[Josko]
Welcome back to the Kraken Power podcast. We’re your hosts, Josko and Brandon. And in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about why your expensive shoes might be sabotaging your gym results and why our most successful clients train barefoot.

Welcome back to the Kraken Power podcast. When did you start training barefoot, Brandon? I actually have a pretty funny story about this.

So I think I started training barefoot around 2010, there was a big kind of movement with Kelly Starrett, you know, mobility and being really grounded into your feet. So this is when those Vibram five feet or toe shoes were coming out. And so I decided to buy those.

Yeah.

[Brandon]
Yeah.

[Josko]
So I dove right in, I bought a pair of Vibram shoes and I loved them. It was great. I would deadlift in them.

I would squat in them. And the only thing that I would say I did not like about them was every time I went to the gym, I’d be in the middle of a squat. I’d be like, okay, I’m going to hit this like nine, eight RPE going into my squat.

And I could see someone from my side just looking at me and staring at me. And as soon as I finished that set, I know that they’re going to come up to me and be like, Hey man, how do you like those shoes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

So I have a kind of a similar, I, it was around the same time, right around like 2010, but, uh, I actually took them out to the grouse grind and yeah, it was hilarious because like every two seconds somebody was going like, Oh, nice shoes. Hey, where’d you get those? What are those?

You know? Um, but yeah, like I, I honestly love them. Um, they were just really freaking weird and I’m so thankful because now barefoot shoes are huge and the shoes that I’m currently wearing are these awesome barefoot shoes that are very breathable and they cost me $58 on Amazon.

That’s great. Yeah. Cause the thing is like with the Vivo barefoot, you’re easily, you can easily spend like $200 on barefoot shoes.

Totally. And the nice thing about those shoes is they don’t look like the webbed frog feet kind of things that people are going to ask about it. Yeah, totally.

Now they look like regular shoes that feel like you’re walking around bare feet. You know, the one thing that always really like confuses me with clients every single time I see it is, uh, like I can splay my toes all the way. I can like open them.

Like you would open your hand like that. And like all my toes spread them out completely. And, uh, I have clients where it’s like you try, like they’re trying to like splay their toes and they’re just like glued together.

And you’re like, how do you even walk? Yeah. They’re just bound.

Yeah. Cause I can, whenever I’m walking, cause of my barefoot shoes, I can feel my toes fully connecting to the ground as I’m walking. But yeah, if you’re, if you’re stuck in shoes all the time, they’re just, yeah, they’re bound and they’re immobile.

And, uh, yeah, you don’t even know what you’re doing. It’s like the shoe is just completely constricting your, your toes, but yeah. So let’s go into a little bit of the science breakdown with a barefoot shoes.

So tell us Brandon. So you’ve probably heard this time and time again, people will preach on about like how our ancestors used to walk around barefoot and connected to the ground. Yes.

I think that is part of it, but a lot of it is you have what something like 2000 nerve endings in the bottom of your feet, 200,000, 200,000 nerve endings in the bottom of your feet. And they’re sending back information back to your brain to tell you where you are in space and where you are connected into the ground, which allows you to position your ankles, your shin bones, your knees, your hips, everything back up to your spine and everything else in your body. Right.

Yeah. You know, it’s crazy. You have 200,000 nerve endings at the bottom of your feet and those go completely silent as soon as you put on your fancy shoes, it’s like putting on oven mitts and trying to do surgery, you know, exactly.

So if you ever see someone doing like a tight rope, you don’t see them doing them in platform shoes. You see them most often enough doing them bare feet. Like you see like ballet shoes other than them going up into a point on their toes.

They’re very minimal. So they have flexibility to them, mobility to them. So they can grip and, you know, go through a sense of pronation, a supination, a pronation again through their foot, because that’s what a natural walking gait would actually require.

Yeah, for sure. You know, you just mentioned athletes and going barefoot, right? What’s really popular right now is going barefoot while you’re, uh, rock climbing and stuff.

So have you seen those like free solo guys that are literally barefoot, like a thousand feet up a mountain, you know, like those feet are so strong. That guy does not have any kind of knee problems guaranteed, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. Although, you know, it kind of confuses me about that. Like, how do those goats like climb those mountains, you know, like hundreds of thousands of feet up and they’re just like on a sheer, like almost a 90 degree off face and they’re just like hooves.

Yeah. But, and they also just look like they’re just chilling there. Yeah.

So maybe we’re wrong. Hmm. Yeah.

We need hooves shoes. Yeah. Yeah.

Just completely bound them up into hooves. Yeah. So if we were to go in, take a squat for an example, right.

So when you’re doing a squat, your foot and in relation to your hip are going to be doing multiple things as you descend through that squat. So just to put it in a little bit more simplistic terms at the top of your squat, you’re going to be a little bit more turned out as you hit that 90 degree motion, you’re going to go more internal and then external at the bottom and then vice versa, as you come all the way back up to the top. So your foot need hip need that degree of motion to be able to move down within that plane properly.

And you’ll see a lot of people are limited by that because they’re used to, you know, squatting in shoes where the shoes soul is very rubbery and it may not provide them support or even worse. It won’t allow them to go through those degrees of motion to get, you know, motion degrees of motion up the chain as well. You know, one of the biggest reasons, cause you’re talking about squatting right now, one of the reason, one of the biggest reasons why people have a lack of ankle mobility is because they’re so used to shoes that have the heel lift, which is like 99% of shoes out there.

They all have some sort of heel lift. So then the foot is just kind of like resting, like kind of downwards like that. And it’s like wearing high heels, but not as high 24 seven.

And then, so therefore over time you end up losing that mobility to go into, um, plantar flexion. And I think that’s Nike’s fault. I’m serious because there was that big campaign where they brought, you know, Michael Jordan in and they were getting really getting into running.

Right. And they were trying to prevent people from getting like extra heel damage. So what they did is they padded up that heel as much as they could.

So when they’re going through those jumps and coming down, they had that support in that cushion. But what that did was artificially lifted their heels, put them more on their forefoot, and then they’re not able to access that weight back into the heel as much as they normally would if they were barefoot, the thing that we forgot to mention at the very beginning of the episode was that at Kraken, all of our clients train barefoot, our gym is a barefoot gym. So most people wear socks.

Some people go completely barefoot, but whenever somebody comes in and they’re like, Oh, I’m going to bring my indoor shoes. We’re like, that’s not the point. Like the point is for you to be barefoot.

Like you want to be barefoot. I don’t know. It still blows my mind that some, like 1% of our clients want to wear, want to wear shoes during their workouts, but I don’t know, let them, let them do whatever.

I think some people do it for like sanitary reasons. Yeah. I mean, the thing is though, it’s so much more sanitary than a regular gym.

Like you can clearly see that our gym is way cleaner than most gyms. As soon as you walk inside, there’s nothing on the ground and where like, if you were to go to a big box gym, you like barely want to put your hands down to do pushups. Ours is like pristinely clean.

You know, everybody’s in socks. It’s, it is super clean. I like, are you going to wear shoes whenever you go into your friend’s house, uh, into your friend’s house?

You know, like, yeah, I mean, there is obviously dozens of people that are coming in through throughout the day at our gym, but yeah, at the same time though, like, like I would forego some of that sanitary reasons just to be able to train barefoot. Cause the benefits are so, so immense. Totally.

And then we give our clients socks if they really don’t have socks. Yeah. Like grippy socks or whatever.

Socks. But yeah, you know, uh, a lot of our clients, they actually come in with a knee pain or foot pain. Some of our clients, like one of their biggest concerns is actually that they have like plantar fasciitis and stuff.

And we’re like, Oh, plantar fasciitis say, okay, have you tried training barefoot? You know, like it is that that is the benefit. Like you, you’re going to be able to cure a lot of these, these ailments just by just by switching to barefoot training.

Yeah. Because a lot of people will get conditions like plantar fasciitis is because the fascia in their feet are very immobile. Like they haven’t been worked and been stretched and contracted on a regular basis because they’re bound by that shoe.

But if you start to progress to being able to work in a barefoot situation, your foot is going through a natural sense of expansion and contraction, as well as allowing your toes to splay as well as go through extension and pull your toes up. You’ll be surprised about how many people can’t lift their big toe up off the floor while planting all the other toes down. Yeah, totally.

And that motion just right there is actually a lot of reason why people have that inflexibility between their plantar fascia, which again, goes up into your heel, into your calf, which is going to have other implications up the chain as well. If you don’t have that good and proper connection to the ground. So I’ve been training with a barefoot shoes for so long.

And I think it was probably about when did we do the sun run? It was two years ago now, I think. So me and you were training for like probably like two months or whatever before the sun run.

It’s like a 10 kilometer run if you don’t know what the sun run is just in case. But, um, I was training with my barefoot shoes for so long. And then what ended up happening was I think I was getting some, um, like bottom of my foot, uh, like calluses or whatever.

It was like pain. So then, um, cause obviously you’re like running on the cement with your barefoot shoes. And, uh, so then, uh, you recommended, you’re like, Oh, maybe you should get some running shoes.

Right. And then I got like some fancy running shoes or like 200 bucks. And, um, at first I was like, wow, this is so much easier to run.

But then what ended up happening was the knee pain started coming. And then what ended up happening was the shin splints started coming. And cause before that, I never even understood really what like shin splints felt like, you know, but then as soon as I switched into like the regular running shoes, I got shin splints.

And the funny thing is, is if you look at the shoe industry, it’s gone through so many different iterations of what the perfect running shoe is. So you can’t leave it to them to figure out like, what is the most optimal thing for your foot to be in? Right.

Because if you look back, like I was saying earlier, when they’re developing the first kind of running shoes, it was that big giant heel wedge with the big giant foam underneath the heel. And then now what you see is in the 2010 era, they’re like going complete bare minimals where there’s no nothing underneath and people are screwing up their feet cause they were going from big fat pad to nothing. And then now what you see again is just like, instead of just the heel being a pad, the entire shoe is like a giant foam cloud.

Yeah.

[Brandon]
Yeah.

[Josko]
See those hokas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I had.

Yeah. Super comfortable to walk around in. Right.

But we’re comfortable to run in walk around. I like my barefoot shoes. Like it does actually feel more comfortable to me.

Yeah. But, um, so just some practical applications. Cause there’s a lot of you, the guys that are probably wondering like, how am I supposed to train barefoot inside my gym?

Cause like I go to a big box gym. Like I can’t, I can’t do that. Or like I work at my apartment gym.

They require shoes. Cause it’s true. Like that, like I’m sure there’s insurance companies out there that don’t want to cover barefoot training inside like a big box gym, you know?

So, um, I’m going to show my shoe, which looks like this. And like I said, this was $58 on Amazon and you want it to be able to like, just like completely roll up into a ball like that, you know, like that’s, that’s a barefoot shoe, but not only that, it should go the other way too, which is what a lot of other shoes are missing as well. And then there’s also like this way.

So like it can twist completely like that. And that’s what you want in a barefoot shoe. And so you could wear that to the gym and people are completely fine with that.

Even though. And so like this is just in case everybody’s wondering about like safety issues when it comes to these kinds of shoes. So one time when I was working at a, at a community center gym, there was somebody who dropped a dumbbell and this is a shoes required.

Jim dropped a dumbbell directly on his toe. And the, the firefighters had to come and cut off his shoe. And there was blood all over the gym because people were like walking like into his like blood and like walking everywhere.

And that was with a gym with shoes on. So it doesn’t really matter if you drop a 50 pound weight on your barefoot. Or with your shoe on, like you’re still going to completely mess up your foot, you know, so it’s not like it’s that much more dangerous.

You’re not like getting that much protection from your little tiny thin shoe anyway. Yeah. We need like steel toed, flexible shoes.

That’s, that’s, that’s the solution to all of this. Right. So on top of the safety stuff, um, there is also the hygiene perspective.

And just to be clear, like I personally think it’s cleaner for you to be training in a gym with a, that’s a barefoot gym, you know, like I’m, I’m of course, if you’re going to be training at like a big box gym, like it’s probably better for you to train with your, with your shoes on, but at our gym, it’s definitely cleaner, like you, you can see it right away. And so yeah, challenge anybody to start wearing at least barefoot shoes at their gym, and if you can start training barefoot somehow as well, and one other kind of precautionary tale that I would give to people who are switching from being in these shoes for years and years and years to going into barefoot is making sure that you’re progressively working into them. So I’m not so much talking about strength training.

Like if you’re going to do deadlifts, squats, things that are fairly stationary, but you’re exerting yourself by all means, just switch to barefoot right away. You won’t really have too much issues. You’ll feel your feet get fatigued and you will feel like they’re being worked, which is good.

However, if you’re going to be doing very high volume activities, let’s say walking very far or running very far, this might be something that you want to progress into wearing barefoot shoes over time, or at least consider what kind of surface you’re going to be walking on. Like for instance, in your example, when you went from running on the concrete in your barefoot shoes, maybe you start off running in the same distance in the trail instead where you’re going to have a little bit more absorption from your body weight coming down. Or let’s say, you know, rather if you were running three times a week in your regular shoes, cut that down to, you know, two times.

And then one time and then zero and completely being barefoot after. So there is a little bit of, you know, progression going from those shoes. Cause remember you’ve been in them for years for you to just switch like that overnight is just unrealistic, but if you do go through this process, it will pay dividends over time.

I, uh, so I, I agree with you. Um, I also just switched completely to barefoot though. So, um, and, uh, maybe at the beginning my feet were sore, but I quickly adapted, you know, it is like the natural way of being.

So like, if you do skip over that, I think it’s not the end of the world either. You know, like if you’re just like, I’m done with these shoes and you throw away all your shoes or whatever, like you’re not going to, you’re not going to hurt yours, like necessarily hurt yourself. Yeah.

That’s what I’m saying. It depends on how much volume you’re doing. Yeah, totally.

[Brandon]
Yeah.

[Josko]
Like if you’re running marathons and you’re going to be like, I’m just gonna start running marathons barefoot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe not.

They’re going to be super messed up. They’re going to be super messed up anyways. Like marathons will do that to your feet.

Yeah.

[Brandon]
Yeah.

[Josko]
You ever see those ultra marathon feet? Oh yeah. Like they’re like bloody and they’re like toes are off.

[Brandon]
Yeah.

[Josko]
Like they’re a toenails or they lose every single toenail. Like every time they do one of those ultra marathons. Yeah.

That’s nasty. Nasty. But yeah, so, um, that’s, uh, that’s it for this episode.

Hopefully you guys got something out of that and yeah, start training barefoot. You’re going to love it and come to Kraken and that’s what we do here. So we’ll see you inside.

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