in Australia, and then he saw what he had done. He was like, what are you doing, man? This is not how we run. And Bowerman was convinced, you know you know otherwise so i don't know like but it but it's as far as biomechanically it does not make sense to me that we would land on our heel like the more i think about it the more it's just like this big marketing push that's all i see and and again when your foot comes down, you hit and you like start to feel what's actually happening.

You're like, yeah, that's not right. My foot shouldn't be out front. And so I could, the only thing I, my conjecture towards any of it would just be, I just,

I personally believe that there's pretty big differences between like jogging and running and sprinting like a sprint yeah it's pretty obvious like you would never heel strike in a sprint um i also think that and this is just a belief i think that you should be able to run in many different ways when you're running because i know for myself every once while you're running like something fucking hurts and you're like what's that yeah you have to adjust so maybe you need to like toe it out for a little bit a little while maybe you need to like heel strike for a little bit but if you're wearing a shoe that like i wear a lot of ultras and it will at least allow me to do that if i need it for some particular reason i wouldn't i wouldn't excessively do it and if i had to do it for like a long run or something i would probably just start walking more so yeah but it's nice to have some options so you're not completely fucking yourself up yeah it i mean

i think there's definitely a place for options and and like you know we sell sandals that are thicker i mean this is this is a half an inch thick um and i feel like this and when you actually compare it it's interesting that like this is basically the thickness of the forefoot section yeah on a lot of shoes and that's actually where you're going to be putting most of your force so i've had people that got into that ran longer distances like like ultras or just marathons or whatever and they tend to gravitate towards the thicker sandal and that makes sense to me um you know that you'd want a little more padding and and when you kind of get at this level you

basically have the same kind of protection you would have with a normal shoe you know except you your arch isn't being interrupted and you're not getting that the heel toe drop what gets to act like a foot yeah do you run into any issues with like i guess because you're not trapped inside of a shoe yeah you don't have the same issues with like, I guess because you're not trapped inside of a shoe, you don't have the same issues, but like, do you end up with any like moisture issues? Like your feet are sweaty and they kind of slip around or is it, because I've only, I've only run a little bit in them. I have not like, you know, run multiple miles in them yet.

Okay. Mark, this is probably the best reason to wear sandals when you run because would you keep your hand in a glove its entire life? Like being sweaty and clammy and stinky or whatever and just socked away. Like, you know, I've been- In like a boxing mitt. In a boxing mitt. Yeah, your hands smell like shit.

Oh yeah, it's a boxing mitt. In a boxing mitt. Yeah, your hands smell like shit. Oh, yeah. It's a horrible smell. So the deal is like, you know, I did construction and I would never keep the gloves on longer than I wanted, than I had to. And I think that, again, I think there's this deal that we've kind of, I think this is like a lot of the excesses of modernity is what I would say is we're trying to fix everything and take the pain out of our lives and take all of this stuff. And then life is going to be good. Once you have everything, everything is going to be fine and easy. And in reality, it's like it's so nice to let your feet breathe. Oh yeah. I mean, just could you imagine if you didn't, I mean, what's the best day you, what's the best thing you got at the

end of the day is you come home and you take your shoes off, right? You know, you're relaxing with your kids, your family, whatever. Like you just want to be free and easy. No one likes wearing a business suit. You know, you get home and you're getting your favorite shorts. And that's the great thing about this podcast. We're just wearing our T-shirts and feel comfortable. So your feet getting a little bit of, and I think sun is really important. Like Dr. Saladino, who you guys had. That's a big deal, getting sunlight on your feet.

Your whole body needs it. Yeah, I agree. I think it's way more important and i think that's who humans are like we're we're built to be outside in the sun solar panels right yeah okay so that's a good that's another little piece to the puzzle as i would see it is um you know chris mcdougall points out a couple things they're really cool and born to run but um one of them like indications like why we actually are runners so uh there's walking animals like a chimp is a walking animal a pig is a walking animal ever seen a pig like run around the barnyard like seen a picture of it maybe you can get that video

because i cannot imagine a pig running right now oh the little ones yeah yeah well i've been at at the county fair like they do little bursts right little bursts yeah the gigantic ones no because they can't this will kind of blow your mind though a pig doesn't have this ligament called the nuchal ligament horses have it dogs have it humans have. And what it does is it stabilizes your head when you're running. Okay. Which is pretty wild. So like you watch a pig and he's kind of, they got a little bit of a bouncy head. Like a bobblehead? A little bobblehead. Yeah. So you have that and, and you're, you know, um, pigs don't have it. And chimps, a chimp doesn't even have it. A chimp doesn't even have a butt. They don't have it and chimps a chimp doesn't even have it a chimp doesn't even have a butt

they don't have a glute and they have got longer we've talked about that before on this show i think we're the only ones with like the deep cheeks wait don't bonobos have it the don't bonobos have the pink booties or is that yeah yeah but their buttholes like they don't have like ass cheeks oh okay so wait which monkey was a cake They're not caked up. They're not caked up. That's a protracted rectum. Oh my God. Which monkey was Rafiki? Because there's butabos and then there's one with the really pink butt.

Yeah, that's just a... I think it's just a chimpanzee. No. No? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Do you know what it is? This is important. A baboon.

Baboons. Deep cheeks. Deep cheeks. I still get credit because his name's Andrew. So they can walk. I can't find a video of a pig. They don't run. And they got long toes.

So that doesn't help them. That's good for walking. But it's not good for running. Okay. Okay. Here's the next piece of the puzzle. I guess their head does bobble. Bobble head?

I want to see this pig run man it's a league of pigs this shit's legit oh oh these are the tiny pigs oh okay so then

that's why I'm like I'm not sure what I'm looking for you need like a oh well let's see oh they got a race going oh wow they're fast they're pretty fast

oh wow yeah that's what I'm saying that's the only type of pig I've seen that's what I'm saying that's the only type of pig I've seen that's what I'm saying I'm like I don't know what I'm looking for here

wow they ran really far see how their head's like coming up and down I see a little bit they got Timon right here or is that the oh yeah that guy's doing pretty good

that looks like a boar yeah these pigs have really good stripes look at that fucking stride wow this is a really shitty example that's why i'm like i can't peppa pig these are more wild ones i don't know if that's gonna help or hurt fast

oh no those are dogs i can see that fucking shit. There we go. Oh, okay. There we go. Chasing down a boar. Those heads bouncing a lot more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's a big old shit. I'm not showing that on screen right now. This is just on YouTube.

Getting some bacon. Aw. Anyway, I'm sorry, dude. It's all right. I couldn't find a good example. It's taking a while. Well, I was at the fair the other day, and they were, like, chewing the pig down the crowd.

And it's just got a bouncier, bobbier kind of head. They can still run, obviously, but it's not their like chief thing. Like cheetahs are faster, right? All right. My dog is faster. I have a Ridgeback, you know, a really cool dog. And here's the next piece of it. He's like a year

and a half old this guy's strong he's like 95 pounds and they're made for hunting lions right in africa they're killer dogs and i can run this guy under the table like give me a warm day and three or four miles and he's like i'm gonna die because he has basically he's got a huge solar panel on his back his whole back is surface area that's like taking in heat i have the top of my head i got my shoulders and so like i weigh twice as much as him is that like a ridge yeah those are ridgebacks they weigh i weigh twice as much as him and i probably have a quarter to a third the surface area to draw in heat. Here's the last one. This is pretty cool.

Dogs and four-legged animals have a hard time managing their breath. I can take one breath every two strides, but a dog, basically, when he's running, has to take one breath per stride. Their organs are set up. They expand and contract so one of the cool things about a human is that we can change our rate of breath and that allows us to breathe the other thing is we can sweat dogs got a pant after four or five miles in sacramento i'm talking about santa cruz in Sacramento, they'd be dead in a mile or two. So we have this ability to run. It's just like part of us. It's deep in us and who we are.

So anyway, another little piece of the puzzle. That's cool about you. Do you have your running sandals with you? Because I don't think you've mentioned that you run thousands of miles a year in sandals. Well, not thousands of miles, but a thousand. A thousand miles a year. In sandals. In sandals.

Yeah, I do have those. I think it's pretty cool to see how broken in you. They got some mileage on them. Yeah, man. Kind of curled around my foot. Funny thing about me is I probably have never worn like... Well, a shoe is going to do quite the opposite of that. You know, a shoe is going to, your foot is going to be the mold of the shoe. And this is the reverse of that. You got the mold of your foot on that footprint of

the sandal. Absolutely. And that's actually one of my, I try and hold it as like a philosophy in terms of how I'm making the sandals. I want to make footwear that compliments your foot rather than corrects it. Simple idea. There you go. Super simple. And it kind of blows my mind, but it's really, like we were saying earlier, it's not that hard. Just flatten it out, you know, widen it a little bit and it would go a long way to helping a lot of people um but yeah the cool thing is the sandals they take the shape of your foot they're very flexible and and um yeah these are doing a little bit of that so far but we're i think these are the super browns super

browns yeah yeah but um exactly they're taking the shape of my foot i wear these all the time i work out in those all the time along with the vivos so they're just they're great the shape of my foot i wear these all the time i work out in those all the time along with the vivos so they're just they're great and i've ran once in them not very far okay but it was pretty cool it was around here i'd love to try running with you guys sometimes and just sometimes just show you like just a little bit of the technique or whatever but yeah it's one of those things where you start doing it and you're like really should i be allowed to do this and then you know you get a little better at it you start doing it and you're like, really, should I be allowed to do this? And then, you know, you get a little better at it, a little better at it.

You're like, oh, wow, this is great. I love it. I'm not going to not going back. So, yeah. What was the origin of starting these in the first place? So it was like the third thing. Because you were mentioning like you were making these at your house and all kinds of stuff i was making them at my house until march this last march um and uh so my father-in-law he helped me out and i tried them that was really early on and then i said these are terrible i'm never gonna run in sandals again i went and bought five fingers and like some

kso's i was just loving it i was knocking down miles and i was having so much fun and then the problem with the five fingers is the stench oh yeah if you're not wearing any socks right yeah and the socks are gonna like be pulling on your feet and they make them tighter and all that the toe socks the toe sock even the toe socks will it just made it thicker and like made my foot less dynamic you're just looking for something different yeah and so i did that and then also you it's like you have to wash those things all the anyways it was a whole thing it's a great product there's got it's got some drawbacks then merrill came out with this

shoe called the trail glove it was phenomenal just a phenomenal shoe and even meryl has like backed farther and farther away from the minimalist thing which is really sad because they could have just kept making that forever and it was like perfect and then so that's it was that was during the winter and then in the spring of that year i was like i need some sandals i live in santa cruz and i i went to this company called luna and i bought a pair of their sandals it was literally like um it was the same material you got there yeah um it's the vibram more flex in about six millimeters and as i was and it had this long piece of elastic covered in rubber or leather and you literally just, and it had this long piece of elastic

covered in leather, and you literally just wove it around. You tied a knot where that toe plug is, and then you wrapped it around your foot and you tied a little bow on the top. And so I'm tying this bow on this sandal. I paid like 65 bucks for them. I was embarrassed to say how much I paid for them. But I found myself more

and more and more out there running and just loving it and it kind of culminated so that was in the spring and then spring of what year by the way i want to say 2011 because all this is like based off my giants going to the world series and winning for the first time that's like my mental you know landmark and uh and then by the end of that summer i'd been running in them so much and just enjoying it that um i decided yeah it was the it was the luna equus it was a cool sandal and it looked a little weird i enjoyed the heck out of them and it culminated in by the end of the summer i was so good at running in them and and enjoyed it so much my wife and i we went on our little anniversary trip up to tahoe and i remember just having one of the best days of

my life i we like hiked a couple miles into emerald bay and went swimming you know you take the sandals off and and then we ran up the Rubicon trail for like four miles or so and we come back and the whole trip was like basically 14 miles and I was like this is awesome man it's a lot of running it's a lot of running yeah and it was great and I just just loved it so from then on I was like I could do it a little better and I want to get in on this I think so probably it was like two years later I started the company you got any uh like anybody have any records in these like is there like you know somebody ran a mile in x time or or like you have your own little prs that you got that are kind of

neat for wearing like because I'd imagine like it there might be some challenges when you start going real fast maybe I don't know well I think that you can run as fast as you want to more or less. I mean if you're sprinting, I've done sprinting workouts in them. I definitely would use power straps. And now that we have the Trailstar, I would lean towards the Trailstar with power straps. Is it because of the – now the interesting thing about the trail stars is the big toe loop yeah that will help you know you've got security from front to back you know it's it's locked in and it's still minimal so i think you can sprint in them like for me like i you know i've run like

six minute miles in them and stuff like that it's it's totally doable um a couple years ago i was just like i'd take my watch i don't like to take my watch out with me anymore because then i just start trying to race myself yeah and i want to you know enjoy my run so um but yeah we actually have some people that won races in them uh i got a we're really big in germ, believe it or not. A few years ago, this guy Christian, he runs this company called Go Free Concepts, and he's been importing a lot of them. We sold thousands and thousands of them in Germany and Europe last year, and he sent me some clippings of people winning races in them and stuff.

What's the most popular one? It's the Warrior. Why do you think that's so? Well, the name's great to start with. And they're the thinnest. I think it's probably the thinnest sandal on the market. And maybe if there's a thinner one out there, somebody's got a four mil sandal or whatever, it's good to remember that two millimeters of that five millimeter sole is tread. So there's a lot of flexibility. They're super flexible, tons of ground feel, and it'll stay on your foot. Once it's shaped up to your foot, it's just like, it's like a glove. I've worked out on the Warriors before.

I've worked out on a lot of these, but I've worked out on those before. And they're, I mean, they're great with lifting too too you jump the rope and doing all kinds of stuff kettlebell swings right yeah yeah they put a hundred miles are my favorite ones a hundred miles and that they're gonna do this you know it's gonna shape to your foot and your reaction time and you know the responsiveness of it will just increase so i think the difference it's a funny thing but with shoes it's like people want to throw them away when they get more worn in and with your sandals when you realize what you have it's shaped up to your foot it's gotten thinner it's conformed it's conformed to you you're like by the time you have we know what you're talking about this is

like a lifting belt yeah you broke in for many years oh yeah get that perfect lifting belt you're like by the time you have we know what you're talking about this is like a lifting belt yeah you broke in for many years oh yeah get that perfect lifting belt you're like damn i i can't ever lose and if you do lose it you panic you're like where the fuck that thing go that's how i used to be with my rainbow flip-flops until i finally transitioned yeah you know your foot would like mold to it yeah it's perfect right but the thong and it's just you don't walk well on that shit what's the thickness of the one you have molded there, the one that you broke in real well? This is a 9-millimeter stack height. It's an 8-millimeter Vibram Nuflex sole. So it's kind of like a rubber EVA composition they do.

And that's kind of they blend their soleing materials a little differently. So EVA like you've got with that, that one's got like 25% EVA in it. And what that means, if you cut that sole, you look on the side. Oh, you have a little tread on yours, right? Yeah. I got tread here. Oh, I see. Okay.

And the deal is that the more, that's like a microcellular kind of sole. You can even see little holes in it and so it's just going to shape up really quick i mean you could wear these things five miles and they'll start taking the shape of your foot you wear this it's going to wear out a little faster so you add more rubber you got a harder compound and it's going to last longer if you um you know the more eva the quicker it's going to go but it'll shape quicker and it's, it's actually lighter than the rubber. So I think when I had those original sandals that my father-in-law made me, it was just pure rubber. It's really slappy.

And it's it takes a long time to shape up. Is this shoe on the table the same as this other one on the table over here? No, this is a Trailstar Alpha. Okay. So it's basically a mountain goat with the Trailstar lacing system. And the trail ones you said are just a little thicker because you got like rocks to kind of navigate over and things like that, right? Yeah, I think for people that it kind of comes down to your preference though. Like some people, they want that ground

feel they really love it and more power to them and then if you want a little more protection you can go here we even have a thicker one um so you know there's a lot of options very cool where should somebody start you know because like the um they're called trail stars right the one with the loop so those i've found to be like probably the most comfortable footwear that i have yeah you know um but it i also like when i do recommend stuff i want people to feel the ground but then i'm like okay well shit maybe that's too much right now yeah so where do you recommend people start because you know on the website there's people are just going to see names they're not really going to understand exactly like where's step one or where's step two so if somebody's listening and they want to get into this minimalist sandal game uh where do you recommend they start

that's a really tough question i think maybe the better question is like it's like i was talking about the panacea thing it's more it's like time like time. Yeah. But I want to add on to what Andrew said. Okay. Because oddly enough, what's been happening is luckily the warriors are the super thin ones, right? Yeah. I'd wear the warriors a lot, but sometimes if I'm running into certain things with my feet, because we're doing a lot of stuff, I'd wear some of my thicker soled shamas or

some of my vivos because my feet needed some time to recover. So the thicker sole was helpful because I'm not having to get as deep into my toes on the gate. You know what I mean? So it's like for recovery, like with a lot of people transitioning, their feet are going to need some recovery doing all of this stuff. And if they have a thicker sole shama or some vivos or something, that would be helpful. It's useful to have. Yeah, it's useful to have yeah it's useful to

have a lot of arrows in your quiver yeah i think you know like you're talking about mark how you have a variety of shoes you know options options so i don't like it's tough to say but like it kind of depends on the individual i think chargers are great um So basically a charger is like a super brown. It's the Elite Lacing System or the super browns are really comfortable. I like those. They're just really comfortable. They look good. It's like German leather and American leather and it's like – it's killer stuff.

You get a lot of flex. I think chargers – It's got smell to it. These haven't been worn yet. Yeah. They're brand new and it has some nice tread on the bottom and stuff too the old goats old goats those are uh super browns right there those are super browns okay yeah we've got a lot of very clever names for all our sandals and then how about uh sizing sizing

um so we it's kind of a it's always a big question for us, and it's pretty simple. If you look at our sizing chart, we show you the sandal and our shama size. They're just men's sizes, and then a woman's size and a men's size and all that. And then we show you the length of the sandal. We also have a PDF. You can just print the PDF off. And as long as it's scaled, put your foot on it and you can see. But what I recommend is you want a quarter inch longer than your foot. That way you could put an eighth of an inch on both sides. And then a big deal is,

you know, I think this remains true all the the way through which is about complementing rather than correcting your foot i think one of the things people expect is maybe this is a big issue is just you're trying to make the sandal fit to your foot you're not trying to make your foot fit to the sandal so you have to adjust them they need that initial adjustment you got to take the time to get it right you want to center your foot on the sandal and then you bring the laces to your foot rather than the other way around. And that is a cool aspect about number one, I've worn other barefoot sandals. I don't want to say any names, but like sometimes with the thong that goes into the big toe, some of them would dig into my big toe and it'd be painful. And I thought they would break in, didn't get much, it didn't get more comfortable. But with the lacing system you have on these sandals, you can it so it's like it's not crazy tight in certain parts of your foot and it fits

perfectly to your foot it feels like you're wearing it feels like you're just walking on ground i i consider myself like there was this one episode of VH1, remember behind the music a long time ago? Yeah, vaguely. Metallica. And they were like, we were just fans of heavy metal, right? And that's why they got into it. I was just a fan of this. And so I was like, well, I want control over the lacing system

and I want to be able to adapt it to my foot every time. I don't want any compromises. And so that's basically what it is. It's a way to keep that thin material on your foot without it. I think it's interesting that the thicker ones still molded to your foot really well. That's cool. Oh, yeah.

They'll all shape up given enough time. In fact, there's a study McDougall points to in born to run he says basically the older your shoes they've done studies the older your shoes get the better they are for your feet and the reason is it goes back to that key which is all that foam it's going to compress it's going to get harder and then now your response time is sped up and you're not damaging yourself in the foam which is great it's just crazy the whole thing's kind of backwards so what's the thickness of this one the warrior is it like five millimeters uh so that's a warrior maximus and that is eight millimeters oh okay so it's like a little more than a quarter inch yeah because these are like

these don't bother me at all i just because i walk so much and i just move around a lot i don't i don't necessarily love feeling the ground like if i want to feel the ground i'll just go outside barefoot normally um i do have the five finger shoes but then it's like you kind of feel the ground but not really because you're not you're not touching the ground yeah so um these are nice like because some of the areas i walk they're just like sometimes shitty kind of concrete there's like pebbles and weird stuff and if i'm wearing something too thin i just find it to be uh a lot of like training for my feet and my feet will get like banged up then the next day when i run i might be kind of annoyed because my feet are

bugging me you know so these are really though, because there's enough coverage here to where my little sensitive feet don't get hurt. Yeah. Well, you know, even though I would recommend above my sandals, what's even better than my sandals are your bare feet. I think that's the absolute, I mean, that's who we are and how we've been designed. And I think that's the best thing for your health. Although there's a lot of really good, legitimate reasons to have foot coverings. There's hypodermic needles these days and spit and dog, whatever, you know,

and there's stuff and there's a lot of reasons why it's good to have something on your feet. So I think it's totally legit. You still do a lot of stuff barefoot? You know, I have been testing sandals so much for years that I haven't done as much barefoot as I would like. And I'm hoping I get to the point where I can be barefoot more often. But I try and be barefoot in the workshop a lot. I try to be bare as much as I can.

And it really is good. And it's good to take in that feedback. It's really good for your feet. And you'd be surprised. It's next level, I think, when it comes to your foot and your feet health and your legs and your back and all of it. But I'm going to be trying to do more. But like I said, whenever I'm like, yeah, I got this this thing tested i just come up with something new and like the sandals i walked in today i have like different parts on different sandals i saw those

i was like i didn't see those on the website like is this some new experimental shit it's all it's always an experiment no but that man that's really amazing thing because i i can't like stress i sound like a fucking parrot at this point but i can't stress just like the difference in the my ability to move and just my ability to do things even on in jujitsu just because of the awareness of the feet and how much healthier they've become my feet are getting into positions and moving into places because of my awareness of them i'm just like whoa i feel like you mentioned uh no inhibition in the way my body moves at this point i'm doing shit i never really thought i could feels like i'm in a fucking martial arts

movie or some shit but it's because they're becoming better becoming more aware it's cool absolutely yeah i'm we're like the um we have the same as far as i know we have the same, as far as I know, we have the same amount of sensory inputs in our feet as we do in our hands. That's why it hurts so bad to step on a Lego, you know, first thing in the morning, you know, but that, but that, that's there for us to access. It's just, it's like pure information that, you know, we're cutting off and, you know, turning into like one input instead of hundreds of thousands. Yes. It's pretty crazy. I remember stepping on some dinosaurs that hurt really bad. Like a triceratops.

Man, remember the last time you stepped on glass? I fucking hate that shit, man. Glass is the devil. You ever stepped on a nail? Oh, yeah. I did that one too when, when I was young. Yeah. I think I got tetanus.

I had to get a tetanus shot after that. I would advise people, like, just if you have an opportunity to be barefoot, just, you know, if you get to a beach here and there. Yeah. Just, like, go do some half-assed sprints. You don't have to, like, you don't have to go fast. Just go with, I don't know, go half the speed that you think you can do. Yeah. So that way you don't hurt yourself.

Just fucking give it a run. Give it a go. Give it a try. Absolutely. And you can train your feet really well in the sand. It feels really good. You can just drag the sand around. You can pull it forward and push it around and kind of squeeze the sand between your feet and stuff. It's just, it sounds really silly and weird, but it's fun.

It feels good. Well, you know, it's funny in like the world of, um, uh, psychology and in therapy and all that. I mean, you're basically helping people to desensitize. And when people have a lot of anxiety, uh, my brother's a psychologist and he's like, all right, you're just going to sit there for a minute. We're going to talk about this issue. And then your job is to see how you feel. You know, what is, what's your body doing at this moment when you're freaking out?

And again, like we're so far removed from this. We are a Neo in the matrix and we just woke up out of that little bubble. We got to get our bearings again. So it's good to, like you said, just feel like, okay, can I even do this? Is this safe? Is it okay? And you'll be surprised what you come up with. And you want to take us out of here, buddy?

Sure thing. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Sincerely appreciate it. Please drop us some comments down below. Let us know where you guys are at in your barefoot journey. We've been talking about this for a little while now, so curious where you guys are at with it. Please make sure you guys like today's video and subscribe. If you guys are not subscribed already, please follow the podcast at MBPowerProject on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndrewZNCima. Wherea where you at i think we have a code power project with shama i think we do um because i spoke to when hayley about that so i believe there's if you guys want to go get it if you enter code power project it'll save you something i don't know what the fuck it'll save you something just make sure you check the description we'll have links everything down there that'll be there um discord check it out if you guys uh have any questions for us about all these sandals just just chat about it there and in the comment section below at nsema ending on instagram youtube and nsema yin yang on tiktok and twitter josh where can people find you you can find us at shawma sandals.com you can find us on Instagram and YouTube. And yeah. I found out something very disappointing today.

Uh-oh. I know. Uh-oh. My foot is a full size, at least one full size smaller than I thought. I bought the condoms that were like a little too large and I needed to buy the rubber bands with them too. Yeah.

And Seema told me about the rubber band trick. But anyway. Yeah. I'll give those magnums. Let's give the magnums to Andrew. Because when Josh came he was like your sandals are actually a little bit too small. You need to go half size up.

We are learning a lot. Insert the horse noise there. Can you grab me one of those beef snacks real quick right behind you next to our male enlargement pump? There's a lot of psychological stuff going on here with these shoe sizes. Yeah. I think so. Well, there's only one size 14 at the table. That's true.

That's true. Have you watched the show? I watched it the other day. I think I'm all caught up on it The Patient you watch that show you guys watch any shows you and your wife yeah we just finished Stranger Things I did not know the last episode was two hours long

we started it at 11 we look up and it's 1 in the morning oh my god we're ruined. We're ruined. Check out The Patient. Have you guys been watching that at all? I don't know what it is. It's really good. I think it might be

Apple TV. You've been watching a lot of stuff on Apple TV. Yeah. I'm lazy. I just sit back and fucking watch TV all day. That's how you become wealthy, guys. Sit back, watch TV. And that's how you get faster. It really helps. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell.

Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye. That was a really good beef stick. I want another one. Can you throw me another one, please? Sure thing, man.

This is happening. Thank you so much for that. That was great.