Stuff You Should Know - Barefoot Running: The Best Podcast Episode in History

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

What is barefoot running? I think you know. But we'll detail all of the ins and outs. Listen and learn! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry over there.

And this is Stuff You Should Know about barefoot running. Colin, don't do it. Colin says, Chuck, Colin, Josh says, do it if you want. Oh, it's just because it's running. Has nothing to do with being barefoot. Oh, really? I got ya. Yeah, man, I don't know.

I'm not a fan of running. I love it. I love walking, but I don't think, I don't know. Have you ever just tried to walk faster? Oh, I walk, exercise, walk super fast. I'm kidding, by the way. Walking fast and running are not the same thing. No, they're not.

I don't know, man, it's just a lot of wear on your body. I don't think humans are meant to run like this. Well, and Chuck, you would be running a fowl of an entire subgroup of people who believe that not only humans should be running barefoot, but that we're actually designed to run long distances. Yeah, I think the idea was that we evolved, and this sounds crazy to me,

we evolved to run long distances so we could eventually just outrun animals who got tired before we did. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, so if they animal. I'm just gonna run after this animal bore until it gets tired.

Sure, sure. Does this make sense to you anthropologically? Sure, if that's true. Well, that's the thing, it's like. They could also, it spears in bows and arrows, which they did, which probably means they didn't like running after animals. Right, but if you speared an animal,

it doesn't mean it's gonna drop dead where you speared it. You might have to chase after it. Well, that's when you do the fast walk. This is great. Did you imagine like, Tuk Tuk doing like the sport walking over the tundra? Kind of. That'd be kind of nice.

It would be. Okay, so we should probably tell everybody what the heck we're talking about in general. Talking about running without shoes. Yeah. Or with those minimal, there are different versions of how minimal those shoes get.

Yeah, so this whole thing started this idea of like, hey man, you know those running shoes you got? Chuck them off and just start running barefoot and you'll be glad that you did. That all started around 2009, 2010. Oh yeah? Yeah. And it has definitely hit its high water market,

got a lot of press. It was a huge trend in running. And then it seems to have kind of crested and waned and now it's back. But the running world has changed forever because of it. But from what I understand, there's not like a lot of people who are barefoot running these days.

I mean, I don't think it's has swept the nation. It did for a minute. But there are definitely people who adhere to the philosophy of your body will adjust because we were meant to, we ran barefoot for, you know, 80 million years. Right, well that's one of the implications of that is that some people suspect

not only are you supposed to run barefoot, but that running with shoes, including very expensive, highly designed running shoes, are actually going to increase your chances of injury or that wear and tear on your joints. Now you're better off running barefoot, which sounds totally counter-intuitive

until you stop and think, they say, hey man, how long have we been running in running shoes? Right. Or shoes of any kind. All the shoes that have been found are actually found in Oregon and they're like 10,400 years old.

They're called Fort Rock Sandals. They were called Pre-Fontaines. Right. Should we talk a little bit about the history of the running shoe? Obviously not as long as that pretty exhaustive list from Mental Itch. But supposedly the running shoe

goes back a couple of hundred years? Yeah, something like that. The sneaker at least goes back a couple of hundred years I think in 1832, a guy named Waite Webster. It's either Waite or Wyatt, but it's spelled like Waite, W-A-I-T. Anyway, we'll call him Senior Webster.

He came up with a way of attaching a rubber sole to an upper, a shoe, which really kind of changed shoes in general. Like people were like, hey, these shoes are actually going to last. Whereas before it was like all leather and they fell apart in the rain really quickly, these rubber soles could really kind of take the impact

that you put on your body when your foot hits the ground, and they weren't going to come apart because you could really attach them to an upper. Yeah, and the word sneakers comes from the fact that they were quiet. They were the first shoes that didn't clip clop around, like Jerry's elementary school principal shoe she had on last week.

So they were sneaks or sneakers because you could sneak around. And I saw that that was invented by the British, but then the British went back to calling their sneakers, I think, plimsoals. That's what they call them today is plimsoals. Which were like kid's shoes back then. Right, but we call them sneakers here.

And then what we call running shoes, they call trainers. Right, I think they still say trainers, don't they? Yes, so I feel like, yeah, and I think they still say plimsoals. And they still say garage, lift, and flat. Sure, and Lou and Lori and all that. And aluminum and herbs. Right, the only one I really take issue with is aluminum.

Really? It's just wrong. I'm sorry, UK, but it's wrong. Even when like David Attenborough says it, or Richard Attenborough or any Attenborough? I'm not saying it doesn't sound pleasant. I'm just saying it's wrong, okay? This was interesting too.

The first, I didn't know that Reebok went back so far. They were the Bolton company. Initially, Joseph William Foster was the founder and in 1852, he developed the first running spikes. And it sounds like in the 1860s for like the next decade, running spikes were just sort of shoes with spikes, like regular shoes with spikes on them. Yeah, and you would hope that they'd flatten out the end

that pressed against your feet, but I suspect that they didn't always, not to your satisfaction. Right, and then of course, other developments in the 70s, air cushioned shoes, and then eventually the gel insert, or not insert, but the gel cushioned heel. Right.

And that was from Azix in the 1980s, and I always thought that was kind of a scam, but apparently close to 30% more displacement of impact than the air technology. Yeah, and the air technology had been invented, I think a decade or so before. NASA, right? Yeah, by a guy named Frank Rudy,

and he worked with Nike to add air to the soles so that this compressed gas would distribute the force that you were putting on your shoe, make it easier on your joints back upstream. Yeah, but if you ask these shoe companies, they're saying that they have developed this technology over the years to help runners. If you asked a skeptic and a barefoot enthusiast,

they'll say, man, this running shoe thing is just a big marketing, money-making scam. Right, because what they point to is, okay, the modern running shoe, actually it was New Balance that came up with the modern running shoe in 1960 with their trackster, but most people point to the 70s and Nike's Waffle shoe as like the birth of the running shoe.

Yeah, because isn't that when running for exercise kind of really started as a mainstream thing? That's what I learned from Forrest Gump. Oh, really? Was that in Forrest Gump? Oh, yeah, remember he just started running and he inadvertently starts the leisure running trend. Oh, I didn't realize he was starting the trend.

I just thought he was running. Right, and then people started being like, what is that guy doing? I'm gonna run alongside him and he ended up starting the running jogging trend. And then moviegoers sat in an audience and thought, why is this even in this dumb, long movie? I like that movie.

I don't know what you're talking about. You said something bad about it before. I haven't yet to see it since then. Oh, since it came out? No, no, since you put it down. So it's like a couple of weeks you haven't seen it? No, all right, which is rare. Maybe don't then.

So, but they point to this, they say, okay, from the 70s, when we started this running shoe thing, injuries, running injuries haven't gone down. Right. In some cases, they've increased. And in fact, things like shin splints, I believe. Yeah, plantar fasciitis. Knee injuries and a couple other things

have actually increased. So people are like, well, wait a minute, what is going on here if you stop and think about it? No one was really paying attention to it until 2010 when a guy named Christopher McDougal came out with a book called Born to Run. And it's basically, it makes the case that like paleo does for dieting.

That like we have evolved to be a certain way to behave under certain conditions. And our modern world has kind of taken that and co-opted it and made, you know, messed everything up. And as a result, we're suffering from all these maladies. But rather than eating ultra-processed food as the paleo diet whole thing is based on, this was that these modern running shoes we're running in

are actually causing injuries. We need to throw our shoes away and just run barefoot and we'll be better off. Yeah, because we have adapted our running to these shoes and we're not even supposed to run and we'll get into the hole. I don't wanna spoil anything by saying heal first. But we'll get into that a little bit later,

but he's saying we've adapted to run a certain way because of running shoes. And this is not how humans or not how the, specifically the Tara Humara Indians, he's like, they don't get injured. They've been running barefoot for eons across long distances on all sorts of terrain. Yeah, they, the Tara Mara Indians, they-

Tara Humara. They live in Northwestern Mexico, I believe. And they're known for running around barefoot or in like sandals that they make from old tires. And they showed up at the Leadville Trail 100, an ultra-thon up a mountain peak and back down. They were like middle-aged, smoking before, and I think during the race,

may possibly drunk on corn or like some sort of moonshine at the time and we're just passing everybody. Oh, I'm sure. Without like seeing, they didn't stretch, they didn't do anything. And they're passing some of the world's like most finely tuned ultra-marathoners. Like it was nothing and people were like,

what is going on with these guys? They're not even wearing shoes. What's the deal here? They really kind of kick things off. They actually, McDougal went and visited them, wrote an article about him and ended up writing a book on barefoot running based on his experiences with them. That's awesome.

Yeah. Like, all right, we're taking a break. Yes. We'll be right back. ["Snowflakes Show"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

There is a big, gosh, ooh, ah, oh, shuck. OK, so this guy, Christopher McDoole, comes around. Born to Run. I've seen it referred to as the most influential running book of all time. And greatest Springsteen album. That's more than, oh, I wonder if they're related in any way. Let me say this.

If ever in his book, he finishes a chapter with Baby, We Were Born to Run, then he should be, he should have the pants suit off of him. Oh, you don't think he should be celebrated? No. Maybe kissed lightly on the cheek? For a witty Springsteen reference? Sure.

He's already stealing his title. How? Come on. As the boss? How's he stealing his, oh, I thought he meant like his title. Oh, like his status title? Still pretty recent after the new year, everybody. Christopher McDoole, the boss.

Right, like what are you talking about? I've not seen him referred to that. There's only one boss. But think about it, Jim Fix wrote, oh, I can't remember what the actual title was, but it was like he wrote the book on running. Yeah, I remember that. OK, so the art of running, the joy of running,

one of those two. And they're saying that this book was more influential. It just hit it just the right time. But not only did this book hit it just the right time, it came either right before or right after a study came out that basically said the same thing, that this other guy who's like one of the luminaries of the barefoot running world.

Oh, yeah, Daniel Lieberman? Yeah, he's a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, which means that he gets listened to when he talks. That's right. But he released this study with some co-authors, I think in 2009 or the beginning of 2010, that basically said, hey, man, if you run barefoot, your body is going to suffer far less

than if you run in modern running shoes. And it was just a perfect timing with this book Born to Run. And the two together caught the attention of anybody who was into running at a time. And people started literally taking their shoes off and going and running, and then hurting themselves pretty quickly. Yeah, and he would point to things like, look,

we've got Achilles tendons. We got these big knee joints. We have a big gluteus maximus. Especially me. And he's like, we were kind of made to run these distances. Other people say, hey, we have those glutes because they're great for squatting and for foraging and pooping, let's be honest.

Sure, and thought about that, but you're right. Sure. And so there are competing theories out there because we don't know exactly for sure. But he basically says the way the human body is put together, we don't need these shoes, and we were built to run, not born to run. But the other idea of this is, and this is really what he

uses to get people to buy into it is we evolved to run this way. Running with shoes is unnatural. Yeah, and it doesn't matter who you are, even if you're super fit, if you're running with running shoes on and you're a runner, you have an 80% chance of getting injured at some point, eight out of 10 people. Every year, he said. Yep, get injured every single year.

And even if you're in, like I said, super great shape, and you run all the time, in fact, if you run all the time, you're probably more likely to get injured. Right, because again, we didn't evolve to wear super cushiony gel shoes when we run. We evolved to run barefoot or maybe in some very thin sandals or something like that, minimalist shoewear.

And he also said, well, some of the other modern problems that we have are some of the other problems that just come along with walking around in these shoes, things like supination, pronation, which I do. What's pronation? It's where you're, when you're walking or running, the inside of your heel is curved downward. So your shoes, eventually, when you

look at the sole and the cushioning, they're worn on one side or the other more. Yeah, I think I do that a little bit. I walk like verbal kint at the end of the usual suspects, basically, from the looks of my shoes and the wear and tear on them. Yeah, mine actually wear a little bit, I think, on the outside more than the inside.

OK, so that'd be supination. And that's just walking shoes. That's supination. Yeah. They're two sides of the same problem, which is that your feet, your heel, is not landing in line in the same axis with the front. It's tilted.

I think there's three different things going on biomechanically. But what people like Christopher McDougal and proponents of Barefoot Running say is, buddy, that's because you're walking on these padded soles of shoes that, like, they're new. They haven't been around for even half of a century yet. Our feet are not designed to walk like this. And so that's why you're doing this.

If you'll stop running in shoes, your pro-nation or your supination will actually fix itself. And there is some data that that is actually true, that those things, biomechanical disorders, can be fixed by running or walking barefoot. Other people say, no, if you have a biomechanical disorder, like supination or pro-nation, you have no business going barefoot.

The barefoot proponents say, do not listen to that guy. He's a dork. And then they say, you know, you really don't need to bring name-calling into this. Yeah, they say, whatever, dork. Yeah, would you say dork? Remember in Police Academy, where they wrote dork on Mauser's chest with suntan lotion?

Oh, right. You got a real red burn. Just realized I was reminiscing about Police Academy. I was just watching. I'm watching the TV show party down for the third time now. And there's that great. Did you ever see that at all? Still have not.

You know, it's a catering company. And each episode is a different party. And there's one party where they go to Steve Gutenberg's house for his birthday party. And he's like, oh, man, I forgot. Like, we actually had a surprise party. My friends threw for me. So there is no birthday party.

But he's like, I don't want this to go to waste. Why don't you guys just come in and call your friends. We'll have a party. Right. So it becomes like a party at the Goot's house. That's awesome. It's a really good one. I'll bet that's probably how it would go down in real life.

He at least seems like a good guy on this fictional TV show. Sure. Who got their start on that show? I don't know about getting their start. I mean, it started at a moment. Adam Scott and Ken Marino and Jane Lynch. She didn't get her start on it, but she got it pre-glee and then had to leave the show when she got glee.

Oh, OK. It was replaced by Megan Mullally. Yeah, I think it was like seven or eight years ago. I saw her on an episode of maybe Law and Order or something like that, an old one. And she was playing serious pathologists showing, I think, Lenny Briscoe, something in somebody's tissue or something like that.

And I was like, oh, that's Jane Lynch. It was like where she was like, am I a serious actress? Am I a comedic actress? Why not both? Yeah, she was good. Chris and our buddy, Kristen Bell was on it, Martin Star. OK, maybe it was Kristen Bell. I was like, she didn't get her start, though.

Was that after Veronica Mars? Oh, yeah. OK. Yeah, she sort of did a guest starring thing. Gotcha. But it's Ken Marino at his best. And he's like one of my heroes. Martin Star was on Freaks and Geeks

and then later on Silicon Valley, right? Yes. OK, I love that guy. Yeah, he's great. He actually, since we're already sidetracked, you should, at some point, try and bring yourself to listen to the Mark Marin episode with Martin Star. Why would I have any trouble listening to Mark Marin?

I don't know. Really interesting guy, Martin Star. I can only imagine. And different than you might think. Oh, really? Is he really like twee and whimsical? No, he's very intense and heady, spiritual and heady. Oh, yeah?

Super smart, yeah. Not that I thought he was dumb, but he can play that. I got you. All right, where were we? We were talking about barefoot running and how some of the people who are proponent say if you throw your shoes away, you will fix all these modern problems.

Yeah, so the idea is that your feet have these nerve endings that will give you feedback when you're making contact with the ground that you don't get when you're wearing these shoes. Right. And they will tell you how to walk, basically, depending on what kind of terrain you're on, and your body adjusts accordingly

and had for many, many years. Right. The other thing that they say is without shoes, you actually run differently than you do with shoes. And this seems to be the genuine article argument for or against barefoot running. And it seems to kind of land in favor of barefoot running to tell you the truth.

So should we talk about the old heel first thing? Yeah, heel striking. Yeah, heels, when you run, if someone, because I don't run, but if someone were to steal something from me on the street and I had to run, you would see me take off down the road and you would notice that my heels are striking the ground first and with a pretty great impact. And people like me would see you and be like,

that's a terrible form. Yeah, and say, you're never going to catch that guy. Just don't even bother. So when you run like that, it actually hurts pretty quickly. And you're actually propelling yourself in a weird way backwards. Like when you bring your heel down, your foot is up and your heel is actually hitting the ground

at a direction opposite the direction that you're trying to go. Yeah, if you like freeze frame that for it's kind of a long running stride, that's what it would look like. So just as far as like running form goes, it's not a good way to run. Anybody who runs can tell you

that you're not supposed to heel strike, although it feels very natural when you're in shoes. If you take off your shoes and you heel strike, you'll take about two steps and your head will just explode with pain. And your heel. Yeah, because your heel is not made to be run on. Now, if you lean forward and run on the midfoot

or the ball of your feet, you'll find running barefoot is much more comfortable. And that's what a lot of people who are proponents of barefoot running say is, this is how you're supposed to run and this is how barefoot running makes you run. When you wear shoes, it's much easier to heel strike. You have to remember not to do that.

Right, like a sprinter, when you see these Olympic sprinters, they're not heel striking. They're pitch forward a bit and they're running up on the fronts or at least the mid of their foot. You see how fast they go. I took a running class once.

College or? No, no, it was like just to learn how to run better. Like a little workshop. Out in the world. What's it called, continuing education? Yeah, adult at night school, I think. And what I was taught was that running is falling forward and catching yourself

over and over again. So the whole time you have to go, whoa, whoa. Right, you just will flail your arms, basically. But you do that in a controlled manner, obviously. But when you learn that and you try it, it forces you to run on the balls or the midfoot. Midfoot's what I learned is the best way to do it. So you did this to learn proper technique and stuff?

Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, and once you try it, remind yourself that you can actually feel yourself doing it and you realize you're in the right form when you feel like there's this slight falling forward sensation. Yeah, the last time I did any kind of running

was when I was playing softball, which is all sprinting. And even for a guy with extra pounds, I was always pretty quick, believe it or not. Burst of speed. Burst of speed. And I would just naturally, Jerry's laughing over there, I would naturally run, not on my tippy toes, but kind of pretty far forward.

Mincey. Yeah, I would mince toward that first base bag. Yeah, go tink, tink, tink, tink, tink. And people would be like, do you hear that tinking sound? And look how fast that dude is. Is that a rainbow trailing behind him in his wake? Yeah, he looks like he's about to fall over. And sometimes I did.

Oh, really? No, I'm just kidding. But I saw other dudes, this is an old bar guy league. So he's some pretty funny running and some weird balance issues and guys kind of falling down and tripping and clumsy. Because of all the drunkenness. And now we didn't drink before games, but yeah. Well, what about during?

No, I didn't. What about? OK. Now they would go afterward, but I didn't socialize with this crowd much. You hated them so much. I was just the ace pitcher who would come in and then go home and like ice my elbow.

Oh, that's pretty cool. You were like the closer? No, I pitched the whole game. Oh, really? But I was a specialist. I got you. Specialist is just winning. Yeah, that was it.

All you do is win, win, win. That's it. Well, let's take a break, Chuck, because I feel like this is so far off the rails, I don't even remember what the topic is. All right, let's do it. OK, let's do it. OK, let's do it.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back

to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio

app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So what is the topic? Barefoot running. Oh, yes. And we should say that when we say barefoot, there's a range of how bare your foot is. It can be completely bare. Some people just go completely foot naked.

Then there are these, I don't know what you call them, about as minimal as you can get. It's almost like a little tire flat, like you were saying. It's called minimalist shoes. Yeah, it's just a really thin rubber sandal, essentially. And I've seen that for running, but what I've mainly seen those for is just people saying, just go out and be in the world in these things.

Oh, OK. So are you talking about the sandal ones that go in between your big toe and the next toe's little webbing? Yeah, it's just like a shoestring and a piece of rubber. They also came up with shoes shoes that are called minimalist shoes. There's much more to them than what you just described. They wrap around the top of your foot,

but have a similar footbed. That shoe you just mentioned is like the Taramara Indian what they wear. Like the little sandal? Yeah, but they make theirs out of old tires, which is even cooler, you know? Totally. So there is different degrees of it.

And the reason that people started wearing things, I think the company Vibram made a sock with some tread on the bottom. Yeah, remember I got in trouble for bagging on those years ago. Five-toed sock? Yeah, I made fun of those. And people had their feelings hurt. Yes, I'll bet those same people do not wear those anymore.

I bet you're right. I remember going to a Cindy Lauper concert with you, me. And there was a couple there. And they were wearing matching Vibram shoes, sock shoes, whatever, minimalist shoes. And were you guys like, hey, we should do that? I will never forget them. They looked like they could, like they were going to at any

minute, just kind of go from walking on their feet to just walking on their hands. And then back on their feet and then back on their hands. That's just what they looked like for some reason. Because they weren't wearing workout gear or anything. This is just shoes they were wearing out there in the world. Because a lot of people say, no, don't just do this for running, like do this for life, basically.

Yeah, I mean, I love, I've always been a barefoot person. When I was a kid, I would play a lot in bare feet. And I always had really tough foot beds, natural foot beds, what do you call those? Soles of your feet? Yeah, sure. They're always pretty tough and still are. Yeah, well, Daniel Lieberman, the paleoanthropologist,

did another study recently, I think, in 2019. And he found that, oh, by the way, he won an Ig Nobel Prize for figuring out why pregnant women don't tip over. Oh, really? Back in like 2009, yeah. Wow, what was the answer? The way that they lean backward, and there's additional lumbar support in their lower back.

And I think maybe the way the fetus lays, it's all just kind of, that's how we've evolved to not fall over, basically. But this more recent work, he went to Kenya, and he studied native Kenyans who basically lived their lives without wearing shoes. He studied Americans who have worn shoes their whole life. And then he studied Americans who wore shoes,

and then made the transition over to barefoot running. And he found that the Kenyan subjects all had deep calluses on their feet. So he thought that they would not be as sensitive. And he found that that's actually not the case, that they're much better off because they have these calluses. So their feet are naturally prevented from things like cuts and punctures and things like that,

because they're just tougher on the bottom. But the calluses don't cover up their nerve endings. So there's still feedback coming from the ground, but the feet are also protected by the calluses, which is kind of surprising from what I understand. Right, and his buddy, the anthropologist, Brian Richmond, who he worked with, I think he was from GW University, he was talking about the arch of the foot

and those ligaments. And he says, those things stretch and contract every time you hit the ground. And that allows the calf muscle to act as a spring. Yes, so that's what I've seen. Barefoot running, one of the reasons why they say, no, it's just healthier and less injury prone, is because of the arch of your foot acting as a spring.

And then your Achilles heel and your calf muscle acting as a shock absorber, but that these are the things that come into play when you run on the ball of your foot or your midfoot. When you heel strike, you are offloading that same force, maybe even more force, but the full weight of your body coming down on your heel, that doesn't utilize the calf or the Achilles tendon.

It sends this shock wave of force backward to your knees and your hips, and that that is why heel striking is so bad for you. Whereas running on the ball of your feet is probably better or your midfoot is probably much better because that force is distributed to the right places, in other words. Yeah, and the skeptics will say, you go out there

and start running barefoot, you're going to get hurt. And then adherents will say, that's because you just throw your shoes in the trash and go out into your workout routine. It's like, if you want to do this, you got to really wade into this water very slowly, and they recommend even, which sounds kind of silly, but they recommend doing something you probably do every day anyway,

which is walking around your house with no shoes on. If you're a normal human being, yes. And then start walking outside on different terrains, just walking without shoes on. Soft terrains first. Yeah, like dirt or grass or something, you've been working your way up to pavement and asphalt and stuff like that.

And then broken flaming glass. That's right, that's what you would know. It's the final one. But they say you really got to work into it, otherwise, like any radical new thing you're going to do to your body, you can't just shock it. Yeah, and not just because of your feet and the bottoms of your feet either.

Yubi tried the new balance minimalist years and years ago, maybe 2011 or something like that. As a runner? Uh-huh. And she had read like, I think the people who sold her shoes even totally like, don't do it. No, they said the opposite. They're like, do not do your normal run,

like do a third of it, I think is what they said. And Yubi's like nuts to that and did her normal run, maybe even then some. And I thought she may have been crippled for life after work. Really? Yes, because she was used to heel striking because she'd been running like everybody else this whole time.

And all of a sudden she's running on the balls of her feet, not even her midfoot, the balls of her feet. So all that stuff is getting moved into the calf muscles, which just get overloaded with this workout. And just later up for seriously, like about five days, she could not run, she was so sore. Could she walk or was she? Barely.

Wow. Barely. Like the kind where, you know, have your muscles ever been so sore that you feel like flu like almost? Like that. Yeah. Like it was bad news. And she's like, you should try this.

And I'm like, not on your life, no way. That's very Yumi like, yeah, they can't tell me what to do. They don't know me. They must have been talking about themselves. That's great. And there is another study. I think this was even from kind of late last year that we found an outside magazine from a study

that was in the Journal of Applied Physiology from Peter Weyend and his biomechanics group at SMU. That's Southern Methodist. I think there's some kind of a horse mascot. The stallions? No, I just remember. I mean, they didn't, never mind. The ponies?

Do we really want to talk college football? The, well, I mean, it could apply to like volleyball or high ally. It doesn't just have to be football. Well, that's true. That was some kind of a horse. You are so SEC. I am.

So we should point out that when you're doing these kind of studies, there are a couple of ways to go about it. There's something called a force measuring treadmill or a force plate that's kind of installed on the ground. And you run on it and it really measures and can show a, you know, a graph on a curve or a curve on a graph on where your foot is exactly

striking and what that means. Right. It shows the force, not just like where like in space, it's more like it tracks the force over time, I think. Yeah. So this is how they're doing all this. They're not just kind of guessing by watching people. Right.

This is Lieberman specifically, I think too. That's right. And by the way, there's somebody knocking somewhere in this building. We're trying to get to the bottom of it. Jerry's walking around with a machete. Right. But we're hoping we can get it out in the edit,

but if you hear some knocking, we're really sorry. But I think you'll agree with us in this episode. It sincerely doesn't matter. Yeah. There's probably like half of the normal amount of people listening at this point. So back to this study, they're using, they use this treadmill and these force plates

and what they are determining is something called the loading rate, which is how quickly that force is applied. Yeah. And what they found is that when you're heel or the ball of your foot or wherever your foot strikes, there's like this initial force that is transferred through your body from the ground hitting, from your foot hitting the ground.

Right. Which will show up as a spike on this graph. Right. Depending on how quick that force is transferred, that's that loading rate, right? And then what follows is the rest of your body weight at reaching its lowest point in your stride and then you go back up and push off of the ground

and you start all over again. That's like one stride and that's what these force plates measure. Yeah. But what they found is when you run on the ball or midfoot, when that's what touches the ground, that actually distributes and kind of prolongs that force long enough that it actually merges

with that second, that second introduction of force, the rest of your body weight, into basically one force curve. Yeah. I think for a while they looked at this spike and when they ran on the midfoot, that spike was gone, but what they determined was it's not gone at all. It is like you said, just kind of covered up

and merged with the other. But that was that early evidence from 2010 that Lieberman came out with that supported Christopher McDougal's born to run hypothesis. That's right. That the spike wasn't there when you run barefoot. It is there when you run in shoes

because you're heel striking. Right. This leaves a really important question though, Chuck, because so this new research is basically saying like all that stuff, that's not the case anymore. We just change our loading rate depending, but it's ultimately the same amount of force getting transferred through the body.

Right, depending on what kind of shoe protection you're wearing. But I think what's weird to me and what I didn't understand with this new research is if it's going to different places, if that shock is being absorbed by your Achilles tendon and your calf. Right. Rather than your knees and hips,

who cares if the loading rate is the same? Right. It's going to different parts of your body and some parts are designed to handle that shock better than others. Is that what they're saying? Like you may be less likely to get injured because the parts of your legs that are affected

are more capable of handling it? Yeah, that when you run barefoot because you're running on your forefoot or your midfoot and you're distributing that force to your calf and your Achilles tendon, that you're less likely to get injured because of that. Because you're taking that stress off of your knees and hips. My question is this,

wouldn't you be better off then running in shoes but hitting your forefoot or midfoot? Best of both worlds in other words? Right. Which is probably. I mean, that's what I do. So I mean, of course it's the right way. You're doing great.

But I think that that must be the case, but I didn't see anything where it's like, this is definitive still after 10 years of this being a huge trend of a lot of studies being done. A lot of people who are very smart have thought about this. It's still not definitive what the best way to run is. And I think it would go back to me, which is to not run and just walk.

Right. But I think the last thing that I saw from this is that so if you like our track coach, they frequently now prescribe running barefoot in the grass as a cool down after the race. Yeah. And then the other thing you'll see too is the era of the very chunky heel running shoe

has kind of gone because of this. Yeah, it feels like they've gotten a little leaner, haven't they? They have because when you have a chunky heel, what's called your shoe drop, which is the ratio of where your heel lands in relation to the front of your foot. So like in the higher the shoe drop,

the thicker the chunkier your heel is. Yeah. It's impossible not to heel strike. So what they figured out is if you kind of drop that heel down more in line with the front of your foot, you can run on the front of your foot a lot more easily and not heel strike in your shoes.

Yeah, those big tall heeled running shoes too are always made me more susceptible to an ankle turn as well. You're kind of up there. You are. It's kind of like walking in high heels or something. I wouldn't know about that. But you can imagine.

Sure. Okay. You got anything else? Nothing. So let's barefoot running. It sounds like the jury's still out, everybody. But if you do get into barefoot running, do it slowly. That's right.

Learn the lesson from you, mate. That's right. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Man. Hey guys, on the safe cracking episode, I was reminded of a track by Bristol-based music producer in the UK, Tricky. We know Tricky. Sure.

I think you got to explain that to us. Right. Come on. Everybody knows Tricky's from Bristol-based. Which featured on an album he released called Product in the Environment. It was a series of interviews with old school London gangsters from the Cray Twins era,

telling their stories of lives of crime over trip hop beats. That sounds awesome. One of these was Bernie Lee, who learned his safe cracking trade while in prison. His favorite technique was to blow the doors off with nitroglycerin, which you touched on the episode, but not in that context.

Check it out here. Insert hyperlink. Also, MH370 at the end of the episode, the second one, Josh questioned the ability to tag all pieces of a plane with his call sign speculating on the existence of such tech. Chuck said, that was the future. Well, it's actually the present.

What? A smart water, not the bottle drinking water, is a technology that encodes detailed info of a thing within water, and then is applied to said thing, allowing that info to be read later on if necessary. The only problem, it evaporates.

It's apparently quite robust, so it doesn't simply wash off or whatever, but I don't have first hand experience, so can't be exactly sure how it works or how it's read. BT OpenReach, the UK's main telecom network provider, uses it to tag the copper wires that make up the network as a deterrent following a spate of copper theft about seven years ago.

Interesting. I feel like I'm losing my mind right now. That's from Liam. He says, big up. Thanks, Liam. Here in the States, we say big ups. That's right. They dropped the S there.

Yeah. Aluminium. Was that in this episode? I know. Can you believe that we- This might be the longest episode we've ever done. Oh, nothing. Yeah.

Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Liam did, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com, and who knows what's there these days. Instead, why don't you just send us an email? Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.