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FC2O Episode 24 - Helen Hall (Part 2)
61 Plays4 years ago
In part 2 we talk about bare feet, breasts, 4D motion capture scanners and Helen's wisdom into how to move from chaos to order!
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Transcript
Running in Vibram Five Fingers: A Joyful Challenge
00:00:00
Speaker
So we put the five fingers on and there was no manual. We just put them on and got going because they felt so amazing. We went off for a usual five mile trail run and it got dark.
00:00:18
Speaker
We got lost on our usual five mile trail run. It was so muddy. We didn't want to stop it. Honestly, I still remember that to this day. It gives me such joy. Thank you.
00:00:31
Speaker
that ran and we came back whooping and high-fiving and whatever and and the next day we could hardly move. Excellent and we loved it we just thought it was it was silly yes we shouldn't have with with the benefit of hindsight but it was joyous we swelched the mud between our toes none of us had ever felt anything like it
00:00:57
Speaker
It was cold, we didn't care. The stones, our feet weren't conditioned enough and the stones hurt the soles of our feet and we were ouching and laughing all at the same time and we didn't care. It was just wonderful.
Helen's Journey with Vibram Five Fingers and Biomechanics
00:01:43
Speaker
In this podcast we talk about how Helen began coaching runners and her own evolution from those huge sold shoes popularized briefly by Madonna called MBTs and transitioned in her understanding and her practice to utilising Newton running shoes and finally to Vibram five fingers. We talk about how this transitioning can affect muscular development especially around the feet of course and how you can safely transition using Helen's audio program. In the mix we talked about evolution and running efficiency and breast biomechanics of all things.
00:02:13
Speaker
Who'd have thought? Finally, we move on to how Helen is able to screen for biomechanical function using her advanced 4D scanner at her clinic. And after all the discussion of barefoot running, we discover how she wraps up all of her training and experience in her book called, Even With Your Shoes On. So sit back and be inspired to rediscover the most natural of human movement, barefoot gait. Enjoy the show. Here we go.
00:02:46
Speaker
Welcome back to another edition of FC2O and this is part two with Helen Hall. So Helen, welcome again. Thank you very much for having me back. So polite.
00:02:58
Speaker
Very good. So in the last session, we covered a fair bit of your history. So we sort of walked through from your military background and your running history and into setting up the 10 point shot, which was initially for runners and then triathletes. We obviously met in 2007 at the back pain show and it was at Olympia. Was it Olympia?
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, the bank show. Yeah. Um, where I was distributing the five fingers and that's really where our journey together started. And you started not just wearing them, but also retailing them and coaching people in them. And actually the coaching is something we haven't fully touched on. So that's something that we could start out with perhaps. Um, so when we start with your journey into the barefooting itself in terms of the experiences you had changing from, essentially from what I understand, you were running an MBT. Is that right?
00:03:55
Speaker
And coaching. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And it sounds mad. And with the benefit of hindsight, it is still slightly mad. But I have to say those MBTs, the original ones had a very steep cutaway, were absolutely amazing to coach running in. They were so unstable.
00:04:23
Speaker
that folk couldn't have a forward lean. You would be flat on your face, neither could they lean back. They would crash back. Well, should we explain a little bit about the NBC? I know a lot of people will have seen them or will remember them, may even have had a pair, but for those that haven't, the MBT stands for Mass Eye Barefoot Technology, doesn't it? Do you want to explain the story behind them?
00:04:46
Speaker
Yes, so it was a Swiss engineer who invented them and he just, I think it was to do with his own back problems, so he created an unstable shoe to help him with his own back problems and when they were looking for a name he just thought of
00:05:09
Speaker
a tribe that was upright and came up with Maasai. He could have chosen from many, frankly, any of the barefoot tribes of the world. The Maasai and then the barefoot was very peculiar given the fact that these shoes were absolutely enormous.
Exploring MBT Shoes: Medical Device to Commercial Product
00:05:30
Speaker
And the technology was because he was an engineer. And I think his name was Carl Sembidere. It's in the depths of time now, and I can't quite remember. Sorry, Carl. And he brought these MBTs in the European nations. It was actually classed as a medical device.
00:05:53
Speaker
In this country, it definitely wasn't. You get around the VAT, doesn't it normally? Yeah, it does. It enables them to get them a little bit on prescription, so they're funded in many European countries, or at least they were. As was, and I think still is, manual lymph drainage is a treatment modality.
00:06:15
Speaker
So when I went to, I think it was a CBD course, a continual professional development training course in Austria, it was seeing all of the Austrian teaching team and clinicians at the lymphedema center, as well as as many lymphedema patients as they could get feet into. They were all wearing them.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yes. Which I'd already started using them and it was it almost gave me the green light thinking well yeah I think I'm on the right track here. Yeah. Okay we forge ahead, go with the flow. I've always been a big fan of when things are seamlessly easy.
00:07:05
Speaker
why fight it, go with the flow, who knows where it's going to take you, you just follow the direction ahead of you. Yeah, because one of the things that preceded the MBTs is the rocker shoes that Yanda developed. I don't know if you're familiar with those, but they're kind of like wobble boards as shoes, you know, but he developed those I think in the 70s or 80s. Oh really?
00:07:29
Speaker
And part of his idea, so these were not to wear out. These were literally in the clinic. And like I said, mini wobble boards. But his whole thing was to increase the drives in the tonic nervous system because of this labile surface that you're standing on, which, of course, there's many other devices like Bosus and Swiss balls and wobble boards themselves that have attempted to mimic that.
00:07:56
Speaker
Do you know if there was any thinking in that way behind the development of the MBTs or was it more to do with this? Because the other thing that I recall from looking at the MBTs was that they had this kind of slight give in the heel and the story was that as you land on the heel that I think the shoe would give a little bit and it was supposed to be a little bit like walking on sand. Is that right or have I got that wrong?
00:08:23
Speaker
I think that, no, you're not wrong at all. Whether or not the Swiss engineer, Carl, whatever his name was, bless him, sorry. Whether or not he cribbed off Yander's work or developed it or the seed of thought was sown, I don't know. The idea of the
00:08:48
Speaker
walking in soft sand, I think came about as other people's description. It wasn't really in the initial, um, the initial leaflet that came through when I first contacted the CEO in Liverpool street, uh, was very medical orientated. They talked about lymphedema, they talked about medical advice, they talked about, uh, sciatica and they didn't talk about walking in soft sand. But then, so the more the product was out there,
00:09:15
Speaker
the more I think that other phrases were attributed to the product. The heel area was like a very squishy
00:09:26
Speaker
soft, um, teardrop shape, not even a teardrop, like, uh, uh, what is, uh, an oval with pointy ends. So like a diamond, uh, but with soft sides or like an oval with pointy ends. Uh, it was like a disc, almost like a whoopee cushion with pointy ends and made of a very particular, very soft material.
00:09:50
Speaker
and then it preceded a big ridge which was the pivot point in the sole of the shoe and the original ones had a pivot point which was quite far back which made balancing more challenging and of course
00:10:11
Speaker
then you've got the reflexive of the writing reflex to organize your body so that you didn't fall over. And all of the tonic muscles firing to hold you upright on an unstable surface
00:10:31
Speaker
with shoot with bones, the bones of the feet with the 33 joints, the innate instability of the foot and yet the great stability of the foot because of the joints. So the innate flexibility of the foot with 33 joints that can open and then the innate stability of the foot when those 33 joints do the opposite. And of course they're opening and closing simultaneously on
00:11:00
Speaker
each surface of one side is closed, the other side, the opposite side is open, top and bottom of course, laterally, the latter side as well. So you've got this amazing massa piece of the foot inside the shoe, which the inside of the sole was completely unformed, unshaped, just flat, completely flat, and it was the outsole
00:11:26
Speaker
that was the shaped part of it, and it was the pivot point that made the challenge to the staying upright, the postural challenge. And originally it was, they were hard to balance in. There wasn't much in the way of forgiveness, forward or backward, quite stable left to right, medial to lateral.
00:11:54
Speaker
So they were really, they self-coach, they helped people instantly become aware because self-preservation is a wonderful thing. And our central nervous system is firing on all cylinders for self-preservation pretty much all the time, that's its job. So the central nervous system was lit up by these. And then, and I think,
Transitioning to Newton Running Shoes: Speed and Form
00:12:23
Speaker
In my opinion, it's slightly sad that then looks became important. People didn't see the value of it. They looked, they didn't want to wear them because they looked whatever they looked. The fact that it solved their back problems was neither here nor there. They didn't look nice enough. And they were slightly too challenging for some. So then they moved the pivot point more towards the midfoot or the middle of the foot, not the midfoot, to make it easier.
00:12:52
Speaker
which kind of defeated the object. They made them thinner and less rocky, which again kind of defeated the object. And in the end, when I departed, when my path strayed away from Masai barefoot technology, I thought they looked pretty much like a normal shoe, albeit funky, but they looked normal.
00:13:15
Speaker
And the upper had become ever more narrow. But then all the benefit of having an enormous shoe with a foot free to roam around inside, with obviously without it falling off, it was all gone.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So it was now a generic shoe that was very expensive, very heavy and of I think less use. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you went from one slightly crazy looking shoe to an even crazier looking shoe.
00:13:46
Speaker
Well, there was one in between. Although the timeline, it's in the book, I had the timeline all organized. I can't quite remember if it was just before or just after Five Fingers because mutants arrived. And mutants, they were intriguing enough to look at and test because they had
00:14:10
Speaker
effectively a negative heel technology, but it wasn't negative. So the earth shoes have a negative heel technology, but the heel was always below the forefoot, which kind of didn't make much sense in my head. And I thought, I'm not sure we've evolved to have our heel below the forefoot the entire time. Yeah, like constantly walking uphill.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yes, I understood the premise of if the heel was below the forefoot, the weight would come back a little bit. So it was kind of unraveling the Western civilization's penchant for leaning forward the entire time. So I understood it to an extent that I felt it had limitations with the forefoot always being above and therefore ankle dorsiflexion always being a little extreme. And if you were walking,
00:14:58
Speaker
with a heel to toe gait, then there was always just this little extra length having to happen. The key is having to happen. It wasn't happening because that was the nature of the terrain, it was always having to happen. So you were forcing something onto your body that was not necessarily how we understood the joint mechanics to describe movement to happen on any terrain.
00:15:28
Speaker
And with the newtons, they had that so that the heel looked low when there was no weight through the forefoot. But then as you passed through the forefoot as the weight as the foot fully loaded heel to toe in that moment of pronation, the lugs underneath the forefoot disappeared into the soul. So then you had this up. Now everything is
00:15:56
Speaker
calm and at one and not being forced anywhere, it's allowed to just be. And it was, they were considerably lighter than the MBTs to the extent that on our first run in them, I PB'd our five mile loop by eight minutes. Wow. Wow. That's incredible. We thought we were flying by comparison because I think it's for every hundred grams, there's 3% effort.
00:16:24
Speaker
So I didn't know how much the NBTs weighed but they weighed a ton by comparison and the Newtons were feather-like. So it was very exciting and then there was something that I could use to help people find their vertical which was with the effective negative heel when they were just standing upright but then those lugs that
00:16:49
Speaker
disappeared as they rolled through the foot and got weight into the forefoot, that normalised the foot, but they had a sense of where this vertical was because the whole, my whole, I look back, I was thinking about what we were talking about on the last session and it really is the whole of my working life seems to have been around trying to find that nebulous space, which is where everything is stacked on top of everything else.
00:17:17
Speaker
And fluid flow is easy. Movement is easy simply by muscles not having to hang on to your head. They're there for the movement of the head because we're actually we're standing in our bones and the muscles are there for movement.
Embracing Foot Freedom with Vibram Five Fingers
00:17:34
Speaker
And both the MBTs enabled that. Stacking. And the Newtons enabled that. But then I met you. And the tables turned again.
00:17:47
Speaker
because now it felt like a foot was now given the chance to be a foot. Yes, what a radical concept. Yes, to the extent that people would look at them and say, oh, oh, it's freaking me out. And the thought of anybody looking at their foot or somebody else's foot and seeing toes,
00:18:14
Speaker
freaking them out. It was a very strange concept to me because I think feet, I've always thought feet were pretty amazing. They've got me to all sorts of exciting places and I wouldn't be without them. And to see them in all their glory
00:18:31
Speaker
I like it. With the Newtons, one of the stories that we got involved with, and I know you know a bit about this as well, is that we were approached by a guy called James Beckinsale, who is a run coach in London and an award-winning running coach as well.
00:18:53
Speaker
I think he won several awards as London running coach of the year, but also came second behind the Brown Leas coach in 2012 for UK running coach of the year. So he's an accomplished kind of dude, but he approached us probably around 2008, 2009 maybe.
00:19:12
Speaker
and he wanted to transition his runners from mutants, which he had had them in for a little while, into the five fingers. And the interesting thing about that was that Tim Bishop, who you know well, who's one of his runners, you know, an excellent triathlete, he
00:19:36
Speaker
He was telling me that when they made the transition from the standard running shoes to the Newtons, the next thing, of course, was they all had terrible doms, delayed onset muscle soreness in their calves, because of this increased propensity towards forefoot striking in the Newtons, which is the whole idea. So I thought we should just briefly explain
00:19:56
Speaker
when we talk about negative shoes negative heels that most shoes have what we call it a drop so a drop from heel to forefoot and that can be as much as well do you know the figures on that Helen you might know what I used to know to the extent that so-called flat trainers were many many still are 18 mil
00:20:22
Speaker
high heels as far as I put in and think they were high heel. Yes, exactly, exactly. So then you can go down to zero drop, which is what an even five finger would be, and some of the sort of other minimalist brands, and even in fact the maximalist brands took on the idea of zero drop as well.
00:20:41
Speaker
So that's essentially being on a flat surface with no difference between heel and forefoot. And then the, is it the Newton's and the Earth's shoes or just the Earth's shoes that were actually reversed, if you like. So the drop went from forefoot back to the heel.
00:20:58
Speaker
Certainly the earthshoes preceded the newtons and the newtons were only a drop when the forefoot was less loaded. So the lugs at the front which raised the front but these these depressed so it was only that that made them a negative heel they weren't they were flat essentially yeah under load were recessed yeah okay okay good but so then
00:21:28
Speaker
Tim Bishop was explaining to me that they went from the standard running shoes into the newtons and the newtons obviously created this delayed onset muscle soreness and then they went from those into five fingers and he said then we had another round of delayed onset muscle soreness and
00:21:44
Speaker
Then they got to running in socks around the track. And he said, and then that was even more extreme because one of the bits of research that I was privy to during my time as the distributor was that when you are wearing the VB five fingers, you tend to preactivate your gastroc. So calf muscle more during the flight phase of gate. Excuse me.
00:22:07
Speaker
And so what that means is essentially you're pointing your toe more than you would do if you were in a standard running shoe. So you're preparing for a forefoot strike or a midfoot strike.
00:22:18
Speaker
That preactivation of gastrot occurs even earlier if you're barefoot compared to if you're in a Vibram five finger. So essentially the more naked your foot is, the more likely you are to point the toe. Now, of course, these are only small studies and who knows what it'd be across a massive population, but it would make sense that your nervous system is preparing to cushion the landing more when you feel you have nothing between you and the ground.
00:22:43
Speaker
versus when you feel you have something like a Vibram 5 finger versus when you feel you've got a big cushion between you and the ground and that would be a standard running shoe. Yes and also what comes to mind depending on how tight the sock is without the even though the Vibram 5 fingers are in effect simulating barefoot the sole is still the width of the sole
00:23:12
Speaker
It's pliable, but it's not the same pliability as skin and the toes are
00:23:20
Speaker
herded into pockets and depending on the type of sock, depending on how tight the sock was, whether it was a toe sock, would also have an effect on how much work the muscles within the foot had to do to control the movement of the bone with even less around it than
00:23:45
Speaker
a vibrant five-finger shoe. So that again, and also there's the central nervous system knowing that there's a rubber sole between them and the ground. And now there's only a sock and if they're on the track, this is an abrasive surface. So then again, you've got this soft preservation thing for your skin, even for your socks. I'm surprised their socks didn't wear out. Well, I think they did. That makes sense.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, some of these things are happening every time you change the stimulus or the environment, the body has to respond. It's a beautiful story, displaying right there in front of us, in all its glory, the ability for the body to change on a sixpence, depending on the stimulus and the terrain that it's covering.
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Now, we've mentioned there a couple of times the central nervous system and the importance of that. And one of the things I think links the story between the MBTs and the Five Fingers is that
00:24:49
Speaker
part of my understanding of the MBT sort of idea was that if you hit the ground with this convex soul, then essentially you're going to rock forwards over the first and it minimizes the need for big toe extension. So I know that one group of people that seemed to respond really well to the MBTs was people with, you know, uh, onions and hallux rigidus and hallux limitus and pain in the big toe, right? Um, but
00:25:19
Speaker
So it kind of forced this smooth rolling through of the foot. And one of the things that struck me when I was first wearing the five fingers in that first few months is that if you walk, let's say, across some grass, which is slightly softer underfoot than the concrete, if you're walking through a park or something,
00:25:37
Speaker
and then you hit the concrete, then what I noticed was that I was hitting the ground quite hard and I instantly got that feedback. And so then what I would do is my nervous system would tell me, well, look, you're hitting the ground quite hard. So I start rolling down my foot much more gently, much akin to what the MBT guys were trying to create with the shoe. But instead of using an extrinsic passive tool to force that behavior, I was using my own nervous system.
00:26:07
Speaker
Yeah. That's lovely, isn't it? Yeah. So the shoe did it for them, which, uh, so whilst their hallux rigidus hallux limitus was, um, a limiting factor in an MBT, uh, it was, it became null and void and, and actually just being upright and, and took the pressure off it and the shoe did the rest of the role for
Impact of Shoe Design on Foot Biomechanics
00:26:35
Speaker
you.
00:26:35
Speaker
So to a degree, the foot became more passive. You could argue it was a, your foot was on something that was unstable. Yes. But the shoe, the outsole was doing the work. Your foot was resting on an insole and actually it was more the body lighting up for the postural tone rather than anything necessary within the foot per se.
00:27:05
Speaker
but it did give independence and movement, better movement throughout the body back to those who had real problems in the forefoot. And then of course then, if I could rerun it all again, knowing what I know now compared to then,
00:27:23
Speaker
then I would, if I had access to them, I might start somebody there to organize their alignment quickly and easily. And then whilst the complete sea change of how their entire musculoskeletal system operated, whilst that changed, I could then go down to the feet and start to help the feet unlock and discover their better potential.
00:27:52
Speaker
during the process. So it's intriguing to think how far I might have been able to get to helping people with MBTs in their feet as well rather than masking.
00:28:02
Speaker
what was going on in their feet. It was an exciting tool at the time. Nothing else like it at the time to help people. So we got as far as you starting to move into the Five Fingers and what was your experience moving from the Newtons into the Five Fingers?
00:28:24
Speaker
Well, we were expecting doms when we went from MBTs to Newtons. But because the lower leg musculature, the extender chain particularly, because we were so used to the heel dropping into nothingness, the calf and the Achilles were already long enough for the negative heel technology. And so nothing much really happened.
00:28:54
Speaker
between the MBTs and the Newtons but between the Newtons and the Five Fingers because of course we made all the mistakes so we put the Five Fingers on and there was no manual we just put them on and got going because they felt so amazing we went off for a usual five mile trail run and it got dark
00:29:24
Speaker
We got lost on our usual five mile trail run. It was so muddy. We didn't want to stop it. Honestly, I still remember that to this day. It gives me such joy. Thank you.
00:29:38
Speaker
that ran and we came back whooping and high-fiving and whatever and and the next day we could hardly move. Excellent and we loved it we just thought it was it was silly yes we shouldn't have with with the benefit of hindsight but it was joyous we swelched the mud between our toes none of us had ever felt anything like it
00:30:04
Speaker
It was cold, we didn't care. The stones, our feet weren't conditioned enough and the stones hurt the soles of our feet and we were ouching and laughing all at the same time and we didn't care. It was just wonderful. And then we conditioned ourselves properly and advised people not to do what we did. Even though it brought us joy and it still brings me joy to this day, 12 years later. That story just still makes my heart sing.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Isn't it amazing, though, that the fact that we, you know, wrap our feet up and we lose that experience and the joy. I mean, for me, I had a very similar experience where I remember running up to the woods and part of the story was that, of course, because I know how to run as, you know, having been trained in biomechanics and I
00:30:55
Speaker
No it's supposed to heel strike is me running along trying to roll as softly as i could be a heel strike in this feels a bit weird but better you know maybe it's just me getting used to. I'm anyway then i got off onto the trails and these are a brighter ways and so you know the mud and it's up to top of the time and they've been a lot of rain.
00:31:18
Speaker
and I was just running down this trail and the first thing that happened was because the original models were called classics which meant that they were barely on your foot they just had a little bit of elastic to hold them on and
00:31:33
Speaker
And I was running along and suddenly realized that one foot felt slightly different to the other and the classic had come off about five meters back up the trail. But I hadn't really noticed initially. But then the next thing was that I started to get a cramp in the sole of my foot.
00:31:49
Speaker
And I thought I've never had a cramp in the sole of my foot when running before, but what I realized was that I was using my toes to grip and to actually give me traction in the mud. So, and then suddenly I thought, oh my God, that's why we've got toes on the end of our feet, because just like a dog digging its claws into the grounds, our toes are designed to give us traction, you know? So, so yeah, it was, that was quite an experience. But like you say, just joyful and childlike, you know, like memories of jumping in puddles as a kid.
00:32:18
Speaker
Yes and and the the goal that on that run and so many runs since the goal was you spot a puddle you go through it you absolutely you you you don't try and jump over it you go through it just for the sheer joy of the squelch and the splash yeah yeah that's it and uh just i'm not sure i answered uh the question earlier i think i got distracted on my own thought process about nbt's and and the extrinsic
00:32:45
Speaker
uh the changing of the soul with the five fingers but what it does the the story of the domes uh the crippling domes i don't think we could actually walk normally for about a week it just for me was this absolutely quintessential uh display
00:33:02
Speaker
of how passive our feet become in a shoe. You know, even an unstable shoe like an MBT, even a Newton, which allows the foot to be completely flat from front to back and that sets you up with alignment, a great stacking. All these things are wonderful, but they all have this missing piece where the foot
00:33:30
Speaker
Still was able to be so passive and we're flying around in the air with both our feet in the sky and then landing on an itsy bitsy bit of it and and it's you know, the thought of it might still be asleep when you're doing that and the revelation that oh my goodness, I am conditioned for all of this in these different types of shoes and
00:33:54
Speaker
and yet I am crippled after a fire trail run getting lost in the splash. It was great insight into how our bodies actually function. Yeah, on the previous podcast you mentioned Stephen Lord and Stephen
00:34:11
Speaker
obviously also as an elite athlete probably still is just like like Tim Bishop and so both of those guys compete at Kona regularly which is the world championship for triathlon or for Ironman I should say and the story with Stephen was really interesting because he got injured and had damaged his flexor tendon I think or something in his foot but civilian sorry go on
00:34:37
Speaker
He tore his FHL, didn't he? Yeah, that's it. Did you put him in touch with us or did he get in touch with us by someone else? No, I think he got in touch with you and then you connected us because he was still struggling and I was actually talking to him. He was in New Zealand and we were somehow back in the day when
00:35:06
Speaker
Google isn't what it is now. The internet wasn't quite as good as it is now. But we were still managing to communicate for me to assist him in just honing the form
00:35:19
Speaker
in five fingers to better use his feet. Because what I was going to say, I was going to sort of pick up on your comment about how shoes often make the foot passive, and I think there'll be a lot of people out there thinking, yeah, but the foot's still activating within a Nike Air or within an Assix Gel or whatever it is that you run in. And of course there will be activation, but the interesting thing with Steven was that
00:35:44
Speaker
he was an elite athlete so he's doing a lot of mileage very very strong very well conditioned very uh yeah you know in great great shape but I met with his surgeon a guy called um Johan Tudor Thomas sorry Johan Tudor Jones his name is um from Fortius Clinic in London yeah yeah and he because he he was a a convert having worked with Stephen and what he said because he's a foot surgeon this guy and um he had seen Stephen come in
00:36:13
Speaker
pre-surgery, obviously taken the MRI scans, done the surgery on his foot. And whilst Stephen was rehabilitating, he was reading up around this new idea of running barefoot. And he took it upon himself to rehabilitate himself using Vibram five fingers and barefoot conditioning.
Foot Musculature Growth in Athletes with Vibram Five Fingers
00:36:32
Speaker
And so I think it was only three months after his surgery and he was back out competing at Kona in Vibram five fingers, which is something we would never recommend.
00:36:42
Speaker
But he did it. And what Johan, the surgeon was saying, was that he then got an MRI scan of Stephen's foot about a year later. And he said it was like two completely different feet. He said the first one was atrophied. Okay, so he was injured and maybe he wasn't using his foot quite in a normal way. But for an elite athlete, you still expect there to be good bulk in the foot musculature.
00:37:09
Speaker
But he said it was almost twice the volume on the next MRI scan. This is a year down the line. So to think that just exercising in a normal pair of shoes is going to work your feet out is probably not as accurate as it might be. And actually to wear close to nothing on the feet or actually nothing on the feet is something that is really going to build the musculature there.
00:37:35
Speaker
Well, where my foot is an example, yes, N equals one, but I know so many people where exactly the same thing happened. I started life in five fingers size 38. And then my arch kind of grew. I had fairly low arches. I didn't have flat feet, I had low arches.
00:38:00
Speaker
they kind of retracted, and it was almost like a 38, almost felt too big, but a 37 was way too small. And then suddenly, I think you were showing me the next season's shapes, and I was now 39, then I was 40, and now I wear a men's 41. The girls' one doesn't work with my feet anymore, it's a men's 41. Yeah, exactly, neither with.
00:38:29
Speaker
The width, yes, it's the width and length. It's not just the width. My feet have grown. So it was like the arch picked up, but now the whole foot is bigger. I have big feet now. So do you think the bones have grown? Do you think that's, you know, it's a stimulus to the bones or the joints are better pumped or a combination of all these things?
00:38:56
Speaker
Yeah, without having an x-ray of before and after, it's hard to know, but I can imagine if my feet were scrunched into, like we were taught, I was brought up with good old Clark shoes, you put your foot into the x-ray, it squishes your foot left to right, front to back, wear these shoes, good, sturdy, supportive, tie your laces up nice and snug. And I think that when 33 joints have got a little bit more breathing space,
00:39:24
Speaker
Your foot is longer. To that, then you add all of the meat from muscles that just wake up and have to do a shed load more work. I mean, a lot more work. Not just walking around because I was running miles and miles and miles and so many miles in them.
00:39:42
Speaker
until the next challenge came along, there was always a, well, I've only run this far. Okay, let's see and see if you can run a little bit further. So even my toes are thicker. So even my toe socks had to grow into men's sizes because my toes were broad enough that this fabric would constrict them. So feet, I don't think are meant to be small and dainty.
00:40:11
Speaker
My feet are big and some people call them ugly, but I think they're fantastic. Yeah, small and dainty is really another word for atrophied, isn't it? Yes, it's like, where's the muscle? Yes, where's the welly? You need some good meat there. You really need the meat there. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so you've started on your own journey in the Vibram Five Fingers and you're starting to sell them in the shop at this stage or not
Retailing and Fitting Vibram Five Fingers
00:40:41
Speaker
yet?
00:40:41
Speaker
Yes. Yes. So I think we, we, I, I, Brian said we should do it. And I said, Oh, I don't know if the world is quite ready. I don't know if the UK, I don't, I, I think I said my words to him where I don't think the UK is quite ready to this. And, and he said, no, I think they are. Yeah. So I think in 2008 we started, cause it was, I think 2007 when I met you, it was quite late in the year.
00:41:10
Speaker
I seem to recall it was wintery time and then we got hold of a pair and then ran in them and I think that by the beginning of the next year we were selling them in the shop and which was a wonderful experience you know meeting all sorts of different shapes of feet and trying to stick toes errant toes into little pockets
00:41:36
Speaker
was an experience. I got to know all sorts of little tricks. I became Passmaster at fitting five fingers, two feet, and trying to get people away from, I want that, I want that pair. And it was like,
00:41:56
Speaker
because if there was a different color the fabric felt different on a foot and each different style had a different shaping on a foot and if you could just get past what you thought looked with the look that you wanted and just go for the fit just go at shaped shoe that just um as much as you can call a five-fingered shoe that just suited your foot the best and then you could then you would get on with it yeah we even i got i found ways of using angora
00:42:26
Speaker
felt insoles to keep your feet warm in winter. That's right. And I think I sent you a pair. Yes, you did. Every which way to make them work no matter what because my feet didn't want to be in anything else. Yeah, yeah, for sure. You sent me a pair of sparkly ones from Italy to get married in. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot about that story.
00:42:51
Speaker
And I got up on the table, I was on the top table, sharing everybody my sparkly five fingers. That's brilliant. So you're the first woman to run an Iron Man in five fingers, and probably the first woman to get married in five fingers, I imagine. Quite positively, especially these sparkly ones, they're very special. I should send you a picture. Yeah, we should get that for the show notes for sure.
00:43:15
Speaker
okay okay so so how about your experience so you talked a bit about fitting the shoes but how about actually coaching people because this obviously led into we mentioned the audio program you did with Kirsty Hawkeshaw and all your programs we didn't talk about your walking program did we but but but let's stay stay sort of in in the time zone so you you
00:43:38
Speaker
Did that music program come after you'd coached a lot of people? I think you've probably already a couple of years into it, weren't you? Yes, it was a way of backing up what I was already guiding people towards so that they had something to remember, some kind of useful tool.
Audio Running Programs and Coaching Innovations
00:44:00
Speaker
The music gave them something to encourage their feet to get faster with. I think it was a good couple of years, probably maybe in three, because I think we started that in 2011. I think I met Kirsten 2011.
00:44:18
Speaker
Yes, it was 2011, it was just before I got remarried. Yeah, okay. And so just so people know what this audio program is, it's a series of tracks which Kirsty put some beautiful music to at the right rhythms for you to run at and to warm up at. And then with Helen coaching over the top. So it's fantastic.
00:44:41
Speaker
So it was when I went into her recording studio, which was a wonderful experience, and I put my headphones on, it felt like coming home. Just having spent six and a half years as an Air Traffic Control Officer, that's all I did, all day every day. I put my headphones on and I bossed people about. But I do best.
00:45:04
Speaker
Yeah and you had the fly fly fly bit in the in the audio. Absolutely so it was about when I that was before Kirsty and her amazing music and the ability to then put my words to music I had found a way to get people's feet to be whatever cadence I wanted so fly fly fly was 200
00:45:24
Speaker
steps per minute and on the ground off the ground on the ground off the ground was 190 right so before the the the headphone because I
00:45:35
Speaker
I don't like headphones and I found another solution now. I have an amazing solution for it now, which is really exciting given the fact that Kirsty and I are working together again on the Audible for the book, but then we're going to follow up with more programs. So now you've got the bone conduction headphones. So your ears aren't covered. I don't like my ears covered. I don't like things in my ears and I don't want to miss nature. I run
00:46:00
Speaker
to be in nature, I don't want to block it out. But equally, other people, they do, they do, they, to have to be able to be in people's ears or with them whilst they're moving so that they, I can, not to tell them what to do, but to ask them to notice what is going on. Maybe if they try this and see what happens, see how it feels. So the,
00:46:29
Speaker
I think I've gone a little bit off track as usual, but Kirsty's music came along to enable me to put together words which were already all happening. So when I wrote the scripts, it was just as if I was behind somebody, cueing them and coaching them and helping them.
00:46:51
Speaker
And then I would just read it out. It was fun. It's wonderful. And we had three albums with progressive albums, which we did because we realized that men were saying, well, yeah, but we don't want to be a goddess. We're a god. So then we had Apollo. Yes. So the first album was, what was it called? Just The Goddess Trinity.
00:47:19
Speaker
Yes it was the goddess trilogy and so we had therefore goddess one and then we had Apollo one. Yes yes. And then we did the the power of walking so for those who didn't want to run but still wanted to walk and in five fingers being able to feel the ground it wasn't four people in minimal but but certainly as ever I wore my heart on my sleeve and
00:47:47
Speaker
if you you know it gets in that if you could feel the ground you might find it a bit easier. Which is why when I was coaching so many people maybe started running with me in whatever shoes they happened to be in and then that they got more and more curious and then so many made the transition.
00:48:09
Speaker
then from their regular shoes, when their regular shoes are worn out. And I just said, just wear them until they're more than dead. The more worn out they are, the probably the better they are. Just wear them out. And then when you're ready to buy a new pair, maybe just not buy a pair of stable shoes. Maybe consider your options and go for less is so often more.
00:48:33
Speaker
Yes, definitely. I wanted to bring in here a couple of bits that I've read up on over the years and see how this ties in with your own coaching because first up, I remember seeing a study and I have it in one of my presentations where they had essentially trained a bunch of athletes in the pose running technique and pose running is essentially this idea of a forefoot strike.
00:48:59
Speaker
and you know there's a little bit more to it than that that's probably doing it a disservice but really that's part of the focus of the pose is that you land in a certain pose and that pose includes landing with a forefoot strike and with your upper body aligned etc and this research was because pose was quite a novel idea and made a lot of biomechanical sense
00:49:20
Speaker
certain athletic corporations or associations got pose instructors into to train their athletes. And the research actually showed that although pose improved the or let's say let's say it it's a
00:49:41
Speaker
increased the cadence and just trying to think it decreased the vertical oscillation which is kind of what you'd expect but it decreased the efficiency as well.
00:49:53
Speaker
And that was surprising because you would think that if you were running with this biomechanically, it would appear to be a more efficient approach that you'd expect the efficiency to improve. Now, some of that may just be adaptation and the fact that they're doing the study shortly after being trained. And so there's still perhaps sort of conscious overlay about how to run and perhaps some tension in the system.
00:50:19
Speaker
But a similar study by Joe Warren, who did his PhD on barefoot running and was, you know, an elite runner himself. I think he was an 800 metre champion. Yeah, an amazing runner, yes. And he found that when he did
00:50:37
Speaker
conditioning, so this is run conditioning, run training, in the five things in a group of elite athletes. I believe it was across six weeks, might have been four weeks, but what he found was that their efficiency improved by eight percent. So this is in terms of oxygen consumption. But what he also did was he studied things like the kinematics, like the ground reaction forces, and he could find no other discernible cause for the improvement in efficiency
00:51:06
Speaker
other than the only thing you could think of to explain it was better neuromuscular efficiency. In other words, if you're feeling better, the ground and getting better ground information, let's say coming into the system, then you can move more efficiently. Now, the interesting part of his research was that, I mean, first of all, that was an incredible finding, but he then repeated it giving education as to how to run. And he found that there was virtually no improvement in efficiency.
00:51:34
Speaker
And I thought that was really interesting because, you know, if you're giving education, you think that that would double up the efficiency. But actually, you know, again, it kind of comes back to what I alluded to earlier is that perhaps there's, you know, if you have too much conscious overlay of what you should be doing in inverted commas, then maybe that tightens up the system and turns running from a reflex into a consciously kind of controlled activity.
00:52:00
Speaker
And that's why I love your, that's why I love your Barefoot Goddess series because I mean of course you can get the coaching and I think that is helpful conceptually but then you can just run to the music and the music allows you to do things at the tempo which allows these reflexes to kick in and that's where I see the huge value in your albums. What do you think about all that? Yes, so there's a lot there.
00:52:28
Speaker
And there's so much, it's hard to know where to start. I think that queuing has an incredibly useful role when you have identified that somebody is, let's try and think of, okay, so maybe they have a really narrow trekking width. So it's almost like they're running on a tightrope.
00:52:56
Speaker
So a lot of energy is being lost to the efforts of staying balanced, running almost with a crossover. So literally one foot is in line with where the last foot was, although a strike length ahead. And they are having a repetitive lower leg injuries or repetitive. Well, ankle sprains is a common one or IT band issues or whatever it might, whatever it might be. There's a,
00:53:23
Speaker
there's a whole sleuth of common running injuries that you can see when you see somebody you ran with a very narrow tracking width.
Running Mechanics and Injury Prevention
00:53:35
Speaker
If they mentioned this list of injuries, it's like, yeah, okay, we see this a lot. And it's generally knees and ankles
00:53:49
Speaker
in the main sometimes it can involve the hip but often it's mean and cool and So when you when you identify why they're running like that, so maybe They're running hugging a midline because they can't cross it Because their AT&R reflex is active hmm
00:54:15
Speaker
Their asymmetrical tonic neck reflex is active still, and they literally can't cross the midline, so they stay close to the midline. And I can measure it on my scanner. I measure these things and you think, how does that asymmetrical body stay oscillating either side of the midline so perfectly when the body above is all over the place?
00:54:40
Speaker
but their central nervous system has got it so well organized because the central nervous system cannot cross left to right, cannot cross the midline yet because of the reflex is still active. And so then when you reorganize that, there's a degree of muscle memory. So with all movement patterns, you have the movement pattern, which was created by the central nervous system to protect you from whatever it might be, or because there was not enough stimulus because
00:55:10
Speaker
there was a dead leg. I recently worked on somebody who literally just had had a dead leg from donkeys years ago, footballer, and we brought his leg back to life. And we had to just help his brain work with this leg that he didn't even know was still dead. It had got dead in the dead leg incidents, but it never actually
00:55:38
Speaker
it appeared, come back to life in the way that it was before, and he was maneuvering himself around dead leg. But then you sort of bring it back in, amortize it into the system, and then you might need a cue or two to help your body not drift back into a default
00:56:05
Speaker
motor program whatever that is so there's the new science that's coming through we think we know what we thought we knew and then it turns out well we're not quite sure it's exactly more so everything is with this lovely open minded well we think we think at the moment it's it's like this but we're open to be contradicted not not because it's wrong but because we've discovered more stuff
00:56:34
Speaker
So it seems that when we enable a foot to function slightly differently, the central nervous system will take that into the walking gate almost seamlessly and automatically. It lies to the central nervous system and then the central nervous system thinks, oh, okay, now we're moving like this because we've got that part of our foot available in a way that we didn't have before.
00:56:59
Speaker
And it seems, in my experience, and it's a lot now, it's hot, and I see it consistently. I might see the change, and I've got it on record video so many times, I see the change in the walking gate, and in the running gate I don't see it absorbed.
00:57:21
Speaker
because and I'm hypothesizing now and I'm thinking is it because the running motor program whatever that is is different to the walking motor program so because now we've got two feet off the floor the central nervous system yes we have the same skeleton skeletal body yes we have all the same joints yes we have all the same sling systems and the communication and we can do it we can do this running thing but it's not the same as walking
00:57:52
Speaker
No, no, definitely a different motor program from what I understand. Yeah. So when you, when you get this situation where you make a change and it's automatically absorbed into a walking gate cycle and you can see the change and it's smoother and the striking increases and whatever else, and then it doesn't get taken into the running cycle motor program automatically, then you think, ah, okay,
00:58:17
Speaker
We need to feed that in. And so then a queue, but not very many queues, is not a how to run. It's just a little queue to help that body utilize the space that they have just created because there was a something in the way and they've just worked to get rid of that something in the way. Yes. Did I make sense then?
00:58:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think you did. I think you did. I was following you, that's for sure. OK, good. And I think also what might be useful for people to understand, because of course you're talking about having many experiences of this and seeing it with many clients.
Advanced Biomechanics: The 4D Scanner
00:58:52
Speaker
But they should probably understand a bit more about how you assess your clients. So you have this incredible piece of technology called, let's see, is it a DIS, high, what is it, high something or other? You tell me what it is.
00:59:07
Speaker
it's a it's german technology of course yes it's german technology called the deer's high performance for metric 4d scanner yes uh and i can measure with more accuracy than an x-ray movement of uh the thoracic and lumbar spines in conjunction with the pelvis in conjunction with uh
00:59:34
Speaker
the pressures through the feet, the delineation of the foot segments, and I can add angles, any angle that you want, whilst in motion, up to the speed of sprinting, up to 25 kilometers an hour. Wow. Wow. Amazing. And this is- In three dimensions, with the fourth dimension being movement, yeah. Okay. But sorry, being time or being movement.
01:00:03
Speaker
movement as in yes so time because it's not well no movement because they're static and you're you're standing still but they're still movement so yes time it's it's done even the static measurement is done over six seconds because you have postural swaying yeah does it not does it not also assess so assess them when they're running as well or not was it yes so do standing still standing still
01:00:30
Speaker
make a pose or standing still relax as you wish it's becoming increasingly exciting making shapes because what we think on the outside oh yes you're making a lovely right lateral flexion I'm now measuring it and it's like oh no no that's we're seeing tissue make the right lateral flexion we the bones are not making the right lateral flexion here so it's becoming increasingly interesting so you're standing still walking and running
01:00:55
Speaker
And now I have the high performance, the previous, the predecessor was replaced a couple of weeks ago. So the difference before was the, before the processor was only able to cope with camera speeds of 60 Hertz. So I was measuring
01:01:22
Speaker
at 60 Hertz. And that was the limit of the hardware at the time, which was five years ago. And then, and there was the only thing that changed over the next four, four and a half years ago. Over that period of time, what changed was the software and what we were able to extrapolate from the information. And then this is the big upgrade because now the hardware
01:01:52
Speaker
has massively improved. So now the processes are unreal and I can record at 240 Hertz. So the cameras are rolling at 240 Hertz. Wow. And when you think of the human eye and what it records and the jury's, depending on which bit of research you read, it's somewhere between eight. Yeah. And 30 Hertz. Yeah. Yeah. So even
01:02:20
Speaker
And of course, the human eye, you're not data recording it. So even if you've got your phone, you're recording on a camera, the camera is still not the level of cameras of even my old machine, never mind my new machine. And with the speeds of running,
01:02:37
Speaker
You can miss the force peak you know if things are happening in in 200 milliseconds So if you're recording at only 60 Hertz you you can actually miss an entire force peak that the important piece of information and can just get lost because the The processor isn't gathering information quickly enough. Yeah, and what does that mean to someone who doesn't understand the software the force peak is How would you explain that?
01:03:03
Speaker
So the moment where the most pressure goes through the foot into the ground, so you'll have a force, a double force peak in the walking gate cycle.
01:03:14
Speaker
So when the heel touches down, your body weight loads on that over the heel. And then again, as you push off through the front foot. So you'll have a double force peak in walking cycles and a, well, you'll have a double force peak if you run a heel to toe as well. But of course, if you run touching down somewhere in front of the heel,
01:03:42
Speaker
then you only get one force peak. Although the heel kisses the ground, there's no force peak pressure. It's just, it grazes the force plate.
01:03:53
Speaker
and creates an imprint, but there's no force peak there. And that's something that we touched on when we started talking about forefoot strike and so on. So what you're alluding to there with running with the heel strike is this idea that you get this impact transient as the heel strikes the ground, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong. And then a second peak as the foot rolls down and toes off. It looks like a double hunt camel, whatever they're called. Yes.
01:04:23
Speaker
Yes. But it's quite a sharp initial peak from the heel strike. And what I recall reading around that is that there are several injuries that are associated with that impact transient. So I think Irene Davies has done a lot of research on that. And I certainly know that tibial stress syndrome or medial tibial stress syndrome is one of the injuries that is closely associated with that impact transient.
01:04:49
Speaker
And you can understand why. I mean, it's, it's the tibia interacts directly with the heel bone. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it makes perfect sense. Yeah, it makes sense. What I, what I use sometimes is an analogy to help people understand what we're talking about here is that, you know, as you're swinging your leg through and you're heel striking. So this is the standard way people would run in a running shoe. Then,
01:05:16
Speaker
It's a little bit like pole vaulting, isn't it? It's a little bit like you're jamming your foot into the ground and then you're vaulting over the top of it. And so you're always going to have that slight jar of hitting the foot into the ground because it's out in front of you, in front of your center of mass. But when your forefoot is striking, what tends to happen is you tend to take a slightly shorter stride.
01:05:35
Speaker
And as you touch down, sure enough, the foot is slightly ahead of you, but by the time the body weight comes down and loads the foots, the center of mass has moved in front of the foot, and therefore you don't get this pole vaulting effect, this little jar, which is the impact transient. So I think hopefully that gives a visual for some people. Yes. And I think that on my new high performance treadmill, I would be able to show that the center of mass of the body is actually
01:06:04
Speaker
is not behind. There is, it's going to be really interesting because the technology I have now, I'm only the third in the world. So I'm seeing stuff that hardly anybody has ever seen. So it is really with wide open eyes and curiosity that we look at this information, not to compare it with anything else, but to really just, we've not seen this before.
01:06:33
Speaker
I'm working with Germany because there are normative values. But the normative values, these averages that have been declared, they're from early 2000s, 2003 often, where it could simply wasn't there to show us what on earth was going on. We're just making this stuff up. And we need to rewrite the textbooks with the current measurements that we're able to take with just collection of data without any bias, without any
01:07:02
Speaker
We're going to do this to show X, Y, and Z. We're not doing anything to show anything. We're just curiously gathering the data that nobody's seen before. It's so exciting. And there's always a spectrum. So yes, whilst there will be some runners that wear first contact and all credit here, I must say, to Chris Riederen, who helped me with this non-confrontational language when I wrote the book,
Revolutionizing Running Techniques and Technology
01:07:31
Speaker
because I don't want it to be versus, this versus that. I am enthusiastic about, let's just have a really nice discussion about what's going on here. Let's invite better movement into bodies so that bodies are more
01:07:46
Speaker
comfortable that bodies want to move more so that people get off their arses and go out and run with a smile on their face and don't look really grumpy and say hello to me as they pass me whilst they run because they are enjoying what they're doing.
01:08:03
Speaker
I'm running away with another subject. It's a good subject because there's something I want to bring in there. And because you and I, I remember we had a discussion about this and I was approaching it partly from a medical interest, but partly from a, from a commercial interest when I was distributing the five fingers was I went down to Portsmouth to meet with the leading breast research biomechanics lab. You may remember this.
01:08:29
Speaker
I remember, I do. And so this lady Joanna Skur, her name is, she's the leading breast biomechanics researcher on the planet. I think more than 50% of the published papers on breast biomechanics have come out of her lab.
01:08:43
Speaker
And what she was, of course, heavily involved with was sports bra manufacturers and so on and so forth. But I went to meet with her to say, look, you know, there's this very interesting research in barefoot running versus short running, where you see that the impact transient disappears, that the loading rates decrease dramatically by two to three times. And if that's the case, then it's also going to decrease breast bounce.
01:09:08
Speaker
And so, you know, if you look at that from an evolutionary perspective, then of course, and I've dug into this a little bit, we've only had clothing for about 180,000 years. Okay, so we know that prior to that time period, so, and our answer has been running for 2.2 million years. Okay, so there's about 2 million years where
01:09:30
Speaker
our ancestors were running around without any clothes okay so that's that's point eight but then if if if we bring it into the modern day um one of the major things that stops women from exercising is breast bounce partly because of the embarrassment partly because largely because of the discomfort um
01:09:50
Speaker
And it just struck me that we could have a bit of a winning formula here because essentially we're doing what the body has evolved to do, and that is to run with a natural technique with decreased vertical oscillation and ground impact and therefore decreased breast bounce, therefore decreased embarrassment, decreased pain, et cetera, and therefore get increased participation. And that's got to be a good thing. Absolutely.
01:10:17
Speaker
The interesting thing at the moment, just as a computer side, is when I measure girls, females running, the bag has to be bare. And in Germany, where they were doing all the test protocols, it didn't seem to be an issue.
01:10:38
Speaker
And I said, I think I need to find a solution in this country. I think I want to find a solution for me.
01:10:50
Speaker
And I'm not large anywhere, apart from my feet. So I have been finding stick-on bras in order to run with a back that is bare so that the scanner can measure what is going on in my spine, but still feel as if I'm supported. So the importance of the shape
01:11:18
Speaker
and the structure of a bra can't be underestimated, but equally, a form that requires either a lot of lateral movement or a lot of vertical movement is really uncomfortable. The body moves in three dimensions. The rib cage moves in three dimensions. It's a three-dimensional side, just as much as the pelvis.
01:11:44
Speaker
is a figure of eight on its side. Well I was going to mention that because because that's part of your coaching isn't it where you're talking about uh you know and this this was a real revelation to me was you know first of all I heard your barefoot audio coaching and you're talking about uh how when running along you know put a name to to the the movement of the pelvis and um you you let the the runner contemplate it for a bit and then you explain that one way to describe it is a slightly
01:12:10
Speaker
wobbly on its hinges seesaw or titatota as they call them in in America. But so you know there's this kind of uh figure of eight type movement pattern like you say which is exactly the shape of a Lorenz attractor and so this tied in with my whole idea of attractor states and gate being an attractor state because essentially the pelvis is moving as an attractor state.
01:12:33
Speaker
And I don't know if I've sent you the webinar that I did on, I had a webinar which I called Bear, Breasts and Buttocks. And it was a slight play on words because I was saying bear, comma, breasts and buttocks. But I was talking about human nakedness, bare feet.
01:12:54
Speaker
the breasts, as we just talked about just now, but also the evolution of the buttocks as being a key part of, you know, our evolutionary heritage as running animals, running creatures, which is all Dan Lieberman's sort of focus. And the fascinating thing about Joanna Skinner's research back down at Portsmouth is that when she measures breast biomechanics, the breasts move in this exact figure of eight. The pelvis moves in, which is no great surprise, of course, but it's just, it's all there, right? It's all the same pattern.
01:13:23
Speaker
And when the body doesn't move in that way, they don't move in that way. And that, of course, is the point. So when the body is moving smoothly and fluidly, that's what will happen. And when the body isn't moving smoothly and fluidly, it doesn't happen. And then there's a
01:13:47
Speaker
a conflict of interest between the breast, the garment restricting the breast material, breast matter, and of course the skeletal structure. So yes, it's a very interesting subject. Just to finish the subject of the touchdown, the contact being at the heel, it's always a spectrum. We must always remember this spectrum. So there are those who will,
01:14:17
Speaker
crash land it was a shock and now and then not a shock at the same time when Mike trees when he first introduced me to um newtons back in i think 2007 2008 uh something like that about the time i met you then obviously i'm remembering the dates and he uh he talked about um the
01:14:46
Speaker
the leg, the heel touchdown with the heel strike being ahead of you being a break. So the slamming of the heel on a standard, then standard back in those days, some are saying now some are different, there would be this
01:15:07
Speaker
enormous lip coming out away from the sole so it flared out like a hovercraft skirt and it was called a crash pad and you just think whoa okay uh that's a shock and and yet not a shock at all so if you if you stick the leg out uh way ahead of you and land on the heel yes you could see that that would be a break um and you could see that that would be a
01:15:36
Speaker
an instigator for enormous forces going up, spiraling through the tibia. But there's a spectrum all the way through to an almost flat landing with a heel being first contact. So the heel is first contact, yes, but it's so subtle.
01:15:56
Speaker
that it's only just measurable and the forces that then that would be to think that that might be a break and that might be anything to do with any kind of forces through the tibia then it becomes
01:16:17
Speaker
It becomes gray area because there's every angle in between. It's not about heel strike being a thing. A heel strike is a spectrum. Midfoot is a spectrum. So forefoot touchdown is a spectrum. There are prancicones out there. Their heels never see the ground ever.
01:16:34
Speaker
And then there are those that land just in front of the heel and and then the heel comes down and nano moment later So all of these discussions about where we first touched down on the ground. I think it's really important to To always have it with the flavor of this enormous spectrum that we're talking about and there's no thing
01:16:58
Speaker
Sure and it's not necessary even an individual thing is it because i remember we used a slide where we someone who would run the great the great north run and have been fighting is a proudly sent us a couple of pictures and there was this one shot of her running along on the on the tarmac on the concrete and
01:17:18
Speaker
and lovely forefoot strike and then she's running on the grass and she's about to strike with a heel for sure and that could be the substrate that's doing that, it could be fatigue that's doing that, it could be all kinds of things and so like you say the sort of linearization of forefoot strike versus heel strike or I guess it's a kind of
Efficient Running Techniques and the Joy of Movement
01:17:40
Speaker
nominal way of looking at it rather than an ordinal way. So it's, you know, you're saying one or the other rather than a scale. Right. And like that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. Good. Good. You can do that. Now, one thing I wanted to bring up because I remember this being a revelation for me when you, when you first coached me. So I remember at some point I came up to the shop to perhaps show you a new range of shoes and you said, let's do a run coaching session. I thought, yeah, okay, great. Let's, let's give it a go. And you took me around the roads.
01:18:12
Speaker
and one of the techniques that you use is to fold the arms in front of you and of course that very much alters your running gait but what it does is it really increases the twist as you're running along so you're getting a lot more transverse plane motion and you know what it did for me was it really of course it accentuates the use of the sling systems first and foremost which I think is part of the idea there
01:18:34
Speaker
but it really reinforced for me this idea of dimensional mastery that I had been working on as a concept for many years and seeing Gates as a kind of form of final mastery of the third dimension of space so you've got you know your
01:18:53
Speaker
what I call the primal dimension and then the first, second and third dimensions. And so it's, it would be frontal plane motion for the first and sagittal plane for the second and then transverse for the third. And so that's this rotation on this twist through the body. But it just struck me that that was, I mean, for me, that was a real revelation to have you explain it in your way and to see how it fitted with my whole way of thinking because, you know, as, uh,
01:19:17
Speaker
I don't know how to explain it without going through the whole evolutionary story, but this transverse plane mastery doesn't occur anywhere in the animal kingdom until you get to the higher primates and then you see this transverse plane mastery from the top down in the higher primates. In other words, they can swing from their arms first
01:19:37
Speaker
but you only get the bottom up mastery occurring in human beings and that is being able to twist from the ground up and through the trunk. So, but what it does also is because it's movement in the transverse plane, it means that you're avoiding the effects of gravity or minimizing the effects of gravity because transverse motion is more or less gravity free. Yeah.
01:19:59
Speaker
And so then that correlates with this whole, uh, persistence hunting hypothesis and the fact that we are able to outrun any creature on the planet given heaped time and distance. Um, so essentially we're using a relatively low gravity strategy when we use this transverse plane approach. Now where are you at in your thinking on that, uh, now that you've done so much more in terms of coaching and using your machine?
01:20:26
Speaker
So I still use folded arms. Folded arms are incredibly useful for so many things. It keeps you warm in the walking warmup. It tends to send body weight backwards if there's a forward lean. Also, if people aren't moving their upper body, if they are stiff in their upper body, folding their arms, it's like an exchange. Movement is always an exchange.
01:20:55
Speaker
I love the world I live in at Joint Mechanics because it's binary. It's dictated to us by the ends of each bone. It's nobody's opinion. It's the end of each bone.
01:21:07
Speaker
And I love the story of Andrew Still, who, the father of osteopathy, where he just carried a bag of bones on his back and he was able to identify, oh, this is the left third phalanges. He could even tell left from right, you know, the shape of the bones. It is, they are as they are. And yes, they vary. In Guy's Hospital, in the dissection lab, they had a box of scapulas.
01:21:37
Speaker
Well, it kind of explains why we see so many shapes moving around out there because they were varied. They were varied, but there was a common theme. So we are the same and different. We're different and yet we're the same.
01:21:57
Speaker
So we can talk about joint movement with degrees of clarity, with a great deal of clarity, I think, with the black and white in a lack of opinion, with the caveats that, yes, we're all a little bit different, but mainly the same. And of course it depends on the injury history. But that's all things being equal. When people aren't moving something, something else will have to move more.
01:22:26
Speaker
So it stands to reason if something isn't moving, then you can encourage that movement by shutting down something else. So as a princess, and it's just to make people really aware. So I use it now not to encourage a twist. I use it now in all sorts of different ways. One of them is when arms are swinging wildly to the extent that the torso doesn't move. And then you say, well, hang on a minute.
01:22:52
Speaker
If I've got arms swinging wildly and the torso doesn't move, I've lost the connection of the posterior and the anterior oblique slings from the lats through the spine to the opposite glutes and from the pecs through the abdominals to the opposite adductors. And those are my functional swathes of wonderful movement that the amphibian reflex uses the reflex of locomotion, our postural lifelong reflex, which adds to our efficiencies.
01:23:20
Speaker
And the movement by pinning arms that are just wildly flinging around, by taking them out of the equation, the body instantly reorganizes itself and gives balance to the system by moving the torso. So then they realize quite how much the arms are doing and how little the torso is doing and how un...
01:23:47
Speaker
how disjointed and how disconnected their movement patterns are and then perhaps maybe why their running feels a bit lumpy and uncomfortable because they're missing whole swathes of movement. I said whole, whole as vague. I was getting in character then, I was outside coaching somebody, I was behind visualizing them. Brilliant, brilliant. Now and so this this link between
01:24:15
Speaker
what I was talking about in terms of the kind of persistence hunt and the ability of us to keep going and your business name or certainly part of your coaching name, perpetual board motion. Do you want to tell us about how that all came about? Well, when I
01:24:35
Speaker
decided I needed to be a grown-up and a limited company. I needed a proper name. I had the shop, Ten Point Limited, but this needed to be separate because this was my baby. This was my
01:24:52
Speaker
my purpose in life. It makes me a little emotional. So I was on the tube, two Clapham chases. I was invited to Clapham chases to teach them how to run downhill, which seemed extraordinary to me. I was being asked to come and show
01:25:17
Speaker
what serious runners, I mean really quality runners, show them how to run downhill. Somebody spotted me at Cotswold Ultra and the Cotswold Ultra is three days, is it three days or two days? Three days I think it was, no two days and it's it's ultra day so it's I think it was about 29, 30 miles something like that and Cotswolds, people think of Cotswolds as lovely benign and sheep and you know quintessential England and
01:25:47
Speaker
And the valley slopes are steep. There's some serious steep slopes there. There's nothing high, nothing goes very long, but they are steep. And for me, going downhill is where the joy is because you have to work very hard.
01:26:05
Speaker
You are working very hard to keep up with your fast feet, obviously, otherwise you'd be face-planting. Your central nervous system is working very hard, but there's not the effort of going uphill. I'm known to be the queen of efficiency. I don't like to work very hard, and as far as I'm concerned, the downhill, bring it on, because then I just get to do it fast.
01:26:30
Speaker
So I was flying down some sloper, rather, and obviously flew past a clap and chaser who then said, can you please come and show us how to do that? So I was on my way to, and I was nervous, I was on the tube and I was reading The Seven Secrets of Success by Deepak Chopra. That's it.
01:26:57
Speaker
And I was, I was on, um, Dharma, uh, your purpose. And I was reading this sentence and it, it hit me and I had goosebumps all over and I still get goosebumps when I think of it. And I realized I was on my way to do the thing that I am best at, that I don't know anybody that does it like me. Yeah. Yeah. Thing. And my purpose in life.
01:27:28
Speaker
is to bring the joy and the smiles back to Brenner's faces. And yes, with downhill, but with running any old running, uphill, along downhill, it's my thing. And to do it with curiosity, with an invitation to notice things
01:27:54
Speaker
without being dictatorial. I'm very bossy. I have an opinion on everything. But it was a way to communicate this just as a, to draw people in, to encourage them to try, but to give it a go, not in a trying kind of way, because that makes, that sounds like a one and your shoulders go up by your ears, you know. Tie harder. No, no, don't try harder.
01:28:18
Speaker
experiment with this try this but don't try harder experiment explore all of these all of these kind of words and so i showed them how to run downhill fast and they loved it
01:28:33
Speaker
Yeah, I bet, I bet they did. Now we are approaching the end of our session again, it's flown by and what I wanted to do, I was going to ask you a bit about your trainings because I know you did some Czech training but I also know you did a lot of work with Gary Ward and his Anatomy and Motion approach and I know that you've obviously got different things from those approaches, I know there's a lot more that you've done as well
01:28:58
Speaker
But I guess because we're limited on time, as surprising as that is in some ways and unsurprising in other ways, I think we should probably talk about even with your shoes on and how you've brought your different trainings into that kind of single piece of work. Yes, it really was the amortization of everything of all of my teachers, you included, and all my teachers are mentioned.
01:29:29
Speaker
So the thing I do, the thing I think that we are best designed for is to keep going, hence the petrol Ford motion. My logo being very like you, I love your logo. It's like my logo. It's the figure of eight on its side. I love the figure of eight on its side. I love the essence of infinity of
01:29:52
Speaker
of not reaching any potential because that's that creates a limit of building potential as Anders Ericsson says in his book Peek Peek and it's just all about this there's more there's always more and it's three-dimensional and so the perpetual I started writing I had a 26,000 page so 26,000 word manual for
01:30:19
Speaker
the perpetual fold motion school of efficient running. I wanted to share my thoughts with more because I was doing it one person by one person and which seemed very inefficient.
01:30:31
Speaker
So this is not very good, so I'm going to coach some people and they will spread the word so that it's not like this or do it like that, but explore the body, find where it's limited. Do some movements to shine light in Gary Ward's words, shine light on areas that you're not using.
01:30:50
Speaker
And then let's see if we can think about stuff and give it names. You know, what's that movement? What does it feel like? And connect an action with a feeling, with a thought so that then you can have the thought and that creates the action or you create the thought which creates the feeling which creates the action. And there's this in your play within your brain and your body connecting with each other.
01:31:17
Speaker
so that you're engaged all the time. People say, you know, do you get bored running? How do you get bored? There's too much to think about. You're planning your body to make sure you're as efficient as possible and as comfortable as possible. It's in your best interest to notice how your body is moving. Yes.
01:31:35
Speaker
when you want to go a long way you don't want to start thinking about it when things are falling apart you want to be thinking about it right from the get-go and then the falling apartness either doesn't come or maybe it comes a lot lot lot later if you go very very very far and
Helen's Coaching Philosophy and School of Running
01:31:49
Speaker
so
01:31:50
Speaker
So then I wrote this 26,000 words document, and I coached two guys, two wonderful, wonderful runners, Brim Green and Pip Haylett, and they have now since surpassed me on every running level that you can imagine.
01:32:12
Speaker
and they were, we jokingly called, I was called the master, they were the grasshoppers and we created this pyramid of step by step literally holding people's hands with working with groups of runners who came along and they were guinea pigs and I honed this way
01:32:36
Speaker
four coaches and then I realized, oh, nobody knows who I am. Nobody knows what PFM is. So nobody's going to be signing up to the PFM School of Efficient Running because nobody knows what it is yet because I am singularly hopeless at all of the marketing stuff and dinosaur, except when it comes to 4D scanners. So then I thought, oh, okay, I need to write the book. I need to write the book to then
01:33:06
Speaker
Tell people about it all. Tell people about how it all came about because it's a it's a confluence of everything
01:33:19
Speaker
that has ever happened to me throughout my running life influenced by every single teacher I've come in contact with because essentially nothing is new. But using words, using evocative language, not doings, so it's not a how-to, it's very specifically not a how-to book. It's a evocative language to find the thing that resonates with you in your body, within your feelings,
01:33:47
Speaker
noticing things and unraveling yourself. And the 26,000 word manual became 105,000 word, 320-yard page book, which then enabled me to send the
01:34:05
Speaker
holding somebody by the hand, making video drills with a, they can point at the QR code with their mobile phone and that will pop a drill that they can play with and think, oh, what feels different in my body? Oh, well that feels, and I, I'm going to run with this and it's going to create a different feeling. I'm going to connect the feeling with the action and this thought and
01:34:30
Speaker
they then start to understand their bodies better themselves and then they might need a bit of help, in which case then they find their PFM coach, by which time I'll have so many people all just enjoying the same thing around the world. Yeah, the whole army of PFM coaches, yeah. And it was that the point being with Gary Ward and his body of work in Atomy in Motion with Chris Reederan,
01:34:54
Speaker
The understanding of the joint mechanics enabled me to finally explain what I was already doing to a certain extent. Many of my thought processes were honed with the understanding of better with completely revised understanding of 3D motion. And so there was a combination of new knowledge
01:35:22
Speaker
weaving that into the way I was helping people and the being able to explain really clearly why it was now why people were going to be able to feel what they were going to feel or might feel this that or the other because of joint mechanics being binary and explainable and nobody's opinion so we had objectivity rather than subjectivity and
01:35:50
Speaker
Gary Ward, Chris Wheeler in Anatomy Emotion, it has enabled me off the top of all of my experiences with you and Czech practitioner, which is so interesting because I, for me, when I started learning with Gary Ward and Anatomy Emotion, it was almost like this was the panacea for all. And then of course, because we are all, we are, I feel,
01:36:20
Speaker
shouldn't speak for all. So many of us are guilty of
01:36:26
Speaker
The next thing we learn is the thing. It is over and above everything else that we have learned. And it's so easy to forget the value of what you already have learned. And in my getting older wisdom, I am now aware of on a daily basis, I am drawing on skills that I learned back in remedial master college when I left the Air Force.
01:36:56
Speaker
and increasingly more and more manual lymph trainage, soft tissue work. It is, we need everything. All of the skills we learn are things to bring with us along the way. So we have this bulging workbox, toolbox of experience and things that we know help other people in so many different ways so that
01:37:23
Speaker
experience that yeah you can't put a price on it can you it's I wouldn't I now realize that I parked things that I'm now gratefully picking back up again yes using with with great joy reusing these tools and and because it's always the what is the the whole is is what is that saying
01:37:49
Speaker
The greater than the sum of the parts. Yeah, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Yes, so bringing it all in together, everything is there on the table to help me explain and help people.
01:38:01
Speaker
for the next running book and the cycling book and then hopefully rewriting the normative values that seem to make any sense with running angles and everything. Excellent, fantastic. Well, so you know the podcast is called From Chaos to Water. So we've just
Key Takeaways for Runners and Resources
01:38:24
Speaker
We've just chaotically spent three hours together. Um, if we were to try and create a little bit of wisdom at the end of all that, a little bit of order for people, what would be the kind of key take home message do you think, um, for, cause I think really what, who we're talking to here is, is largely runners and people that are working with runners, people that want to move well. What do you think would be, uh, um, some, some key take homes for them? Easy.
01:38:54
Speaker
notice stuff that I feel that the biggest thing that people miss is they're not noticing stuff. They're not noticing stuff until it's too late. They might notice it and just delete it. Oh, that little nickel. No, it's just, and that's fine.
01:39:12
Speaker
or they'll pull it, or poke it, or they'll do something to it, instead of looking at the body as a whole. So I think that my biggest message to anybody out there, whether they're stuck with their running, whether they're about to start their running, whether they're perennially injured, it's, okay, just stand still.
01:39:35
Speaker
Move your body, just poke around with a few QR codes and explore your body in three different planes and see where are you stuck. Notice it. And then don't push into it, meet resistance and start to give your body back a little bit more movement in that area. Don't try harder. Please, please, two things, notice stuff and please don't try harder.
01:40:02
Speaker
Please don't try harder. Your body is so efficient. We have efficiency encrypted into our sinews, our bones, our joint articulations, our swathes of connectedness, our everything, the reflexes. We are so efficient. It's there for you to use, but you've just got to go find it and you can only find it if you notice stuff. Yes, beautiful. Love that. That's a great, great conclusion.
01:40:30
Speaker
we have order yes yes we found the order fantastic um well Helen where can people find you if they want to get hold of your book or they want to get hold of you directly uh where can they find uh the various resources we've talked about
01:40:45
Speaker
Oh, thank you. So, um, my website is Helen-hall.co.uk where all of my work is there. Uh, my book, uh, my Lemny, my, my invention, uh, Lemny being short for Lemniscate, uh, being the sign of infinity, obviously, because the figure of it on this side obviously has to be there. And of course the book, even with your shoes on is available from Amazon as well.
01:41:12
Speaker
are in both print format and kindle and the audible I was hoping it would be out by Christmas so okay spring spring audible will be out by spring yes excellent and barefoot audio is still available through band camp
01:41:30
Speaker
And there was still a link on my website to bank, I'm absolutely sure there's still a link on my website to the bank account for the Audible and it's also available on iTunes. Yes. Excellent. Excellent. And there'll be more coming up. Oh, good. Oh, good. That's great. Well, Helen, thank you so much for your time.
01:41:49
Speaker
it's been really joy listening to you, talking to you, listening to you and talking to you. Yeah a bit of both, yeah it's been fantastic and yeah I'll let you know when this goes up so thanks again and we'll be in touch. All right God bless, bye!
01:42:08
Speaker
Well, I hope you enjoyed that chat with the lovely Helen Hall, one of life's true experimenters and observers. Helen is not only a great coach and athlete herself, but also an inquisitive investigator with some of the highest tech equipment in the world in her clinic, including the most high tech, the human body. Thanks for listening. And if you got something from it, please feel free to share the treasures you uncovered with anyone you think would benefit. See you on the next show.