Are Your Shoes Ruining Your Foot Health

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25 milligrams of CBD and 25 milligrams CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Whether you've ever toyed with or wanted to run a marathon or do an endurance event, or you've never wanted to do either of them, and in fact, you would only run if a bear were chasing you, quote unquote, from a good friend of mine, this episode is going to be so much fun for you. First of all, something is going to trigger you because you will most likely say, oh, I've heard of that. Heard of him, I have that in my refrigerator. This is that show. And if you've ever wondered about those crazy-looking 5-fingered, 5-toed shoes and whether or not you should try them, or why those crazy people like me now are wearing them, this is for you. You're in perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause, and you're not slowing down, you're just getting started. But the old rules don't apply anymore. The workouts that worked before, they're working against you now. The advice you've been given, incomplete at best. I'm Debra Atkinson, and I'm the founder of Flipping 50, the pioneer in fitness for women in midlife. For more than 40 years, I've been in the trenches with women just like you, and for the last 12, right here on this podcast and, and the founder of Flipping 50: The Stronger Way app and membership. Welcome to Flipping 50: The Stronger Way, where science meets strength, where you'll find the tools, research, and real talk to build the body and the life you want in your second half. Each week you'll get evidence-based exercise and nutrition strategies, conversations with leading experts, and honest answers to the questions your doctor didn't get. Answers to in medical school and doesn't have time to answer in an appointment. This is your show. Let's get stronger. From the creator of the brand of salad dressings you may very well have in your refrigerator door right now to the founder of a shoe company called Peluva, my guest is an out-of-retirement multiple times ex-endurance athlete, responsible for a large part of the interest in ketogenic diets, in addition to other things. Mark Sisson, you may recognize from The Daily Apple, something he started back in 2006, but he has contributed to a lot of the way, I would be willing to bet, you think about or have thought about in the past your own personal health. Can't wait to introduce you. Mark Sisson has been shaking up the world of health and fitness for over 20 years. He ignited the ancestral health movement in 2006 with his wildly successful blog, Mark's Daily Apple, and his bestselling book, The Primal Blueprint. He helped popularize the ketogenic diet and the concept of intermittent fasting with his New York Times bestselling books. Keto Reset Diet and Two Meals a Day. He gave millions of health-minded grocery shoppers access to healthier sauces and dressings with his Primal Kitchen food company. He sold Primal Kitchen to Kraft Heinz for $200 million, and now he wants to change the way the world walks with his latest venture, a shoe company called Peluva, and his latest book, Born to Walk. Mark Sisson, thanks so much for joining me.

My pleasure, Debra. Good to be here.

You know, and it is an understatement to say I know you're busy, so I appreciate your time because I'm looking at your history and clearly, um, I don't think you'd say you failed at anything, but you clearly— retirement didn't necessarily agree with you, so you turned back around to do something else and look for a problem to solve. Am I right?

Yeah, a couple of times actually. My first time I thought I was going to retire was around 54, and then I, then I sort of recalibrated and thought, no, I'm not, I'm not done yet. By the way, at that point I thought I was going to be interested in playing a lot of golf. I found out pretty quickly that I'm never going to get good at golf, so that changed everything.

Well, you have been good at an awful lot of things, so we'll highlight some of those, but I think To listeners, as we're talking about foot health today, anybody who recognizes your name or the Daily Apple as we're teasing this and sharing the episode, they're not gonna say immediately, "Oh, that was an easy leap from salad dressings to footwear." How did that happen?

Well, the footwear thing had been simmering, festering in my brain for almost 40 years, ever since I was a runner. And, I got injured as a result of partly overtraining and partly some dietary implications there, but also as a result of footwear. I was one of the first long, long-distance runners, guys doing over 100 miles a week to use really thick padded cushioned shoes to enable us good runners to run those sorts of miles. But, we didn't realize at the time that elevating the heel and putting that padding in and getting rid of some of the ground feel that you get from your contact with earth every time, every step you take, whether you're walking or running, getting rid of that sensory input confuses the brain. And the brain now no longer is able to orchestrate your entire kinetic chain perfectly. And you do that enough, so many miles over so many years, and you get injured. And that's what happened to me. So I knew that I had been at the effect of shoes that I'd been wearing. But there was no solution at the time. I went on with the rest of my life and started talking about diet, wrote some books on exercise, on fitness, on diet, Primal Blueprint, Keto, intermittent fasting, and then started Primal Kitchen and was really, you know, all about helping people realign their, their health through dietary choices and making healthy food taste great. So that was the impetus for Primal Kitchen. When I sold Primal Kitchen, though, I was really able to turn my attention back to that problem that had plagued me. My whole life, which is I really like being barefoot, but it's fairly impractical in this modern age that we've built around ourselves with concrete and pavement and hardwood floors and tile, marble, and glass and dog stuff and whatever. So, I looked at what could I do to improve the general population, a notion of foot health, and educate people on how important having strong, mobile, resilient feet is to not just your well-being today or your ability to travel, but to your longevity. I think right now, I think foot health is the lowest-hanging fruit in the entire realm of longevity. And so, I'm really going at it hard with the development of this shoe that I feel has taken all of the science of the last 30 or 40 years and optimized around what what allows the feet to do what the feet want to do when you're out walking or jumping or playing golf or setting up for a slap shot in hockey or whatever you're doing. What is it that allows the feet to, to become strong, mobile, resilient, and carry you through life?

Love that. And I think we have something in common, although not at your level. So I was also an endurance athlete, or I'm a recovering endurance athlete, is what I like to say, because I found out the hard way that's really not what my body wants to be doing right now. So, that's a hard thing to swallow. But, in doing a little bit of research, if I dug correctly, at 27, you were already dealing with arthritis in your feet. Is that right?

Yes. That was the ultimate thing that took me out of running. I had arthritis in my feet, osteoarthritis in my feet, and then, I developed tendinitis in my hips. And, I'll walk you back through this. But, As I was running so many miles, like over 100 miles a week for almost 7 years, that's a toll, that takes a toll on the body clearly. And, I was one of the early, I want to say, miracle cures, but it's not actually what happened. I had chondromalacia, I had bad knees. My kneecap didn't track well. And, it was a result of these new thick cushion shoes where my my proprioception and my organization of my kinetic chain wasn't aligned enough to be doing 5-minute miles for 20 miles at a time in these shoes, and I developed knee pain. So, I wound up getting orthotics. I was one of the first sort of miracle cures with the use of hard acrylic orthotics that my orthopedist put inside my shoes. And lo and behold, I went from having knee pain, like, like, to the extent I couldn't— I couldn't even walk without a cane at one point, to being able to run again. Oh great, hallelujah! So my knee pain went away, but running in those orthotics for another 6 or 7 years, it, it forced my foot into a position where my foot wanted to pronate. Well, like, when you're running and you're a good runner and you, and you've got good biomechanics, your foot wants to pronate. And, the orthotics kept me from pronating, which then allowed my knee to track the way it was, but then I developed arthritis because my feet were so messed up. And then, it went further up the kinetic chain to the point where I got tendonitis in my hips because I was accommodating the— I was limping ever so slightly on the arthritis in the feet. It was a classic case of trying to fix a problem with putting a shim in or putting a Band-Aid on instead of getting to the root cause of the problem. And, I've seen this my whole career now as I've watched other people, runners in particular, who tend to get injured at a rate higher than NFL players. I mean, runners get injured— 50% of runners get injured every year. At any point in time, people who call themselves a runner, 25% of them might be injured. It might be plantar fasciitis, it might be Achilles tendonitis, it might be shin splints, it might be lower back problems, but so much of this is brought on by the shoes. And, that's what I really want to approach.

Yeah. And, I think we so often ignore that. And so, we go right for the massage therapist or the myofascial distortion specialist. And yet, you commented that back then you were the first to run all those miles on those newly cushioned shoes and that great The innovations. You look at them now, I mean, they're twice as thick. They're like pillows. Yeah. I think this year I've returned 2 pairs of shoes and I never return shoes, but I'm like, my knees hurt after wearing these for a walk. I can't use these. Like, don't tell me these.

No, I mean, you're right. And you'd think, like, I would think, okay, Mark, I've been wearing— I've been going barefoot. I've been wearing minimalist footwear for a long time. I was into 5-toe shoes 20 years ago, so I've been wearing nothing but 5-toe shoes for 20 years. My feet are strong. My feet are really, really strong. And yet, I put on a pair of On running shoes for a walk and my knees will hurt after 2 miles. I'm like, "How is this even possible?" Well, how it's possible— I know how it's possible because I've screwed up my biomechanics enough that when I'm walking barefoot or walking in Peluvas or in minimalist shoes, I feel the ground, my kinetic chain is working perfectly, my knees are in alignment, my ankle is rolling just as much as the ankle is supposed to roll. By the way, people think, "I don't want to sprain my ankle. I don't want to—" Your ankle is supposed to roll. It's almost in a 360-degree gimbal, right? And, as long as it's strong, your ankle's ability to roll to step in a hole or on the side of a rock or you know, going up stairs or whatever it is, that's what keeps your knee safe is your ankle's ability to accommodate the change in the tilt of the surface of whatever it is you're walking on. So, all of that, you know, together when you then are able to utilize all those tools and that fine-tuning to walk well and to reacquire a gait, now you put on soft padded cushioned shoes, And, again, the brain goes, "Wait, wait, wait. What's going on here? I don't know exactly how to— I'm not feeling the ground." And, it starts to guess and that's when you get the knee problems. And, again, I think, "Well, Mark, you're strong. You've strengthened yourself over these years of going barefoot." But, it happens to so many people that I know who once they've strengthened their feet up, then they put on regular shoes again, the shoes become really uncomfortable. It's a little bit like You go your whole life, some people, not you, go your whole life eating bad food and gaining weight and having low energy and whatever. And then, somebody says, "Hey, I can help you clean up your diet." So, you clean up your diet, you put on some muscle, you burn off the body fat, your pain goes away and you go, "This is amazing. I'm eating great food and everything is wonderful." Then, you go back and you have a meal of what you used to eat before and now you really notice it. Right? Yeah, hangover.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, that's the same thing that's going on with feet here, I think, that people get used to the pain, they get used to the misalignment of their feet, they get used to the lower back pain or the knee pain or whatever it is or the bunions or whatever, and they don't think about what's going on in this perfectly aligned kinetic chain that we're all born with but that we mess up because we take away the primary sensory input that we need to be able to walk.

So, so true. And I think it's such a great thing, but I think it's the message we've gotten for years has been backwards. It's been the orthotics are the answer, or, you know, you need new shoes, you got to have better cushion, let's look at the tread on your shoes. And then we've got this whole 80% of the population not exercising the minimum amount for metabolic health, and they want to get started. And it's like, which is worse, getting started with cushioned shoes or not getting started at all. You know, I think we got to look at that.

Real question, Debra, by the way. It's a real— it's a great question. Worth— I mean, go on, but that's a, you know, like, is it better to start with cushion shoes than not at all? Yeah. I don't know. I sort of have an opinion about that.

Yeah, I thought you might. Tell me this. What is different What happens in your foot when you begin to wear a 5-toe shoe, a Peluva, if you will, which is your brand name. So let's be transparent with anybody who's living under a rock and didn't know that. So if you haven't seen my Little Red Riding Hood shoes, they're very cute. So you'll have to look for those. What is different and what happens to your foot when you first put them on? Is it— I mean, we've been wearing these soft cushion shoes, and for a lot of our listeners, we've also been trying to stuff our toes into heels when it's warranted, whether they're for sitting or for minimal walking as we need to. But we've been doing a lot of damage probably to our feet for years and years. How do you adapt to something new like this? If you're supplementing to help your muscle, your strength, you're aging. For decades, the gold standard supplements for muscle performance have been protein and creatine, but there's another piece of the puzzle most people overlook. A lot of people think, I can willpower and discipline and do the strength training and that alone will help. But these things rest on a deeper biological foundation, which is your cellular energy system. And at the center of that are mitochondria. They're the tiny little energy factors inside of your cells. And muscle cells are especially energy demanding, and they contain thousands of mitochondria. But without energy, muscle can't perform. Here's the problem. As we age, this gets worse. Mitochondrial function naturally declines. That impedes the one thing most important for results in women over 40, and I believe that is recovery. Most women are willing to do the work. We're disciplined, we're motivated to get results, but we don't recover as well. You know the stats. Muscle loss begins for us at about 30. We lose 3 to 8% of muscle unless we're not— unless we're doing something to counteract it. But most people try to solve it with more, more workouts, more frequent, more longer, heavier. But truly supporting the cellular machinery underneath muscle and energy production is just as important. Introducing Mitopure. Timeline developed Mitopure, a supplement containing urolithin A. Urolithin A supports cellular process called mitophagy. Mitophagy helps the body remove damaged mitochondria, recycle cellular components, and support healthier mitochondrial function. It helps your cells produce energy more efficiently. Yes, Please look. In one study taking Mitopure, participants experienced 12% improvement in muscle strength in 4 months with no change in exercise. The future of health, your muscle health, and your overall health and aging— it's not just building muscle, it's powering muscle at the cellular level. Higher quality muscle is the goal. Timeline's clinically proven formula is now available at a new lower price. Mitopure now starts at $99 with the exact same formula and science. And my listeners can still get 20% off when you go to timeline.com/Flipping50Show.

Yeah, no, it's, it's a big adaptation for a lot of people because if you take a look at the sort of typical modern shoe, it's narrow. Now, you say, well, I bought a EE or EEE, it's wide. No, they still come to a point at the front of the shoe. So, they might be wide at the metatarsal head, but your toes want to continue to splay outwardly as you go past that midfoot part of the foot. So, a regular shoe, even a wide-toe box shoe tends to bring the toes back in together. If it's a really narrow shoe and if it's like a heel or something like that. It's just horrible what it does by squeezing that big toe against the other toes in your foot. Now, the big toe is the most important joint in the entire body. It's, it's the primary driver of locomotion. It is the last point of contact. So when you walk, you plant the heel and you roll off the big toe. If you're barefoot and you have good foot health, plant the heel, roll off the big toe. Now, if, if you confine that toe in that foot in a shoe where you're scrunching the big toe over, then you're raising the heel up sometimes an inch or an inch and a half, depending on the running shoes, or depending on even some of the campus casuals that people wear, certainly the heels. Then you raise the heel. Now, what that does is that shortens the calf muscle. The calf muscle, because you've basically pointed, basically pointed your toe a little bit to the point that you shorten the calf muscle, which then puts more strain on the Achilles, because the Achilles doesn't— the Achilles is very strong. It's the strongest tendon in the body, but it's like steel. It doesn't stretch, it doesn't bend that much. You want it to coil and spring and bounce, and use a calf to do that. But if you shorten the calf muscle all the time, it pulls on the Achilles and has a problem there. Then, by virtue of having pushed the big toe against the others, a lot of people, women in particular, develop bunions, where the big toe now, in order to accommodate this angle that you've forced the toe in, it builds a bone outward. And now you've got this real pointy side part of your foot that A, doesn't look that great, and B, is very painful for a lot of people. Then people get plantar fasciitis because they've scrunched that big toe against the other toes, and now the plantar fascia area, that part of the arch that needs, it doesn't have much blood flow to begin with, and now you've restricted the blood flow anyway. Now you've cut off the blood flow, so now it gets, the tissue starts to die. Plantar fasciitis or plantar fasciosis, sort of the death of this tissue. So you have all these things that can go wrong as a result of the footwear. People will say to me, "Mark, you know, I get it, but you know the bunion thing, like my mother had bunions, my grandmother had bunions, it's in my family, it's genetic." No, bunions are not genetic. Bunions are 100% a result of your choice in footwear. And if you spend a lifetime confining your toes in those spaces, and maybe you do have a little bit of a genetic predisposition to become more affected than some people. So, some people can wear regular footwear their entire life and not get bunions, but the occurrence of bunions is always related to the footwear and then maybe some familial genetic propensity to conform the bone that way. Who knows? Either way, it's a choice of footwear. Now, let's just say, okay, you recognize all this thing. Now, we put you into a minimalist shoe that's got 5 toe slots, that's, that's, that's wide enough to accommodate anybody's foot, to allow the toe to force the feet and the toes to splay outwardly, because toes want to splay outwardly, that allows that big toe to abduct, that is pull away from the other toes, so that it can be the last point of contact on the ground when you push off, that allows the circulation to happen through that plantar fascia region and through through the entire foot, that then because of the virtue or the nature of the 5 toes and the ability to move up and down and articulate up and down, when you walk on, say, cobblestones, or you step in a hole or a divot, or you step around a rock, the toes conform, the toes adapt to the change in the texture, not just the tilt, but the texture of the ground underneath. And every step you take, you're using all the intrinsic muscles of your feet. When you use all the muscles of your feet, you build your arch back up. Your arch wants to be strong. People complain about having— I have, Mark, I have flat feet, I have no arches, I have flat arches. No, you were born with perfect arches. You just, you let them atrophy through a lifetime of wearing cushioned, thick, rigid, supportive shoes where whenever you had a problem, you put an orthotic in there. You unburdened the arch of even having to do any work. So it's no wonder it atrophies and gets weak so that when you take the shoes off, now you're flat-footed. Now, if you're flat-footed, one of the things that happens is as you're walking, because your arches don't— they're not working, they're strong, they're not strong enough. And by the way, you can have flat feet but strong arches. You know, the shape of the foot is partly genetic. So some people will— you look like, oh my God, they have flat feet, but they've very strong arches because they go barefoot, they know how to— they've worn minimalist shoes. So it's not always that flat feet equals weak feet. You can have strong flat feet if you do the right work. But at any rate, if you have weak arches, now you, you start to walk, now you develop kind of a duck walk where your toes start to point outward because two things happen. Number one, you want that big toe to be the last point of contact, and because it's scrunched over, the only way to do that is to have it roll off at an angle because your feet are sort of pointed outward. And then you overpronate because of that, because you have no arches and because in order to roll off that big toe that's been scrunched over, now you overpronate, you roll your foot into the step and it causes a whole bunch of problems. Put on the minimalist shoes, put on Peluvas, go barefoot, do some training. All of a sudden you realize my arch gets stronger, my feet get stronger, my gait starts to become more parallel. I start to now plant the heel, roll off the big toe, plant the heel, roll off the big toe, and do it in a way that— and I know you know this because we talked about this before we started recording— your gait, your— everything above your waist changes too. You walk more upright, your posture changes. It feels good. You like literally you feel like rolling your shoulders back and you feel like, you know, kind of walking proud and tall. It's amazing what happens when you walk with intention in good footwear. That kind of brings us back to that hypothetical, like, if you're out of shape, overweight, and you want to start walking, should you start walking in barefoot shoes? Yeah. Uh, versus, or should you just start walking in, you know, um, thick cushioned you know, hokas or whatever, because they're comfortable to you. And I would say, you know, if we go back to— I had a conversation with the CEO of Virta Health this morning, we were talking about this. They are very big fans of— do you know Virta Health, by the way?

Do you know what they do? I don't.

Okay, they're the largest company focused solely on reversing type 2 diabetes through Lifestyle interventions. It's a big company. And so, I've known the founder for quite some time. And, he said, "Look, we don't even have people walk if they're more than 60 or 70 pounds overweight. We don't even have them walk until they get the diet dialed in first because we want them to lose weight first so they feel like walking." Right? So, with that same sort of sensibility, sensitivity, I would say that when you start walking in Peluvas and minimalist shoes, be very conscious of how much you weigh and how much stress you're going to be putting on your feet, particularly if you haven't done any barefoot work before because your feet are going to be like, "Whoa." It'll be like going in the gym for the first time after not having gone to the gym for 10 years and then doing a hard, hard weight training workout. You wouldn't want to do that. You want to kind of ease into it. It's the same way with walking in minimalist shoes. But once you do, the feet adapt very quickly, and then it becomes this sort of self-reinforcing thing where you— like, again, I was a career runner. I ran, you know, a lot. I haven't run a mile in 30 years, but I love to walk. And every night, my favorite thing to do at the end of the day is I go for a 45-minute walk. And in that walk, I am, you know, downloading and ruminating about the day and whatever and thinking about things, but I'm always conscious about every step I take and how it feels good. And I'm engaging all the muscles in my feet, which are then engaging all the muscles in my leg, in my, you know, posterior kinetic chain up to my glutes. And one of the things we talk about a lot is the big toe is also directly connected to the glutes. So bodybuilders and weightlifters who are really trying to lift heavy weights and get stronger and look bigger and you know, on leg days, they will take their shoes off because they know that the big toe needs to abduct away from the rest of the toes in order to plant firmly to do a deadlift or a lunge or a squat, but also to engage the glute fully. And if you don't do that, and you start doing those heavy leg days in restrictive shoes, and you aren't able to fully engage the glute, then you start to involve some of the, the ancillary stable muscles, stabilizer muscles around the glute, which is fine, but you're not You're not trying to do the work to complete the task. You're trying to do the work to build a stronger body and build that particular, that particular muscle group. So anyway, it's like, I want people to understand how critical it is to everything you do that you achieve excellent foot health and strength and mobility and resilience.

Yeah, so, so agree. And I think to your point about getting started and going for a walk in the shoes, and that was one of the last things I did. So ironically, I I had a 10-day stint as— I was grandma daycare. And so I was kind of locked into this in-house, not doing much, but I took my Peluvis. I'd just gotten them and I said, okay, well, I'm going to just get used to wearing them. And so here's my 10-day period. I'm wearing them all day. Actually, you take a lot of steps caring for an 8-month-old. So I got a little movement in and then I started doing short walks. So shorter dog walks, not my walk, but You know? Yeah. But what I realized is very similar to the adjustment with the posture, you feel very different. But I realized that walking otherwise in those cushioned shoes, the running shoes or walking shoes we all buy, that you get really lazy and you don't realize you're lazy. We're all counting our steps, but I feel awake. I feel head to toe, the muscles are awake when I'm wearing those shoes. And I was half asleep and I didn't even realize it going for walks. The rest of me just going through the motions.

Yeah, I think I noticed that and I've seen that with a lot of people where if I do 10,000— let's just say, Phil, you know, theoretically, if I did 10,000 steps in thick running shoes versus 10,000 steps in Peluvas, I would feel more tired after the Peluvas. But in a good way, because I'm, I'm out, I'm doing the steps. Like you said, I'm doing the steps not to put the time in and not to, you know, get a number, but to actually improve my strength and my mobility and my resilience. And so I know that every step I take in Peluvas, I'm involving more muscles, which to your point about feeling lazy in, in cushion shoes— I mean, I went, uh, I went to a running shoe store a while back, and we were talking about Pelotas. We had an event that we're sponsoring there and they said, try on these new, you know, whatever they were, Vaporflys or, you know, the new racing shoes that are like $350. I tried them on and I literally started laughing. I could not— they were like the old kangaroo boots that we had in the '80s. I mean, it was, it was so ridiculous how much bounce and cushion they had. And it was also ridiculous how high off the ground they were to the point that if you did step in a pothole, You would, you would, you'd sprain an ankle wearing those things if you didn't have strong ankles. Yeah.

But the interesting thing would be to be a fly on the wall, don't you think, in a shoe store when somebody walks in quite often having no clue what they're looking for. And, you know, I think they do want, well, I want to get started walking and I want something with cushion. And so they're being led to the slaughter, basically. You know, they're not getting an education on their foot and their foot need as much as they're getting sold a shoe.

Well, and they're getting sold a shoe by, you know, advertising. So they— a lot of people— this is one of our issues with the reason the Peluvas are not really that available in stores, but we're doing very well online, but we're not in stores yet, because somebody walks into a store and they say, I read about this new Hoka, or read about this new Nike, I read about this new Adidas, I want to get a pair. I don't think the salesperson who's, A, whose job is to accommodate the customer, and B, who's typically on commission, they're not ready yet to go, no, you don't want one of those, you want to wear these, try these minimalist shoes. So we have that little educational challenge that we have to get over, uh, which we've been doing for 3 years now, and we're very happy with it. I mean, we, you know, I spend most of my life educating people about foot health now. I used to educate them about diet and how to eat right, and now it's how to move right.

Love that. Why would you say that we resist? I think there's still, you know, some penetration of they look funny. They're, like you said, somebody's in the gym and they're really trying to work on their glutes and they're really focused on muscle. They're going to do whatever it takes potentially. And, I think, once, maybe, you know, I'm 62, and for the last 5 years it's like I don't have a lot of F's to give anymore what other people think. It's more about does it feel good and what's it gonna do for me for the next 10 and 20 years. That's so much more important. But I do think we still all— what are people gonna think? Or they look funny to me. And yet, is it a lack of education? I mean, what are you finding as you're kind of penetrating to the next level in the new way wave and more people are getting it. What is it that makes somebody say, "Oh, now I get it"? Yeah.

It's definitely a lack of education, like a huge lack of education. I'm amazed and appalled at how many people have zero awareness of their feet. And, this starts with them trying to put Peluvas on in the first place and taking 10 minutes to get each toe into its slot and then standing up and saying, "I think I'm in." 3, only 3. And then finding out that they haven't done that. They have zero toe awareness of that. So, the educational aspect of it is huge. But then, there's that thing where people, you know, I think the shoes look great. You know, I have a lot of women, older women love the Peluvas. I have a bunch of women in my building who are over 55, maybe 20 or 30 of them, and they go, they walk, they do all, they train. Their trainers say they have better balance than they've ever seen. These are women who used to have bunions or bad foot problems who now walk 5, 6, 7 miles a day outside on the concrete in Miami.

So— Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you telling me this could help a bunion? Oh, yes, of course. I love you so much.

No, no, no. This— we have so many people. The best example is my daughter-in-law. Who, um, she's head of marketing at Peluva. And when she was 19— she's German— when she was 19, she started to develop bunions in her feet. And so she had bunion surgery on one of her feet, and it was horrible. It was painful. It took forever. I mean, you know, they're basically cutting bone and reshaping a foot and everything. Uh, she started dating my son, and, uh, they eventually got married. They've been together for since COVID And so she started wearing Peluvas as soon as we were making them. Her other bunion, which was just as bad, but she wanted to wait 2 more years to have bunion surgery because she did not want to go through that pain again. She wanted to forget the pain. Her other foot is like 100% pain-free. She wishes she'd never had the bunion surgery. She only wears Peluvas. Like, I— so they got married. Uh, 2 years ago, but she's German, and so they're having their wedding in Austria next month. Oh my gosh. Um, so her, her, uh, European family can, can attend. It's a, you know, passport kind of thing. Sure.

And, um, is she walking down the aisle in peluvis?

Walk down the aisle in peluvis.

You better get a picture of that.

I really do. So anyway, this But back to bunions. So, you know, one of my early adopter friends, um, was— she'd given up on walking. She loved to walk, it was her favorite thing to do. She'd given up on walking because she had bad bunions, started walking in Peluvis. Now her feet still look, you know, they, they don't look pretty, but the pain's gone and she's readapted, readjusted her feet to, um, being healthy while they're— while she's walking. And, and that in turn allows her to go to the gym and do legs and do all the other stuff that you do your— that you use your feet for beyond just walking, dancing, you know, all of the things that we almost take for granted. So yeah, we— bunions are just— get— ladies, get— and men too, get a hold of that before it gets out of control because that's a serious, you know, issue for the rest of your life if you have bunions.

Two questions for you. So one, And I don't know how much you know about this, but I do think that— so it's been 30 years since I had a baby, but my son's, you know, 8-month-old, I am learning they're not putting shoes on him at all. Good. They're being advised, you know, let him be barefoot as much as possible for— and I'm like, so are we changing that? Are we going to see, do you think, based on that, if we're just—

I hope so. I think one of the things— better health? Yes. I think one of the things that's happening is— so, you— because people say, "Well, would you make Peluvas for children?" I'm like, "We would love to, but it's tough enough to get those big grown-up toes in there. Try getting those little tiny toes in there." Yeah. So, more to the point is let your children go barefoot as much as possible and then only put them in wide, soft, thin toe box shoes. There are a number of companies that make wide shoes. SoftStar is one of them that makes makes, you know, great shoes for kids that are under 6, 7 years old. And then by the time they're 6 or 7, you can— but again, just make sure that you don't scrunch their, their toes together. There are other companies that make wide open toe box shoes. We're one of the few that makes a 5-toed shoe, which is more, um, like a glove for the feet than a mitten, say. Um, but I think if parents are able to get a hold of that early on and and allow their kids to go barefoot as much, encourage them to go barefoot as much as possible outside, in the house, climbing up and down stairs, whatever. And then just, just let them wear really, really loose, comfortable shoes.

They'll be fine. Okay. Second question. So if 35-year-old Mark, you know, the one who was maybe forced out of competition because of injuries or arthritis, osteoarthritis, could put on a pair of Peluvis and that's what he wore. What do you think changes for him in the future? Does he get more years as an athlete?

You know, that's so funny because I'm so grateful that I got injured when I did. I am so grateful that I got that running bug and that endurance bug out of my system. Because if we look to an entirely different set of problems in, in people who are lifetime endurance athletes, now we start to encounter cardiovascular issues, like lots of studies done recently on people who run too much. And there's such a thing as running too much, not just because it is wear and tear on your joints, even if you have great form, but also your cardiovascular system. So I did damage to my heart. From all the miles I did. So I'm so thankful that I got injured and was able to then take some of that information, translate it, and then be able to write books on— like, I wrote a book called Primal Endurance on how to train. Like, I tell people, don't run a marathon, but if you have to, okay, I'm going to show you how to do it, you know, in the, in the way, in the kindest, gentlest way on your body. So 35-year-old Mark with paluvas, I would have probably shifted my sport to something more, um, because I'm competitive, something more dynamic, something more ballistic, something like parkour or obstacle racing or Spartan racing, or, you know, they have high rocks today. I probably would have done more of that because I, I have enough upper body strength and, and, uh And I was, you know, and I still had the cardiovascular endurance, but I shudder to think of how I'm— if I shifted my diet and changed my footwear and been able to continue to run for 10 more years, what that— what impact that would have had on the rest of my body. Because back to, you know, what we talked about a little bit, running is Long-distance running is not good for you. It's— I'm sorry, it's a, it's a, it's a pursuit that a lot of people will take on. It's a life challenge. It's a, you know, finishing a marathon, that's great. One, maybe two. Um, but most people— I wrote a whole book last year called Born to Walk, and in that book I talk about the running boom of the last 50 years as having been inappropriate for almost all people. The only people should be running long distance on a regular basis are runners. Okay, that sounds glib, Mark. That sounds cliché. No, the only people who should be running are ectomorphs, skinny people with large lung capacity and a high pain tolerance. And those people are probably going to be competitive enough to want to run and be able to run. And so go for it. But everybody else who's 5, 20 pounds overweight, 50 pounds, should not be running as any sort of a, of an anti-aging strategy or any sort of a weight loss strategy. There are a lot better ways to do this. You should be walking a lot. And, by the way, when I say running, I'm talking about metronomic running, 5, 6 miles at a time, 8, 9, 10-minute mile pace. Sprinting, I'm all about sprinting, but sprinting is more of a strength-promoting activity than it is a metronomic wear and tear on the body. So, I think most people should not be running. And, I'm one of the few that, I would say, I was one of the few that could be running and and was okay running. And even then I got injured and I got beat up from it. And I'm glad I stopped when I did because I have so many friends now who've had heart attacks and died, heart attacks and lived, open heart surgery, massive valve replacement issues. And when I say so many, I'm talking about, I don't know, 100 top athletes that I know. Forget the tens of hundreds of thousands or millions. Who suffer from AFib from having trained too hard, or VTAC, or all of the other cardio maladies that come from, from overtaxing the heart every single day just because you read somewhere in 1968 that it was good for you. Amen.

Yes. Okay. And do you miss it? Do you miss any part of it? No.

No, and I'll tell you why. I had an epiphany in my late 30s when I realized that my whole life as an athlete had been, had been built around managing discomfort. That every single workout I ever did was about managing, digging a hole for myself, becoming uncomfortable, and then managing that discomfort for as long as I could. To the point that then when you get in a race, now you're up against all these other well-trained athletes. And And the, the objective that day is to see who can dig the deepest hole for themselves, bring everybody into the hole with them, and then spit everybody else out the back end. So, so every day of my life from the age of 15 to 35 in terms of training was built around not being comfortable. And then I started playing Ultimate Frisbee., you know, and I started actually playing games because I was never a team sport guy. And I'm like, wait a minute, games are fun and I'm getting a workout. So for instance, I discovered Ultimate Frisbee pretty late in life. I mean, my son was 10, so I was 50 when I discovered Ultimate Frisbee. It's like the greatest game ever. And I will sprint, I'll probably cover 6 miles in a 2-hour game sprinting most of the time, sprinting, walking, changing direction, jogging, sprinting. And that is play. Great work. But I would never— I've tried it, you know, in the last 35 years, I've maybe put on shoes 4 times to go out the door and go, "I'm just going to go run a mile and see how I feel." And I swear, I'd get 200 yards down the road, and I'm like, "What am I thinking? I hate this. This has zero— it's not fun at all. Why am I doing it? I don't need to do it." and I would walk home. So, now, it's obviously ingrained in me. But, when I was an endurance athlete, I was all about— I was in that mindset. And, it's a bit of a sickness, Debra. It's a bit of a— it's a wacky kind of mindset to be in to force yourself to do this every single day without really days off unless you're forced by an injury versus every day I get up now and I choose to go to the gym and work out or go for an hour stand-up paddle. Tomorrow, I'm riding on the beach on a fat tire bike, really those big balloon tire bikes. We ride on the sand for 13 miles in the heat, hour and a half ride. I mean, it's hard work, but it's fun. We're chatting it up and having a good time. And I still throw the Frisbee with guys every once in a while. So I'm always looking for ways to play now versus looking for ways to beat myself up or hurt myself or manage discomfort.

Love it. Love it. Okay. So is there a question about Peluva that I haven't asked you yet that should have?

Well, I mean, one question would be, you know, is Peluva right for everybody? Yeah. You know, and I would say yes, it is right for everybody. Now, that doesn't mean I'm out there saying all you should wear is Peluva shoes, but I think everyone should have a pair of Paluva shoes in their closet along with everything else that they have for specific uses. So a lot of people will wear Paluvas just to the gym, and women in particular do getting like leg days, but anything they're doing in the gym. I see a lot of women now, young women, you know, in their 20s and 30s wearing Paluvas in the gym. Yeah. I have a lot of UTMB off-road trail runners who rock with a backpack in the mountains with our trail shoe, our ATR, because they're training their feet to be resilient and strong. And then when they get in a race, they'll put on a little bit thicker wide toe box shoe like an Altra or something like Altra and race in that. But they're strengthening their feet using Peluvas. They're using it as a tool in their toolkit to build something else. So I think everybody would be— would benefit by having a pair of Peluvas in their arsenal, in their, in their toolkit. For reacquiring a strong, resilient, mobile foot.

Excellent answer. Well, excellent question too. So thank you. So, so appreciate your time and you being here. And I remember a mutual acquaintance of ours, Sean, he first met me and I was in platform shoes by Michael Kors and he shamed me to no end. He said, what are you wearing? Yes. God, we don't even know each other yet. So now he's won me over. He got me started. And remind me which Shawn this is. Shawn Greenspan. Oh, yeah.

Okay. So Shawn, I mean, because I have another Shawn, Shawn Stevenson, who does Model Health Show. Sure. And he's one who he had Puluvas in his closet for 18 months and didn't wear them. And then one day he wore them and he goes, oh my God, what an idiot. Right. What an idiot. Like, and now, now he's a total convert. He's a huge supporter of it. But the same was with Sean Greenspan, and Sean's one who's hiking in the mountains. Right. With his wife, and they're just— she only wears pullovers.

Yeah. All about the pullovers. Knee injuries. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, we're converts.

So my challenge to you listeners, all of you, is to show me you in yours the next time you're posting. So, Mark, thanks so much for being here and for everything you've done. Career-wide for everyone's health. Appreciate that.

Thanks. Thanks, Debra. Great talking with you.

Thank you. The information shared on Flipping 50 the Stronger Way is for educational and informational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your physician or qualified healthcare provider before beginning any exercise program, making changes to your diet or adjusting any medications or supplements. Individual results may vary. Debra Atkinson and Flipping 50 are not responsible for any injury or adverse outcomes resulting from information presented on this podcast.