Episode 136: Walking, Longevity, and Why Foot Health Is the Missing Link to Aging Well, with Mark Sisson

Welcome to the show today. Today I have Mark Sisson, who's 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 best selling book, the Primal Blueprint. He helped popularize the ketogenic diet and the concept of intermittent fasting with his New York Times bestselling books, the Keto Reset Diet and Two Meals a Day. A Day. He gave millions of health minded grocery shoppers access to healthier sauces and dressings with his Primal Kitchen food company. And now he wants to change the way the world walks with his latest venture, a shoe company called Paluva and his latest book, Born to Walk. Please welcome to the show Mark Sisson.

The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or medical guidance of Dr. Robert Whitfield.

All right, everybody, welcome to the show. I have Mark Sisson today and Mark has a long history of work in the health space. In particular, recently I saw him at a show and I was wearing his paluvas. So we're going to talk about Paluva and certainly his work encouraging people to walk because I find that to be the most important exercise after surgery like we discussed. So Mark, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. Rob, good to see you again.

Yes, you too. I, I know you were just in Denver at a show, so maybe let's talk about your show and Paluva.

Yeah, so we had a. We appeared at the largest barefoot shoe expo in the country, which is not saying that much. I mean it's, you know, it's the only one, but it's the third annual and they're probably 40 companies there displaying their wares. Went from, you know, just basic minimalist shoes to five toed socks to the sorts of training devices that we can use to reclaim health in our feet. But it was all sort of centered around the health of the foot and it was called the Barefoot Shoe Expo. We had a great presence there. We had a lot of, a lot of traction in. We sold shoes. We actually brought up a U haul truck with 600 pairs of shoes and sold, sold those. But you know, before we started recording, I was telling you we had an event on Sunday. We invited 35 people on a hike in Denver in the mountains. Not, not real mountainous, but rolling hills, beautiful hike, five miles. We brought try on shoes for everybody. So these are 35 people have never worn Paluvas before. And I'M thinking because the organizer of the hike said we're going to do a short hike. It's going to be great. You could try the Palooas. I'm like, I'm thinking a mile and a half, two miles. It's a 5.2 mile hike, 35 people wearing pulumas for the first time. The ATR, which is the, which is our, you know, all terrain products. Nobody complained of blisters, nobody complained of any sort of like new shoe issues. Like, I would never, I would never go five miles running in a brand new pair of running shoes the first day. So this was such a great experiment for us and we got, we got comments like, oh my God, this is amazing. I can feel the ground. My, my feet actually feel like they're connected with earth. This is foot candy walking on stones and cobbles and things like that. So it was a really great experience to have all these newbies be trying on these five toed shoes, which are, you know, foreign to most people and to have such an amazing experience.

Yeah, let's go back to that for a minute because the audience won't. They know that I prefer in my program walking after surgery because walking is a tremendous exercise that doesn't create a problem with heart rate or blood pressure. It's perfect for what I want after surgery. It doesn't promote any problems with those variations that could lead to bleeding, which is what you want to avoid after surgery. But it's tremendous in terms of its cardiovascular effects. So I've had terrible feet. As I've told Mark. I've had five knee surgeries and Achilles surgery. And the thing that I used to, I used to live around the Reno Lake Tahoe area. And back when Morrell hiking boots were really, really good. Those were the most comfortable things I had. And then those fell out of favor. And I've had some Zebranos.

But.

And I've, as Mark knows, I've worn Vibram, which was became popularized and born to run. And we've had discussions about Poluva and Vibram and five toed shoes. So I got paluvas at the behest of actually Michael Bostick in Ben Greenfield and my friend Jeff. And I've really enjoyed having them. I now wear them exclusively in the operating room, which I told Mark, because they're super comfortable for me because I have to stand and I don't, I can't shift around and do a lot. And then I wear them as my daily wear at work as well. So they're meant to Let your foot expand. They're not, you know, cramped. And you can. And what I'm doing right now is I'm pushing down on my great toe for balance and everything so I can feel everything, and then I'll just let you take it from there. Mark. Those are my simple kind of nuance.

Yeah, well, you know, just to sort of continue that thread about walking, you know, I had my hip replaced in December, and my entire recovery was just walking, and it was just walking in the appropriate shoes. I have to make a real sort of underline there that just walking is great, but walking in thick, cushioned, elevated, restrictive shoes, not so good, and compromises your foot health and your foot function and your gait and the recovery. So coming back from hip surgery, I either went barefoot in the house, which I did a lot, or I wore the paluvas. Now, the idea behind these shoes are that we're trying to recreate a barefoot experience, but in the context of modern civilization and the sorts of surfaces that we have to navigate every day. The. The concrete, the pavement, the sidewalks, the hardwood floors, the tile, the marble, all those hard surfaces that we step on that our feet did not evolve to walk barefoot on. So while we. While we evolved to walk barefoot, we didn't evolve to walk barefoot on those sorts of surfaces. So my son and I set out four years ago to create what we call the optimal shoe, which would allow for the foot to do what the foot wants to do. The foot wants to, first of all, feel the ground. It wants to be informed. The tens of thousands of nerve endings of the bottoms of each foot are there to inform the brain of the tilt, the texture, the temperature of the surface you're walking on, so that by the time you weight that front foot, the brain has all the information it needs on exactly how to organize the kinetic chain in a fashion that most appropriately distributes the forces and the weight. For example, you're stepping on. On cobblestones on a path. When you. When you weight that front foot, maybe there's a tilt to the cobblestone. Maybe you're standing on it sideways by the time you actually put the weight on the barefoot or on a minimalist shoe, the brain goes, okay, we need to scrunch the arch around this rock a little bit. We need to articulate the toes. The first two toes up and the last two toes down. We need to roll the ankle out to the side a little bit so that the knee doesn't tweak from inappropriate forces. We maybe need to bend the knee a little bit too, because we're dipping into a, into, into sort of a, you know, either divot or stepping down a foot or whatever it is. So we have all of these different things, these forces that we have to accommodate as a result of this one step that we take, which if you're wearing thick cushion, padded shoes with an elevated heel, none of that information gets to the brain. And the brain guesses exactly on exactly how it's supposed to walk and how it's supposed to. Are the shoes are. The shoes are supposed to articulate. Toes are supposed to articulate. So we created this shoe that has full toe splay. Look, your toes want to splay outward. Your great toe wants to be away from the rest of the toes. It doesn't want to be scrunched up against the other toes. It wants to be away from the, from the rest of the toes to create a stronger base, a firmer base. And, and if you draw a line from your big toe to your heel, that line is how you create an arch. If you, if that line is straight, a straight line from the toe, a big toe, that's out then to the heel. Now every time you press that toe down, as you just described, you're engaging your arch fully. If you scrunch that big toe over against the other toes in a typical shoe, that line becomes a crooked line and you can't articulate, you can't use that big toe. And so you lose arch. And so people complain. Well, I, you know, Mark, I have bad arches or I have flat feet or I have whatever I have. No, you, you were born with perfect arches. You just wore crappy shoes your whole life and your feet have atrophied. So the, the concept behind Paluva is how do we get people to reclaim foot health by relaxing, realigning, and strengthening those intrinsic muscles of the feet.

Yeah. I remember to your point being told I was flat footed and getting fiberglass arches put in as a kit, and it really hurt. Of course, now it seems like completely absurd that somebody would do that, but that's. You're talking like the 70s is when I grew up. And that was, that was what they did for you. They made a, you know, basically a plaster mold of your foot and they created a fiberglass insert. Orthotics.

Yes.

And so, you know, who knows how many of my knee problems, you know, basically.

I know, I know, I know how many, because I. The same thing, by the way. I, I was a victim of. Look, I was a miracle cure with Orthotics in 1976. I had this guy, Steven Sabotnik, a podiatrist out of Hayward, California, cast my feet and I was wearing the new brand new thick cushion Nike running shoes. And I had, and I had condomalacia as a result of that. And so what he did was he gave me these orthotics which raised my arches up and prevented me from over pronating. Well, the foot is supposed to pronate, man. It's supposed to pronate and, but it's supposed to pronate with all the information I just described all of it. Like if, if you're running barefoot, the foot, which is a multiplanar, you know, contact organ, the foot gets all the information and it knows exactly how to rotate and how to, how to pronate. If you put it in a thick shoe and then you start to run, As I did 100 miles a week, I got knee problems because it was all wonky and the brain didn't get the information. So now the first cure was to put a shim under my, under my arches to prevent me from pronating. So then for two years I ran that way and I ran well, except I got hip tendinitis, which ultimately led to some deteriorated hips. Because once you start putting a shim up the kinetic chain to fix the, it just worked. Whatever the forces are, you know, the weakest link is or are work their way up the, up the kinetic chain, at which point pretty much everything stops at the hip in that case. But so, so many people are walking around as you described, with these shims, these orthotics in their shoes, which are unburdening their arches of having to work and so their arches get weaker and then they have more and more problems. And then maybe, you know, people get like plantar fasciitis because not only are they not working that, that arch area, that plantar fascia area, but now they've squished the big toe again against the rest of the, of the other toes, cutting off the circulation. And so we see in most cases of most plantar fasciitis diagnoses are actually inappropriate diagnoses. They should be plantar fasciosis. It's literally sort of the death of that tissue. A lack, a lack of oxygen to that tissue from having artificially crammed the big toe away from and cut the circulation off of that plantar fascia area. So to me, I mean, I know you're, you're understanding this in a big way now. You know that the, the idea that foot health is probably the lowest Hanging fruit in the world of longevity right now. It's, it's like every, everybody over 60 or 65 should be like completely dialed in on, on re. Accessing a strong foot, a strong, strong gait, better balance and that's what's going to improve the quality of life from that point on.

Well, let's talk about that because I get asked a lot about resuming exercise and what's the best exercise. And you know, my clients and everybody listening to this show is predominantly female or they're listening for a partner, loved one family member and trying to get insight about that. So, and I'll speak frankly about what I'm trying to tell patients is and set them up for avoiding osteopenia, osteoporosis, being more resilient, being less frail because as we age and we're losing muscle mass, becoming unfortunately sarcopenic because of whether it's our behaviors or approach to exercise, our lack of, of resistance training or grip stress training or things that are going to help maintain our balance, like those things lead to decreases in all cause mortality. So using, you know, people will come in Mark and I'll not be wearing shoes in the office. They're like can I ask you a question, Dr. Whitfield? Why are you not wearing shoes? Because I don't want to wear a shoe. Shoes bother me out loop is. So if I don't want to wear a shoe because my foot doesn't feel right, I'll, I'll wear a paluva sock or five toe sock. And, and that's fine because my foot's now in contact and I feel better.

Yep.

It's when I feel best because I stand a lot and I'm up and that just feels better to me.

So. Right. Yeah. So, so you understand that and I'm sure you coach your, your patients that sarcopenia and, and osteopenia are, they require weight bearing activity. You. The only way to reverse osteoporosis, osteopenia, sarcopenia, the only way to reverse these is through weight bearing activity. And the best forms of weight bearing activity require that you plant your feet firmly on the ground. So most, most women who are dealing with lost bone density issues would be well served to start loading up on some squats or some, you know, weighted lunges, jumping. You know, there's a whole series of exercises based around bounding now, you know, the whole trampoline thing. I'm, as part of my recovery from hip surgery, I'm, I'm, I'm climbing up on a chair and jumping off onto the ground and landing, you know, in a way that is, you know, it's, I'm, I'm protecting myself when I'm landing. I'm not like jarring landing, but, but jumping off of things. I mean, these are all these sorts of weight bearing activities which are necessary to prevent the bone loss and the muscle loss, require strong feet and resilient feet. And one of the first things to go on people who are unable to get to the gym is pain in the foot. They've got bunions, they've got plantar fascia issues, they've got neuromas, neurosis, they've got, you know, loss of feeling in the bottoms of their feet from, you know, years of not just bad diet, but the, you know, the footwear that they've been choosing to use. So every athlete, every person in the world, but particularly athletes, you know, everything you do starts with your feet. Whether you walk or jump or run or dance or set up for a slap shot in hockey or hit a golf ball or a baseball. It's the contact with Earth that, where all of the, all of the forces get initiated and, and over a lifetime, you want to retain that connection with Earth. You want to retain that ability to generate force and to absorb impact forces through the feet, which, which requires this, this input, this ground feel, toe splay, toe articulation, ankle mobility, and all the things that we talk about. So I'm wondering why every athlete doesn't have like, you know, people go to the gym and they go, well, you know, Monday is back and buys and Thursdays is chest and tries. And I'm like, okay, what day is foot day for you? And they're like, what do you mean foot day? Well, no, it's probably the most important part of you being a healthy athlete. You know, most athletes deal with high ankle sprains or Achilles ruptures or, you know, foot problems. Foot, anything from the hips down is what athletes deal with in terms of injury. And so much of it is related to not just the footwear they're using in the, in the games, but their lack of mobility and lack of strength because they've been taping their feet up or they've been restricting their feet in really tight cleats and, and so many injuries could be prevented if these people spent literally just one day a week focusing on foot health. And then I would say, and then spent the rest of the week walking around either barefoot or in paluvas.

Yeah, I, I wanted to, you know, go back to and just for an actionable item, say, you know, I tell people who come to see us and have surgery and recover with us is to avoid the, the long term thing I don't want to see is nostopenia, osteoporosis, sarcopenia, loss of, you know, lean body mass. So, you know, the drugs currently, like the GL1, GLP1 agonists, those things currently can do both, some more so than others. So the, the, there'll be things coming. They're going to help, but I have to deal with this problem as well.

Yeah, it's true, it's true. Yeah.

I tell them to refrain from things that are going to burn. So like so much cardiovascular exercise that's high interval, high intensity, spin classes, hit CrossFit, like all these things that are kind of.

They're catabolic, Rob. They're all catabolic.

Yeah. They're too much. Right. They're just like, they're not going to help you in the long, in the end game.

Yeah.

Just walk number one. That's great. And then this lower body thing has to be emphasized. We're going to go back to that and say. All right, so if we're going to emphasize one thing from our conversation with Mark Sisson today is we're going to emphasize using your lower body, using your, your feet, your lower body musculature and especially your thigh, hip glute musculature. Because, because those things are going to protect you from becoming frail in the law. And then of course there's grip strength, which you can grip a tennis ball and those things. So we're looking at things are going to help you avoid what we don't want you to fall. Yeah, you want to maintain balance and your thigh strength, your hip strength, your coordination, your balance in these things, you know, like palubas, which are engineered basically let you feel the surface that you're walking on better. Helps to avoid that. I, I can't emphasize that enough. I talk about this stuff and that's why I wanted to have Mark on this show because he gives such a great talk about, understands this so well. I feel like, like I'm in an echo chamber when I talk about patience.

Yeah, yeah. Peter A said it the other day. He said, you know, every day as a 20 year old or a 30 year old, you know, you encounter little disruptions where you trip or you, something happens and then you catch yourself. You know, there's a certain amount of, you're not paying attention, you stub your toe, you trip or something. Happens, but you have enough strength and enough force to be able to generate immediately and enough balance to catch yourself. So throughout your 20s and 30s and 40s or whatever, you're able to overcome these little otherwise life threatening mishaps that are all around us every day. Because your feet are strong enough, you have balance enough to withstand that. And if you do fall, you know, you catch yourself and you, you don't break a wrist, you catch yourself or maybe you roll or whatever when you're younger, as you get older, if you lose this ability to even recover from a trip, in other words, you don't have enough force production to be able to swing that right foot forward and stop yourself from tripping or falling. Now you just fall and you fall partly because of the lack of strength, partly because of the lack of ability to react quickly, partly because of loss of balance. And then you fall and you stick a wrist out. Now you break your wrist or God forbid, you break a hip because you have osteopenia or you have osteoporosis. And that hip, which otherwise would have been perfectly fine as a 20 year old or a 30 year old or a 40 year old, now it's broken. And then, you know, now you're 65 or 70 and now you wind up the hospital and now you have a 25% chance of never being the same again. Well, I think it's a 25% chance of dying within six months and a 40 or 50% chance of never being the same again. All of this is preventable with some, you know, some mindfulness and some, a few little simple exercises. And you know, I'm going to be 72 in a month and I still do my balancing exercises, I still do some slack line, I do heavy leg days in the gym. Look, I wear paluvas every, I have, like, Obviously I have 25 pair in my closet right now and I have them for all occasions. But in paluvas, every step you take is strengthening and, and realigning the, the intrinsic muscle of your feet. So it's working on, is passively training you, not ballistically, not dynamic. It's passively training you to improve that sort of foot strength and resilience so that if that day comes when you do trip, which, you know, I still trip once in a while, I'm on a hike or whatever, I catch myself and it's no big deal. And you know, it's like, but I, but I can see what happens to people who become frail as a result of choosing not to go to the Gym and do that, do the work. You know, we talk about the big. The big toe is the most important part of the foot. I mean, insurance companies pay more for the loss of a big toe than any of the rest of the foot. They know that the big toe is what anchors the foot. It's what, it's the last point of contract contact with the ground. If you, if you have a good gait, if you have a normal gait and a well formed gait, it's the last thing to leave the ground if you're barefoot. For sure, certainly in, in Palomas, not so much in reg, in regular shoes, which again, if you've scrunched that big toe over now, you, some people have to like, they have to duck foot a little bit to roll off that big toe and then their knees come in and they get all kinds of issues with that babe. But, but the big toe is, is critical because the big toe is, is wired directly to the glute. So in order to fully activate the glute muscles, you have to engage that big toe. This is why weightlifters and bodybuilders on leg days will often go barefoot in the gym. If they're doing squats or deadlifts or lunges or whatever they're doing, they want to press that. They want it. First of all, they want to articulate that big toe. They want to abduct, pull away that big toe from the rest of the foot. They want to plant it firmly into the ground and they want to press into it to engage the glute. The glute is the largest, most powerful muscle in the body. Except that as people get older, you know, and, and because of the, I think partly because the footwear and the lack of work that they're doing and this and the lack of engagement with that big toe, they lose their glutes and you know, you saggy asses is a big problem on old people, Rob. I mean, just, just saying it. So you, you want that big toe to be fully engaged when you're doing those leg days, when you're doing those lunges, when you're doing those squats, when you're doing those deadlifts, when you're doing, you know, whatever, whatever sort of leg exercise you're doing because you want to, you want to fully engage all the muscles up the kinetic chain, not just through the glute, which is, which is where that big toe connects, but the big toe also connects to the brain. And so I, I like, I literally in Chinese medicine and in foot Reflexology, the brain is, you know, it's like I get a, like, dude, in two hours, I'm getting an hour and a half reflexology massage. Today I get one a week. It's my favorite, my favorite session of the week.

Right.

And I've learned so much from this woman about, about the different, you know, efferent, efferent nerve endings that, that different parts of the body end in, in the foot and that I want to do a study at some point where we look at pre, sort of pre dementia patients, early onset and, and have them go barefoot or wear palas and see if there's any connection between that big toe being in contact with the ground and activation of the brain. It's really interesting stuff to me.

Yeah, I, I appreciate the, as it relates to the thigh and the hip and specifically the glute and what's going on there. Like having a jacked up foot is the opposite. Like that is literally like doing a squat on a hill.

Yeah, yeah.

So it makes sense obviously. And you know, as you were talking, I was doing it in my palovas, pressing down with my big toe and spreading my foot out. Because that's how you want to squat or lunge or. Because if you have a narrow base, you're going to fall.

Yes.

Because your, your natural instinct is to splay it out. Like your hand, not, you're not going.

To do a push up like this or a handstand. Yeah, yeah.

So you have balance in your thumb. Just like your Great toe is 40% of the function of the hand. So you always want to preserve the thumb just like you would always want to preserve the great toe. And yeah, having weak glutes, thighs, hamstrings, that affects performance, stability, all the things. Like you can't be explosive with weak, you know, thigh and hamstring and glute musculature. It's, it's impossible. Like you have, have all those things working in concert and I just. Have you read Super Ager by Agers by Eric Topol?

No, I'm familiar with the book, but I have not read it yet.

So he talks about all these, you know, studies and they have the, the welderly study where they looked at these patients who were very, very healthy and tried to figure out, you know, the, the basic things of why they were doing so well. And there wasn't a lot of things related to genetic predisposition which I, I sent him a question about because I was just curious. But mostly like you were talking about walking activity, community. We didn't talk about community, but being in isolation is terrible for someone's longevity. Yeah, maybe speak to about like going for walks and, and I, you talk about that a lot. So I just want to make sure you bring that up.

You know, one of the lifestyle, I would say excuses people have about walking when I say that walking is a quintessential human movement. It's the best thing we can do. The more you can walk, the better. People will say, well, I don't, you know, my day is full, I don't have time to walk. And I'm like, well, you know, do you have 10 minutes in the morning to walk your dog? Do you have 15 minutes to park your car a half mile away from school and walk your kids to school the rest of the way together as a family? Do you have 10 minutes at work to go on a, on a quick walk with some co workers? Do you have 40 minutes at the lunch break to go on a longer walk with your co workers and discuss some stuff? Because lunch only takes 20 minutes. We know that. And if you can, if you can pack five 10 minute walks throughout the day, it's almost more valuable than one 50 minute walk because the body wants to be moving all the time. The body wants to be standing and moving and, and going through all these archetypal rest positions and poses and through different ranges and planes of motion. The body expects that we're, we're wired to be moving a lot and not to be sitting around at sofas. So to the extent that you can do that with other people, then you can, you know, you can multitask. You can not just do the work and, and enjoy the, the movement experience without thinking about burning calories, because that's irrelevant, but also the community of it being able to have conversations with people on a walk. And we're seeing it now. There's a resurgence in run clubs and walk clubs around the country. There's all these sort of social clubs that are cropping up where people are getting together for the social aspect of an easy run or a walk? Because everybody's sort of recognizing that we are too tethered to our devices now. And it's just, it's sort of, it's killing us from the inside out. You know, it's making us depressed and morose and, and, and unfit. So there are some great ways that we can not only become more fit in a less invasive way. We don't have to struggle and suffer to become fit. We can, there, there are choices we can make like walking, like lifting Weights twice a week, not four days a week or six days a week. And then spending a lot of time in community with other people, finding out, you know, ways in which, again, we can kind of hang out together and go for a walk or, you know, go to the gym and, and, and do it. Walk on the treadmill. My wife has like three girlfriends and she walks on the treadmill when the weather's inclement. They all, they have a great time. They're like, you know, walking for an hour on a treadmill and they don't even realize the time's running by that fast.

Right. I think it's super important. And some, some folks and like, I can be like, very caught up in work and do things for hours at a time and not have that community. Other people get very, very. As we learned from the pandemic, their mental health suffers greatly when they're isolated. And so being in community, going for the walk like you're, you're saying, you know, inclement weather, do that on the treadmill. The other thing I wanted to say is that, and I want to make sure we touch on this. I think this is a, a crucial thing and I spoke to you about it for my occupation, because I would have to stand and operate for long periods of time and not be able to do anything because of, you know, from a small, you know, circumference of area, basically where I was operating, I couldn't change and shift and do much. And I find that wearing the Plymouth in the operating room has, has helped me in terms of. I always liken it to foot fatigue. Because you're. Your feedback mechanism has been. It's wondering, like, what are you doing? Yes, A lot of times I will, like many surgeons will shift and stay on one leg. Like we're, you know, doing some flamingo dance nonsense or, you know, not really be conscious of what's going on with your lower, lower body. And I find that wearing plumas in the operating rooms helped me not have as much fatigue along my foot and perineals all the way up the chain, if you will. So maybe kind of speak to that because I feel like that's an underappreciated thing in healthcare workers because they've been taught to wear stupid things like Crocs and clogs.

Yes. Those Sketchers, Skechers and thick Hokas and all that stuff.

Yeah, things all for your feet.

Well, you know, the. On first pass you go, well, that makes sense. They're wearing pillows, they're wearing cushions on their feet. So if they're on their feet all day on concrete, that makes a little bit of sense. But what they don't. If you understand how the foot works and you understand that the big toe wants to be. It wants to splay outwardly, all the toes want to splay, but the big toe wants to be abducted away. If you understand the concept of ground feel, if you understand that by standing on an elevated heel, which most of these shoes have an elevated heel, usually it's anywhere from a half an inch to an inch and a quarter above the level of the metatarsal heads, the lower toes, that shortens the calf muscle. And over a series of days or weeks or months or years, the calf muscle gets shortened. It just never fully elongates down. The calf is supposed to come all. It's supposed to. The heel is supposed to come all the way down and touch the ground. Like, if you're barefoot, your heel is touching the ground and your metatarsal heads are touching the ground and your toes are touching the ground. And that's a, that's a what we call a zero drop. Well, all of a sudden, you elevate that heel one inch, and you can imagine the, the, the calf muscles shorten, which then puts a strain over time on the Achilles because the Achilles can't. You know, the Achilles doesn't stretch that much. It's. The calf muscle is what stretches. And so you're. Now you're pulling on the Achilles, and it may manifest itself in an Achilles tension or tendinosis. It may wrap around underneath the foot and become a plantar fascial issue. Just because you think you're, you're wearing these cloud shoes all day, but all manner of weird things are happening in your feet. Now, in your case, and I bragged about you because I'm, I'm saying, here's a guy who's doing hours of fine motor skills standing in one place, but because his toe is just the fact that your big toe is splayed outward and now you have a stronger base to stand on, it's going to all of, all of that input rolling up into your knee, even when you shift positions, because you have the ground feel, you're feeling the ground underneath, you have the toe articulation and the toe splay. You're not going to get wonky knees from this. Your hips aren't going to give out, your lower back isn't going to give out. And you, with the shoe that you're wearing, which is the, the Napa, as I recall, it's still only like 12 millimeters total stack height. Well, what that means is there's just enough cushion there. So it's not like it's a minimalist shoe. It's not like it's a, It's a Vibram 5 fingers with 3 millimeters of hard rubber between you and the concrete. No, we've put 4 or 5 millimeters of a soft EVA cushion. Again, it's not that thick. What we do, we wanted to create the sensation of walking barefoot on a putting green, right. So when you're walking on concrete, we want it to sort of feel like, oh yeah, this feels like I would, it would the same level of pressure if I were walking barefoot on a, on a golf putting green. And so in your case, I think, you know, the only thing I'd add to you is I'd get a pebble mat, right? I'd get some sort of a, a little bit of a pebbly mat to stand on while you're doing that. And so you can, it just gives you a little bit of a more surface input into the bottoms of your feet. You can still stand there. I used to, I had a stand up desk in Malibu. I was one of the first guys to have a stand up desk going back almost 15 years now and, and I had a pebble. I was, I would add, I would sit at it barefoot or stand at it barefoot on a pebble mat. And it was really cool. I could, you know, you get these little, little.

We've used fatigue mats, but the opposite to give us more cushion because that is something that. It has its heart in the right direction, but its thought process is flawed.

No, I mean this, but that's the same as the software Pillowy cloud shoes, right? It's a, it's an interesting concept that makes sense at first blush, but if you look at the body as a unit and the kinetic, the entire posterior kinetic chain, which starts at the bottoms of feet, goes all the way up to the neck. And now you start to think that you're bypassing some of that important haptic sensory input in the name of short term comfort, but it's compromising the musculature and the lengthening and shortening of, of muscles. And I mean, now we're talking about fascia, now we're talking about tendons and ligaments, we're talking about cartilage, we're talking about all these different component parts of that kinetic chain that do get affected when you simply bypass that, that important sensory connection. Scrunch the big toe over. So you prevent the, the abduction of it, which it wants to do and raise the heel up. All of these things, they sound kind of good for a short term solution. It's one of the reasons why people walk into a running shoe store and they'll try on a pair of these, you know, brand new vapor fly, you know, carbon plated, whatever, and, and they run down the hall 20ft, they go, oh my God, these feel like trampolines. I'll take them, you know. And then you get them home and you're like, well, I wonder why my knees hurt, I wonder why back hurt. I wonder why I'm running slower with these on. Because those same shoes are, they are taking from, with slow runners, with runners who run like nine minute miles or slower, it actually reduces the efficiency of the Achilles. And so those, the dampening of those same shoes which seem so trampoline like and spring like are absorbing the very, the very coiled energy that your body wants to be able to run faster and so you wind up running slower in them. It's just, it's incredible. Now if you're a great, if you're a well trained athlete and you only land on your midfoot, not on your heel, and you've got a, a strong stiff Achilles tendon which is just coiled all the time, just, it's just ready to spring off every time you, your forefoot lands. That Achilles is just, is, it's, it's kinetic energy. It's all, it's coiled and ready to spring into action and run 440 miles, you know, for 26 miles. That's a different story. But, but even, even those guys who are the best runners in the world do not train in those same shoes because they're trying to train their feet. They, they save those shoes for the races.

That's what I was going to say. Like you have all these really, really high performing athletes. You know, I'm in Austin, Texas. We have like Speed Central here at the University of Texas and we have athletes who, you know, this used to be the undercover city for athletes to live in because it was kind of off the grid. Yeah, Austin is no longer that way. Yeah, yeah, everybody's figured it out, moved here. But you know, like you're saying like to train in the five toe sock or barefoot and get on a, a BOSU ball or balance ball and get up and then have everything activate. I mean that's obviously ideal. And then when you have to go for that, those moments, you know, if it's a, a pro soccer player, it's 90 minutes. If it's a pro basketball player, you know, it's 60 Minutes. You know, the football player is very different because they like have this three and a half hour long session, 30 minutes of actual time. But that's, that's kind of a. Your point, right? Like train these other ways to help your body and then for those moments where you have to go out and, you know, perform. Yeah.

Put on your performance wear, put on your specific. You know, I, I see wide, wide toe box cleats coming on the market right now. But I think soccer is a great example of a sport that looked at the foot and said, we are going to convert the foot into a bat. We're going to turn the foot into a bat to bat a ball into a net. And so batting the ball into the net is number one. Running is secondary. And so they, they, they optimized the soccer cleat for kicking and not for running. Now if they were optimizing it for running, it would be a little bit more, it'd be a little bit wider, a little bit more conducive to toe splay and activation of the, of the arch and everything else. But that's just, you know, the nature of the history of sports, which tends to be, you know, caught up in the old school. I mean, you go to most of the training rooms these days and you've got trainers who've been there for 30 years and they're still taping feet up and they're still doing all of the, you know, the old school stuff that they did without really kind of thinking in terms of like what, what the next level of performance might be because they don't want to take a chance on, on breaking that mold and then, and then losing a season to having done the wrong thing, you know, and.

When you watch the most probably fa. Famous cultures in the world, like Brazil for soccer, they're on the beach barefoot.

Yeah.

They can do anything with a ball. You can.

Oh, it's amazing. Yeah.

And I have a son who's played in Europe and our son has had his share of problems and surgeries and I've, I've tried to and, and continue to try and press upon him, you know, training barefoot for the same reasons we're talking about. Because you, as you go through life, you can't just continue to have surgery. Right. It's not sustainable. I've had five knee, one Achilles. He's, he's already at, he's not turned 21 yet.

Wow.

Surgeries. Jace, those are slightly different. They're not from injury so much as they're some, some congenital stuff. Anyway, the point being is like, that's not sustainable.

Well, like I've said, an injury is your body's way of telling you you're doing it wrong. So that's my, that's my blanket statement there.

Yeah, I mean, once the, these are hinge joints when we're talking about knees, of course, and they have to articulate, you know, perfectly and when they're not to mark. Right.

But, but that's the thing. So, so it requires this organization. The brain has to understand, look, everybody's born with a perfect kinetic chain. And you may say, well, I wasn't because I have congenital flat feet or I have, you know, knock knees or bow legs or wide hips or whatever. No, it's, it's. You are born with a perfect kinetic chain, provided your brain has the information it needs. You need to organize your perfect kinetic chain into a gate that works for you. Which is why it sometimes interesting to watch gate analyses and other people, you know, start to say, well, this is the proper way to walk and this is the proper way to, to run and sprint. And you know, you look at some of the sprint coaches and they'll say, there's eight guys in the, in the finals here and every one of them runs differently. You know, they, they, they, they have a different. Because they're, they've optimized for their own biomechanics. They've optimized for their own kinetic chain. And they've done that paying strict attention to how that brain organizes their own kinetic chain. So when you are able to understand how that works and then go back and, and kind of fix. How do you correct the problems that you've engaged in over a lifetime because of bad choices in footwear? Well, you. Barefoot is still the best, the single best way to do that barefoot. There's nothing like getting back into starting from scratch and going barefoot and saying, okay, I'm going to climb stairs barefoot. I'm going to activate my arch. I'm going to, I'm going to press my big toe into the ground. I'm going to run barefoot. I'm going to sense the change in terrain so that by the, so I don't roll an ankle if I'm running across a grassy field that has a gopher hole in it. And over time, you can re access this perfect gate, the gate that is perfect for you based on your own parameters in your own kinetic chain. But if you, if you don't do that, then you're again, you're doomed to whatever weakest link you have giving out once you start to overdo it, which is what athletes tend to do. And then you're, you know, then you're a candidate for surgery. And now you start that, that whole process of, of trying to fix things surgically that you probably in a, in a, in a better world would have fixed, you know, just by mindfulness. And look, our ancestors didn't get injured. If you, if, if 50, 000 years ago, if you got injured, you died. That was, that was, you didn't get, you didn't get a chance to pass those defective genes along to the next generation. Right? You died. So injury is, is kind of a new, other than war and getting eaten by an animal, overuse injury from you know, do you think our ancestors, the persistence hunters, you know, said on a, well, we had a hunt yesterday and we killed this, you know, this antelope and it lasts, it's going to last us three days. We have a day off today. Let's go for an easy 10 miler. Do you think they did that kind of. No, no, they, they, they, you know, they played games certainly, but they didn't train the way our athletes train today because it was antithetical to health to be able to, to do that. So I don't know. I'm, I, I gotta, I got a thing about over training now but I.

Saw the text, I was like hey, we've talked about this before but make sure when you can you rehab and, or train, you know, barefoot obviously when you're in pro soccer drills, obviously you can't be barefoot. You're gonna suffer actually an injury that way. So yeah, when you're, when you're performing or in the duties that you have to do for that, you know, specific sport, then you have to be know in the right protective wear. But training when you can alone or when you're doing your own specific things, you can actually concentrate on then your own, you know, movements to Mark's point. And I really appreciate him saying that. So let's just, I'm going to recap for everybody some of the highlights. You know, for me personally the takeaways are, you know, we really encourage everybody to walk both for yourself and you know, in community because that is super helpful as well. And then we encourage certainly training in a five toe, you know, sock, a five toe shoe like paluva and really work on your, your strength of your thigh and hip musculature, your lower leg musculature because those are the things you're going to protect you from becoming frail, increase resilience. And that's best, you know, for longevity. So I want to thank Mark for coming on the show. Mark, where can they find and learn more about pulluva?

So it's paluva.com P-E-L-U v a.com that's our site. And we have, you know, seven different men's styles and six different women's styles and all kinds of colors and things. And I highly encourage that on Instagram. Where, where Paluva. W E A R Paluda. Where Paluva. And then I'm on Instagram as Mark Sisson Primal. And I post something three or four times a week there. And yeah, appreciate, appreciate the chance to chat today.

Awesome. Thanks for hopping on. And we'll put all this in the show notes as well.

Great.