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Jay is a physical therapist, author, expert in biomechanical analysis and the creator of the mobo board. On this episode, Jay dives into the importance of foot function that all runners should consider. Jay shares the foundational exercises and tests you can perform to determine your foot's level of coordination, stability and strength. We also touch on minimalist footwear, orthotic prescription and Jay's favourite foot strength exercises. Finally, Jay speaks about the most common mistakes and misconceptions he has witnessed in his decades of work. Check out Jay's website www.anathletesbody.com and www.moboboard.com Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial.
Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
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On today's episode, we have a foot strength masterclass with Jay Desherry. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life, but more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. Welcome back, Run Smarter Scholars. We have another episode to build on your running IQ. Usually the podcast gods shine well upon this podcast and upon me recording these interviews, but this is an exception and- It was a big struggle to get through an interview for some reason a lot of things happened and the podcast gods were not smiling for us. It started off with I guess my scheduling side of things. I had this scheduled for 3.30 in the afternoon and I had a call from some of the tradesmen to build this internal wall right at the front of my office. And they were scheduled for turning up at around about 4.30 and I was like, okay. potentially if everything goes well, interview done by 430 tradesmen at 430 and then no disruption. And usually I record on Riverside. It's a platform and apparently just had a bug where I just tried to keep attending the session and it kept saying my camera was faulty and then the whole thing just froze. And so last minute decision, we jumped over to zoom. I sent him an email, said, Jay, Riverside isn't working. Let's jump onto zoom. And, you know, I lost a couple of minutes, about five minutes or so. Then we started the interview and this happened. Uh, I do this, uh, with individualized work with, with runners. I do this with, um, uh, education for, uh, clinicians. Turns out his entire street had a blackout. So I was left in the dark, figuratively. He was left in the dark literally. And he popped back on to the zoom call. maybe four or five minutes later and we had to start the thing over again and he used his phone so he was just sitting there in the dark on his phone, made sure he had enough battery life and finally got the interview underway but by that stage we were probably had lost 15, 20 minutes and so as you are aware the tradesmen are coming at 4 30 and so they end up coming a little bit earlier. Towards the end of the interview this happened. one of the things that just drives me crazy. Can you hear this? Um, I can. Yeah, we can wait for a second. I think the podcast gods are against us, uh, when it comes to mining up this interview, an absolute disappointment on my end and managed to edit what I can manage to salvage what I can, it was only just some minor disruptions the first, I think 40 minutes just went really well. Um, so didn't get a chance to answer Alan's. patron question sorry we had to kind of cut it a bit shorter but got through everyone else's I was lucky to get through everyone else's and I guess let's introduce Jay. Jay's a physical therapist he's the author of Running Rewired and Anatomy for Runners so he has those two books he's an expert in biomechanical analysis which he'll delve into and he's also the creator of the MOBO board which is a specialized balance board to help with foot strength. In today's episode, we delve into the importance of strength, uh, the importance of foot strength when it comes to running, running performance, reducing risk of injury, just the benefits and how exactly to implement it, what exercises you should be doing. We go through the coordination, stability and strength load training. He's a wealth of knowledge. Loved having him on despite all of these hiccups. And I know it's an interview you're going to love. Jay Desherry. Thank you for joining me on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. If people aren't familiar with you, which I know there are a lot of listeners who already are, can you just describe who you are and your credentials, your books and all that sort of stuff and kind of the mission that you're on when it comes to foot strength and working with runners? For sure. I mean, yeah, my name is JD Sherry. I'm a physical therapist. I've been practicing for about 20 years now. I see a lot of things come and go as far as trends and, you know, trends and biases over the years. I could imagine. Yeah. So it's been fun, right? But yeah, I think that, you know, my mission is simple, right? I want to help people improve their durability and improve their performance via education. I've been very, very lucky in my career to work with some great people. I ran the Gait and Motion Analysis Laboratory at University of Virginia for about two years. 10 years and then another private lab in Oregon for another almost 10 years. And I hate saying this because I don't mean to sound cocky, but I pretty confident that I've done more individualized gait analysis and any other person in the world thousands. So when you read studies that show, you know, 10 runners, 20 runners, a hundred runners, I've done thousands. And the interesting thing is for most of you listening is you probably don't care about research. You care how this applies to you and me too, right? That's my, my big MO. I mean, yes, I do research, research guides or thought process, but it doesn't tell us how to treat you. And I think that's one of the things I've tried to do is make all this messy data and science applicable, right? To give people roadmaps to try and improve the way they perform. And a lot of people appreciate it. And I know a lot of the content that you do produce and a lot of, you've kind of... developed a little niche specialty around the feet. And it's something that not a lot of people are talking about. And that's probably why you've decided to push the message out there. When people think of strengthening and they think of running and reducing their risk of injuries, some might eventually recognize the importance of strengthening, but little runners actually appreciate the foot strengthening side of things. So I thought we might just start off with why should runners consider strengthening their fate? Why is that so important? Yeah. You know, this is a great question. So it's funny, right? If we back up, you know, let's say 20 years ago, and we said that runners need to work core strengths, that was sort of just becoming buzzworthy, right? And, you know, you look at things, things now in our current modern times, and you say, you know, what type of core work are you doing as a runner? Not should you work your core? It's what kind of become accepted. And, you know, over the years, people's, you know, finally got the message yet. Hip strength is important too, right? And then over the years, we've talked about knee strength and now we're slowly getting down to the foot. The reality is, you have body parts and it's your job to make sure that all those parts work. And so when you talk about, do you have to have foot care in some aspect of your plan, you'd be remiss not to, right? And it's not the fact that it's something else to do. This is integral in your preparation as a runner. And it's so overlooked and it's overlooked by twofold, right? It's overlooked by the athletes. And I will feel free to throw the vast majority of my profession under the bus here because when you say foot strength, most PTs basically do marble pickups and tallis crunches. And then if you want to throw icing on top of that, they get a TheraBand that move the ankle around and that's their entire plan. And again, I mentioned that I have had data on thousands and thousands of athletes One of the things I saw was a big hole in how the foot and ankle, uh, stabilized in most athletes with lower leg problems. And then even if they don't have lower leg problems, how the foot and ankle plays a role in issues upstream as well. So, um, and this is pretty simple. Um, we have to make time for this. And, uh, so I've, I've just tried to find a better way to make sure that people have the knowledge and tools to integrate this into what they're doing. So they're not wasting their time and getting, and they put their time and getting results. And when you're talking about those sorts of things and the importance that it has, should all runners be focusing on building up the strength and function of their fate? Or is it only reserved for a certain population or a more different populations? Is it a higher priority for different runners and different populations? Yeah, I mean, I love this question, right? So, you say shellwork, runners work on their... blank strength, right? You insert whatever body part you want there. I mean, I have never met an athlete that couldn't improve, period, right? So I've never met an athlete that couldn't improve their core stability, their hips stability, their knee control, their postural control, and yes, their feet, right? So, you know, should you be able to, you know, press 900 pounds with your big toe? No, there's a point where things are, you know, become ridiculous, but I mean, yes, all runners need to work on foot control and foot strength. And I'd love to kind of break that down as far as what those terms are. But you need to make sure you're training properly. And we talk about actually kind of dive into it now if you don't mind. You know, when you talk about what to do for your feet, right, there's certain aspects. I break things down in terms of coordination and then I talk about stability and I talk about learning the foot, right? And so it's important to make sure that you're learning proper. coordination with your feet and proper stability of your feet. And then we add load. So if you do things in a very learning skill, versus just learning to push things around, then you see things actually materialize in your gait. Because again, most runners don't just want strong feet. They want to run well. And so that's the whole thing is making sure that if we're going to ask you, hey, take time away from your schedule to do these things, it better have a direct carryover into your running gait, or else it's a waste of your time. So. Um, yes, we do want to make sure we improve these skills. When you learn skills, you change behavior. When you change behavior, then you start to have better form, right? You can find better position. You can maintain position for a longer period of time. Uh, and, and again, we see carryover into better run a gate. Is there, when you're talking about those initial steps of coordination, stability, like building that foundation before you apply load, is there a certain. test or certain things that a runner could do to see if they are, if they do have nice coordination stability or whether they're lacking? 100%. Yeah, so here's two you can do right now. Real simple. And just, I mean, even break this down a little before we do this test. If everybody just takes their hand and put your hand in front of you, and I just want you to touch your thumb to one of your fingers, right? That's really, really easy to move your thumb independently from your fingers. We have on average, pretty good dexterity in our hands because we use them for fine motor skills, right? So drawing, writing, you know, needlework, whatever you're into, right? Use your hands a lot. And the reality is we take our feet, we stick them in a shoe and hope for the best. And that approach doesn't work. And we know it doesn't work because we haven't seen decreases in running injuries since running was been since its inception. So, you know, the idea here is you need to be able to control the motion of your foot. So one of the tests or exercises and tests that I've used for at least 16 or 17 years has been this whole thing called toe yoga. So you can Google this online. There's thousands of people who do it now, but basically it goes back to the fact that as a human, and I should say, it's not as a primate, as monkeys, gorillas, and apes don't have the skill, but as a human, you have a certain region in your brain dedicated just to your big toe. And you have a certain reading in your brain, dedicated little toes, right? Apes, monkeys, girls, primates don't have this. They just have one for all toes together. They don't have a separate one for their big toe. So neurologically, you as a human being are wired to have very specific controls in your foot. The second thing is people don't realize you have a different architecture in your foot. Your big toe is completely different than your four little toes. Your little toes are three bones each. Your big toe is two bones each. And you have these little... sesamoid bones, which are kind of like knee caps, right? Yeah, each big toe has two little mini knee caps inside that toe that change the leverage of controlling the big toe. And so you should be able to independently, we call flex and extend the big toe separately from little toes. So toe yoga, you basically just stand up, put your foot in the ground. And what I want you to do, and I'll give you the exact cues I use if you're with me in my clinic, right? So... You're gonna take your big toe, and I want you to pretend a picture of my face is underneath your big toe, and you're trying to smash my face down. So you're not trying to curl your toes, right? You're trying to press down. So keep pressing down, keep pressing down, keep pressing down. And as you're pressing down, I now want you to take your four little toes and float them up into space. And then now take your four little toes, flatten them straight down to the ground, not curling, keep them long, push down to the ground, and then raise your big toe up. And I want you to repeat that back and forth and see how well you can do that. And then I want you to do that again, but this time I want you to take your running shoe or a lacrosse ball or something, right? Just some object. And I want you to put it right inside your ankle. Right. And then when you look down at your ankle, there'll be a little gap between, let's say you use the shoe, right? So say you put a shoe, just maybe one centimeter to the inside of your ankle bone, and I want you to keep that shoe there. look at your ankle and do that same little toe yoga test again. And as you do this, you should not see that space between your ankle and the shoe shrink, right? Because what most people do, when we ask them to separate, control their big toe, full toes, they wind up moving their ankle back and forth. And again, that's showing me that you don't have the skill of coordination to work inside your feet. So that's one of my go-to tests to look at, you know, Hey, do we actually have dexterity, right? When we talk about using your foot, we're not talking about gross body balance of wobbling around with your hands in the air, right? We're talking about, do you have the skill of to basically drive down and control through your foot? So that's step one for sure. Do we have step two? Yes, there was step two, right? So step two, right? It's how we look at things together. Right? So step two is pretty simple. Um, it's basically just taking shoes off, standing on one leg. Okay. And hold this position for about 30 seconds. And as you do this, I'm gonna give you a little something to be aware of. Are you somebody who tends to stand what I call evenly spread, right? So evenly spread means as you're standing on one foot, listening to us talk right now, you should have equal contact from the inside ball of the foot. all the way to the outside of all the foot. So you can keep pressure nice and even across what we call your metatarsal heads is a fancy word for this, right? Some people listening will be right there, which is great. Some people will actually not have good control of access and stiffness in their foot. And what they tend to do is lean in the outside of the foot. And when you lean in the outside of the foot, what happens is you wind up doing some really interesting things to try and maintain balance. You start to lean in your trunk, your hip drops, and then put your arms out in space, right? You don't know how to truly balance. You have what we call a reactive balance strategy versus a proactive balance strategy, right? I know how to drive my foot down. I know how to get stability. Some people listening to this, when you try this, will not stay on the outside of the foot. They won't be on the inside. They'll actually collapse and fall towards the inside, right? And some of you actually may have to put your opposite foot down the ground because you're so deficient in stability. So if you're somebody who tends to stay evenly spread across the foot, right? then there's a bunch of other little things we can do to kind of look further up a chain and find out what we have to do to kind of find black holes, right? And plug them when we find them. But if you're somebody who tends to stay on the outside of your foot, we have to first open up what we call this little line of tightness in the outside of the foot. Basically the outer band of the plantar fascia gets tightened and we can actually open that up. I have a video of this on our website if you want to check it out. But if you go to moboboard.com and Look at the exercises page, like all the way down at the bottom of the page, there's a little thing called, is your foot flat? And it just goes over this test. And I have a video of a way to kind of fix this using a lacrosse ball, right? To basically it's a little fascial unwinding technique to open up the outside, the outside, excuse me, outside column of the foot. And it's a great little way to help you get your foot flat. Okay. If you're somebody who tend to fall on the inside of the foot, right? Then we know we have to work on, you know, some kind of basic building blocks of getting that coordination dialed in first. So we start from, you know, again, building that coordination in the foot, you know, starting with to yoga, starting with some of the exercises to make sure we can get a solid platform so that again, the coordination comes first so that when we do quote, balance exercises, you don't cheat with your hip and your trunk and your arms, but you're actually using your foot in the way you're supposed to. I often say when I give someone a balance exercise and they're really bad at it, they, they just don't know to activate their toes, they're just trying to balance on a really like rigid, inactive kind of foot. And it's not until I say, you know, why don't you try and activate the toes and trying to actually have the foot prevent you from falling over. And it's like a completely different, like game changer for them. Because like, I was just trying to just balance the way I thought. Do you commonly see that pattern? 100%. It's When we look at athletic performance, right? Your foot's the first thing hits the ground and you have a ton of proprioceptive input, right? So proprioception is your ability to detect where your body is in space. If you look at your hand right now and your hand's open facing you, you can see your hand's open, you can feel that your hand's open too. And if you close your hand and make a tight fist, you can feel the fact that you're making a tight fist and you can obviously see that as well. But if you close your eyes, you probably can still tell if you're making a tight fist or you have an open hand, right? because you have good position sense and good feel. Because again, we use our feet, right? Most of us don't use, excuse me, use our hands. Most of us don't use our feet. So when we talk about proprioception coordination, it's the ability to detect where your foot is, what it's doing, and make those little micro-corrections thousands of times a second to get a solid foundation, right? I mean, your feet are your landing gear, right? And if you can't tell it's going your landing gear, you wind up with poor control. So we're trying to improve the awareness of what's happening down below first. And sometimes that can be just, yeah, hey, pay attention to your toes. Think about this, right? Try and drive down at the big toes. Think about this little, you know, that little to yoga exercise we did. A lot of times people do this. They look at you like you're crazy. And after like three days, they can do things they never could do before. You didn't get stronger. You just got better coordination. I have seen that exact same pattern. I've seen when I teach to yoga to a lot of people. straight away, like I'd say maybe 80% of the runners that I teach this exercise to straight away, they can't do it. And then they say persist for, you know, a few times a day, sometimes three times a day, I want you to do this to yoga exercise and within a week, um, sometimes two weeks, but generally speaking, within a week, they come back and like, I can actually do it now. And it's, um, it's obviously they're not getting stronger in that period of time. Like does it, it takes longer to build strength, but like you say that coordination, that motor pattern and those neural connections are just changing and just becoming more connected. Yeah. And that's, and that's the thing. It's like people are saying, I want to get stronger. I'm like, look, I want to get stronger too, but you know, you have to know how to, I hate to use the word walk before you can run because that's not really true. But you do need to be able to find those connection points, right? Because what happens is, this is one of the reasons why those of you who've done balance work and different therapy before. One of the reasons why you fail a lot of times is because you come in with that very poor awareness, right? You can't tell what your foot's doing. And somebody gives you some exercise, which is really hard. And instead of focusing, you know, it's so hard that you can't focus your attention on your feet. You have to focus your attention is not falling over. And so you wind up carrying all your bad habits of foot control, all your bad habits of hip stability, all your bad habits of trunk control, and you're flying around in space and you're doing these things that are way too hard. And so. You know, the complexity of the exercises and balance training where it's to be just hard enough to meet you where you are, to challenge you and not overpower you, right? We don't wanna fatigue your brain. I wanna challenge your brain. And people forget this. And it's one of the reasons why, you look at research and balance training and what people are doing. And a lot of stuff in the research world is really poorly done because some of the tasks people are given are just too hard, right? And again, we wanna put you in a better learning environment. I wanna give you the time, contact, And, and cues you need to learn to move your foot better for control. Yeah. Very well said. How about for different like foot shapes? And I know like when I graduated physiotherapy, you know, close to 10 years ago, they, there was kind of like this notion, if someone has a flat foot, you can train their foot strength and train their coordination to kind of correct that, uh, flat foot to try and raise the arch and trying to get that stronger. Um, What's your position on this in terms of, okay, if you have a pronated or flat foot, do you need to prioritize strengthening above someone who has a neutral foot? And if you do have a flat foot, does it help correct the foot posture? Yeah, this is, um, we were doing our research study, uh, one time looking at the effect of this thing called navicular drop. So basically how much a foot moves. Um, when walking, running, jumping into a variety of tasks. And one of our research subjects came in, uh, and he was a runner at our university and he ran a high 14, a minute 10 K, uh, super fit guy. Right. And, uh, he came in and, you know, he would be all definitions and elite, uh, elite national caliber runner and took a shoe off and his navicular, which is a bone inside of the foot was almost on the floor, right? And he's the, he's the kind of guy. who goes and sees a healthcare provider and they say, you should never run. If he was in the military, they would have denied him entry because they said, you have flat feet, you can't do anything. And the guy had zero pain and he ran high 14s for a 5K. He never had any problems. And you see things like that, it's this aha moment of, okay, look, people have different anatomic variability and I'm not gonna change that. It's not my job, right? I'm not a surgeon who's gonna go in and chop bone in half or refuse it, make it look different. But- We have varying aspects of control. And if you've got an anatomy that needs a little bit more control than the average bear, you probably need to spend a little more time working on that increased control than someone with a stiffer higher arch, right? But again, we don't say that just because you've got more turnout or turn in at your hip angle that you do more or less squats, right? It's just a little bit different in terms of how we tailor what you're doing. So the idea here is that foot shape is something we're not gonna change. If you have a lower arch that tends to be very mobile, you have more emotionally average person and you might have to do a little bit more work to try and maintain better stability. But I would say just because you have a higher arch doesn't mean that you have a free pass to do nothing, right? So your foot still needs to work too. So I would say that there's slight biasing, but foot type itself does not dictate a yes or no in terms of what we wanna do. We just dictate how we wanna intervene to help you out. It seems to follow the same advice with different running techniques and, uh, the, the link between injury and certain types of running forms. And it seems like the matter, there might be some traits that may slightly increase your risk of injury, but sometimes people with those traits, you know, survive and thrive just because that the body's adapted to that particular style. And, uh, as long as your training is adequate and it's not a huge abrupt change, then you should be fine because the body does an amazing job of just adapting to your own mechanics and your own movements and, uh, positions. And so it does seem that, like you say, there might be a slight bias if you do have flat foot, but for the most part, the body would, you know, just get used to using that motion. And if you do have a particular history of foot issues or, um, you know, maybe decide to, okay, now I really need to start prioritizing that foot strength, but it's not necessarily a bad thing to have flat feet. If that makes sense. Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's like, I tell everybody, look, if you're an athlete, it's your job to show up ready and train to control your body for the, you know, the motion that you go through in your sport period that applies to every athlete, every, every sport I've ever worked with. Right. It's, it's no surprise. And so as you walk and run, you know, it's funny. People. bend their knee back and forth all the time, right? They hear flexion extension, people side bend and rotate their spine all the time, right? And nobody gets scared of those things. And all of a sudden you see they wear pronation, supination and people, you know, put their hands up and start freaking out and they start getting all nervous. And I'm like, look, these are just terms to describe motion. Right? That's it. And I think people look at the foot and they get, they get, look at it and they kind of freak out because they don't understand, they get nervous. It's just another body part, right? And if you can control your foot for the things that you need to do. There's a runners out there, right? If you can control your foot well, not just for two reps of an exercise, but for, you know, 26.2 miles or a hundred K or 50 K or whatever sprints, whatever you're running, right? If you can control it well for the entire distance with good quality, right. That's a key thing for your events. You're going to wind up really robust and you're going to perform great. Yeah. Well said. And this topic in particular is very popular. I had. Uh, on our page and Facebook group, this particular topic, any questions for Jay, whole bunch of questions came in. What the first one last comes from Jen and she asks, uh, what are your top feet or foot strength exercises and how and when should we incorporate them? You did mention like coordination, stability is like the foundation sort of exercises before applying load. So maybe it's a good opportunity now to, to delve into that load side of things or some of your favorite foot strengthening load based exercises? For sure. Um, so let me, uh, I will do that, but let me first show the exact problem we see, right? So a lot of runners out there like doing calf raises. Okay. Um, calf raises are great and calf, calf strength has been getting lots of attention in the research world lately and it should, um, your calf muscles, uh, you know, are strong and they attached to your Tilly's tendon, which is this huge powerful rubber band. And so. We want to make sure those muscles can work well to push off. And the problem is a lot of people just started doing a bunch of calf raises. Right. And so one of the things that clinicians look at is this thing called is a fancy word for it is called a posterior tibialis insufficiency test. All it is basically you put your hands on the wall, do a bunch of calf raises up and down, and we look at the quality of motion within your foot as you go up and down and a lot of runners, right. Especially the runners out there with lower leg problems, aches and pains and injuries. When you do this test, what happens is you do your calf raises. Your calf is not weak, right? You might do 10, 15, 20. I don't care, right? You might do a bunch of them, but as you rise and fall, we see very sloppy, uncontrolled motion of your rear foot on your forefoot. Those, those two plane at the plane that your rear foot, your forefoot's in should be nice and stable as you up and down. And most of you tend to collapse your foot wobble it back and forth. And so, you know, I use that test as a gateway to say, are we ready to go ahead and start training the foot? in loaded positions or not, right? If you fail that test, if you can't do 20 calf raises without your rear foot collapsing on your forefoot, we're not doing anything at all with your heel come up off the floor. Why? Because you just proved to me, you failed the test. You don't know how to control that motion yet, right? So you asked earlier about tests. It's one of the tests I use to say, look, are we ready to kind of go into, you know, again, heel off the ground type training, any calf raise type work, and also integrated work, right? So... We don't just train feet, we train people, right? So there's a time to work on that skill, right? We break things down. We work on, you know, toe yoga. We work on the skill of integrating in, you know, foot strategy, not just hip strategy, right? In terms of how we balance. And then we start to add motion, right? And then as we get better and better and better, as you kind of, you know, master the basics, I'm not looking at doing boring, isolated footwork with you. I want to integrate your foot into multi-joint activities, right? So we might do things like a split squat, right? a heel elevated split squat. So a split squat is one foot's on the floor in front, one foot can go on your sofa, can go on a plyo box, can go on something back behind you, and you're basically squatting down on one leg and rising back up again. That exercise is done all the time. If you're gonna make it more challenging, raise your heel, right, just about a centimeter or two off the floor. So you don't have to go high at all, but raise that foot up off the floor means we magnify the load up in the forefoot, right? So we're trying to build that contact platform in the forefoot. That's where all the magic happens. Not in the rear foot, but in the forefoot in terms of steering your foot properly. So that's an example of a very advanced exercise, right? Now it might take a long time to work up to something like that, right? Because again, you're adding a squat pattern on top of a loaded foot position, but to re to downgrade that we might get same exercise with what the foot flat. We might keep the heel up and give you contact point for your arms, right? To give you some stability. I mean, it's as lots of ways you can guide the exercise. Um, we can do a single leg deadlifts, right? So, um, yeah, there's a time and a place to do them body weight. There's a time and place to add load, right? So we can add, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds. I mean, most runners freak out when they come and you'll work with me. I don't just sit there and have you put a, you know, 10 pound kettlebell or excuse me, a 10 kilo kettlebell on your hand. I, uh, you know, I have people doing, you know, well over a hundred pounds on a single leg deadlifts. And some people like, wow, that's a lot. Like. Yeah, it is. Cause guess what? When you run, you have several times body weight plus part of your structure. So we're going to train that way. Right? So, you know, my goal for me is, you know, I have to meet you where you are. And, you know, again, you have to master the coordination piece. And I know most of the listeners are going to love this and get out and try the HeLa-based split squats and the fancy stuff. And those are great exercises, but a lot of you are going to have a hard time because they're challenging to start out with. So make sure you nail the basics first. I like putting in things where you've got, you know, body weight instability, where, uh, one of my favorite exercises actually is to, uh, have people basically just stay on one leg, take a kettlebell, uh, can be, you know, two, two kilos can be 10 kilos, whatever you want, right. And just pass it from your right hand to your left hand and back again, back and forth, and you'll be amazed at that subtle instability, just transferring the weight back and forth from the hand to hand, how much of a difference that really makes. in terms of how your foot has to work to stabilize, right? So things like that are great. In full disclosure, those of you listening may or may not know this, I developed a product called MoboBoard, which is a device that's basically tailored to train your foot specifically. So I hate doing cross promotion, but that is a device I developed. And again, it will target the muscles inside your feet. There's a tremendous amount of exercise you can do with a Mobo that are designed to work your foot. But also again, work your foot with all your parts upstream so that you can get more bang for your buck out of everything you're doing and not have to spend extra time. So there's lots of things out there. Again, if you look at that moboboard.com website, I have tons of exercises on there. Um, everything on there, most of the things on there is done with a mobo. There's some things you can do with out of mobo as well on there. So there's some great ideas and videos to check out. I'm glad you mentioned it. Cause I was just about to ask you about that. I went onto the website and checked out the exercise examples of the I recommend anyone to go check it out cause it does look very, very interesting and can be very challenging. It seems like some of those progressions in terms of like progressing the exercises or like, I guess just implementing them themselves. Can they just be done during the normal strength and conditioning workouts? Can they, do they need to be done all year round, off season, in season, any of those particular guidelines? Yeah, great question. So, I mean, again, remember when you, when you look at So I know we use the word strength training, right? To kind of cover all bases. I don't like using that word for everything because everything we do isn't about strength, right? So it's always about coordination. And again, all runners should be doing some neurological proprioceptive type work all year long, right? So this doesn't mean an hour a day by any means. It might be five minutes, eight minutes, right? Can be short and quick. This could be your dynamic warmup before you run, right? So instead of sitting there and doing static stretches, which we know a waste of your time, why not do something which is actually gonna make a difference? IE work on some stability work. So, you know, I like doing this dynamic warmup before you run. If you want to do this after a lifting session or before, I personally like to have people do things like this before because your brain is fresh and awake. And the more of a fresh brain you can put into things, the better you get in terms of learning, right? Because that's the whole idea to help you learn. So yes, should be done all year. Again, once you master basics and you're really good and pretty solid, What we start doing is taking our footwork and just putting it into our multi-join exercises, right? So again, you've already mastered some, some low level exercises, right? Now we're doing, you know, again, single leg split squats, we're doing some, uh, single dead lifts. We're doing, you know, instable and unstable positions. And there's ways to roll all this in, but just like you'd say, you never say at the time of year, I don't work my core, right? I mean, that's ridiculous. Um, there should never be a time where we're taking footwork off a table either. Yeah. Well said. And I think that's, that's really clear guidelines. Nicola asks a really nice question, which I'm curious about your answer. She asks like, how much foot strength is enough? Is there a point where you are, you're happy with the amount of foot strength that you do have and you don't need to say, do them anymore, or you don't need to progress? Is there any kind of benchmarks or guidelines around that? Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, right? So. Again, once you master the basics and your skill and coordination, if you're somebody who can stand on one leg, right. And you can pretty much like cook dinner and eat your dinner on one leg and not have any issues. I mean, you know, again, your balance is there, but then we have to start loading the foot. And again, like going back to idea by doing like, you know, heavy single-leg deadlifts on one leg, right. That's an advanced way to work your foot. in a closed chain environment, meaning foot on the ground. So we don't just train feet, we train your whole body. And my goal is to make sure that you work your foot with everything off the chain. This might be a good time to kind of put this in. So we talk, I mean, people love to segment things and what do you do for your feet? What do you do for your knees? What do you do for your hips? I mean, that's common and I get that, but the reality is I like to think about what happens in terms of your body. When you train your feet, what you're training is this spiral line of control that goes from the inside of the foot up to the outer hip, um, and all up into your core and lab dorks like me love to use the kind of coin, the term, the free moment, it's a basis rotational line of control that goes to your body as a runner, you have to be able to stabilize rotational stability in your body, right? Not just your foot, everything. And so the secret here is you can't work. Rotation control on your foot without also working in rotation control up in your hip, right? You do it at the same time. So, you know, as you get more complex, right? We start to work that spiral, right? And so when you talk about how much foot strength is enough, I wouldn't say that you have to worry about your foot being strong. I would say you want your foot sink or integrated with the rotation upstream to make sure you have a solid stable limb. Then again, it's gonna last not just 10 reps, right? And not just 2K, but last for the entire duration of your run, each and every run, all day, every week for the entire season. Right. I mean, that's real simple. I always say, I just train backwards. What are your goals as a runner? I want to run, you know, XK for, you know, 50 weeks a year and hit these time goals. Great. Let's just take that and work backwards. And, you know, if you can't show up biomechanically, stay able to do that. You're going to have some problems. Right. So it's our job to make sure you're in a solid plan, um, to, to progress along the way. And I probably should ask as well, when you talk about these split squats and single leg deadlifts and All those, are you encouraging people to do these particular exercises in bare feet or minimalist footwear, or should they start in footwear and progress to bare feet? Uh, barefoot first, always all the time for everyone, just because when you take away the shoe, you take away the sock, you get good ground feel, right? Remember we coined that term, appropriate assumption is position sense. So if you have nothing between you and the ground, you have good position sense and more, more sensory input to your body. Um, As you get better, if you want to do things in more minimal footwear, that's fine because minimal footwear isn't cushioned, right? And so when we talk about cushioning in shoes, cushioning actually takes away position sense. So if I say, I'm gonna make it harder for you to feel and find position in your foot and do an exercise that you're already not very good at, suddenly your brain gets really nervous, right? And you're not in a good learning environment. Things may be quote hard, you might be wobbling. That's ridiculous. It's not a good environment. So again, when we talk about foot stability, we're always trying to put you in the best learning environment, which is always going to be barefoot on the ground. And following on from that, I'm curious to hear your advice around the prescription and use of orthotics, if you have any people who you might recommend orthotics or people who aren't orthotics, whether they should wean off them or keep them on. Like what's your general sense around orthotic prescription? Yeah, so it's a great question. If you look back early on in my career, I probably made, I don't know, I mean, I would say it was minor, right? I mean, let's say I probably made orthotics for 10 to 15% of the patients I saw a year, okay? In the past five years, I've made five pairs of orthotics. And I think that changed total, right? So five orthotics in five years. And the reason is, Orthotics, again, there's a ton of literature out there. Some studies are horrible. Some studies are actually quite good. I've actually written medical book chapters on use of orthotics in interventions. And so I would say that if you look at that question, do I need a orthotic or not, it's based upon your alignment, right? So we looked at something called a radicular drop test, right? And so it looks at motion in your feet and you can actually do a test called subtalar neutral. So you can ask your... your physio you're working with to do is on you. Basically what they do is have you stand and they put your foot and ankle in what's called sub-toe neutral. They're going to put their thumb and their forefinger on the elbow, your ankle, they're going to kind of just rotate your foot back and forth and they're going to find that position. And if they put you in neutral and you have contact of the ball of your foot toes, one through five, nice and flat, then your orthotic needs are none, right? Because your foot's never going to be more incline it off the ground than it would be in that position. Um, 99% of you will pass this test about 1% of you, right? When we do this test, when they put you in neutral, what you're going to find is the big toe and quite possibly toes two and three as well are inclinated pretty high up off the ground. Right. And so what that means is for you to get contact of your second and third, your third, the second, and your eventually your big toe to the ground. You're going to have to cheat the rotational position of your entire leg. to get that and that's gonna screw things up, not just in your foot, but also in your knee, your hip, but even your lumbar spine, right? So again, that's a test that looks at your individual structure. And if we find that you're a zebra in a field of horses, then yes, or I thought it can be used to change that interaction with your body and the ground to help you not compensate things upstream to make up for some foot obliquity. But again, most people do not need this put in. And again, I would caution people just to shove things in your shoes because one is extra weight you're carrying around. And two, you're messing with that natural sensory aspect of how we stabilize our bodies. So less is more for the majority of people. Be your own orthotic, meaning show up with solid strength you need. Your foot's active. You're an active person. And if, you know, those of you who listen to this have masks, right? We're heavy creatures. You know, do you really think a, an insult that weighs a hundred grams under foot is really going to stabilize your entire body? No, not at all. Right. So, um, there's a time and a place that time and a place as an often when they're needed, they're needed for sure. But again, this test is a great way to identify if you actually need them or not. I think we're on the same wavelength there. I've had a lot of people become a little bit too reliant on orthotics and they do have say foot or ankle pain. put in an orthotic and they feel so much better because it's taking that pressure away and they feel the need to constantly have it in and it's kind of like over subscribed or over prescribed or like become reliant upon because of that, because they continue to use it once those symptoms have alleviated. What would you say for those who currently have orthotics? They're not injured, but because they've been told in the past that that they need these sort of orthotics and how they've adapted to those orthotics, should they try and wean off that, off those particular things? Again, it's an individual answer, right? So some people listening to this will have a valid, again, the axis of inclination of your midfoot, right, is so high that you actually do need that. And some of you listeners out there today will be that group for sure. And for you to keep an orthotic in place probably makes sense. for the majority of you, I would say, again, this is based upon, again, getting true objective lab data on thousands of athletes. And again, looking at individual muscle skill analysis, right, and cross-coating those, then the vast majority of you out there can show up with a solid, strong, and stable foot to not need your orthotics, right? Now, to do this, okay, if you're gonna wean off, I always tell people, you know, look, if a kid breaks their leg, it's been quite a stretch for a long time, you don't just suddenly go from crutches to running the next day, right? You don't kick the kid off the crutches. You've got to wean the kid off crutches to develop the confidence and coordination to get back to what you're looking to do. So, some of the research out there does show there are a lot of key results in atrophy, meaning weakness of muscles inside the feet. And so, I would be cautious to just jump out of it, right? So if you're somebody who thinks, you know what, I'm gonna try and make this work, right? I wanna try and get out my orthotics. Well, before you even start to get out of them, I would like you to start to do that little balance test, right? Find out if you're somebody who tends to have a really stiff lateral foot, because most orthotics shift people in that direction for sure. And do that test, find out where you are. You probably are gonna have to open up that lateral column of your foot. Again, that video to fix that, it's on our website. You can check it out. and work on that. And then when you can get that nice and flat, you start working some coordination work, right? You say, hey, let me try walking around without my orthotics in, right? Maybe some people might be wearing 365, right? So I wanna make sure that you can start walking around without them. Then we start working up and have some more progressive balance exercises, right? And you get foot specific balance exercises to start to prime the system. When you have some basic level of control, Then we can start to put in maybe one run a week, maybe two runs a week that are shorter, right, without orthotics. And then eventually you can titrate back up to the point where you're able to run all your runs without them. But you never go cold turkey for something like this for sure. If you want to take your running wisdom to the next level, then I highly recommend signing up to receive regular Run Smarter emails. Once you sign up, you'll receive my weekly blogs, research paper summaries, and podcast insights. You might be aware that I regularly post information across Facebook and Instagram, but I know not every blog will reach you. There are simply too many posts competing for your eyeballs and I'd rest a lot easier knowing that runners who want this content are receiving it safely into their inbox. Plus, the additional links and resources I include within my emails means you will get the upper hand than reading it on social media. So if this interests you, there'll be a sign up link in the show notes. Good advice. Yeah. Fantastic. I have a, another patron question from Rachel and Rachel asks, she, first of all, anatomy for runners is one of her favorite books. So she's a big fan of yours. And she says, I have intermittent pain from a previous metatarsal stress fracture and recently have burning on the inside or the outside of my foot. I do foot exercises, massage my calves and have minimalist shoes. Should I be changing my shoes or doing anything different? I know there's not a lot of information there, but do you have any advice for Rachel? For sure. So, Rachel, yeah, it's always hard slash impossible to diagnose everything exactly, but one thing you called out is very clear, right? So when someone says they have a metatarsal stress fracture on one foot, that is almost never an impact problem, okay? So stress fractures aren't all the same. Some stress fractures are caused by impact stress fracture is caused by instability. 99% of time, metatrial stress fractures are what we call instability, or actually called tensile stress fractures, meaning you're yanking and loading that bone in a very high and strange way because your big toe isn't doing all the work, right? Or isn't doing the work it should be doing. So what we need to do first, is to again, get your foot working properly. So massages are nice. You might be doing some stretches, but again, I would employ you to work on, you know, dedicating some time to actually do some work to truly make sure you were getting the foot in, you know, working and functioning properly. As far as footwear, a hundred percent you should be varying up your footwear. And I'd say this, you know, traditional running shoes have cushioning and they also have some rocker, some roll built in, right, in the forefoot. So, you know, taking someone who, again, it's impossible for me to say, right, via, you know, a question where you schedule, I mean, on this continuum, but if you don't have good control through your forefoot, right, and putting you in a minimal shoe is probably not the thing to do right away because it's going to say, Hey, look, we already have problem control. Let's not make this person have to work harder. Let's take away that built-in rock in the forefoot and tell to go run. That's, that's not setting you up for success, right? So it might be something where we need to spend, take a step back, find out where those black holes are in terms of getting your foot stability built up properly. And then we start, yeah, work on some things to get you kind of working progressive. I love the correct toes. I don't know if they sell those down in Australia, but the toe spacers in general are great to help kind of wake up that proprioceptual connection between your feet. They're not gonna strengthen you so much, but they help you work better while they're in. Meaning it gives you more kind of, it's almost like I tell people foot stability work, increases your capacity, right? And toe spacers kind of help you work the best with what you have right now. So you can wear those walking around, going to work, walking your dog, doing work in the house, right? Going for a run too as well. But those are great little tools to try and kind of wake up that mind-body link between your feet. And then as far as footwear, I think again, having lots of variety is helpful, right? So you may do some runs or some walks where you're in minimal footwear, you may do some runs and walks in more traditional shoes. As a rule of thumb, a little cushioning goes a long way. And I don't believe that every athlete out there should be running barefoot or running in minimal shoes all the time. In fact, I never advocate that. Cushioning does a lot for us in terms of protection and also in terms of economy when we run. So having golf clubs is necessary for golf, right? You have to have different clubs for the course. Same thing, we should be, yes, switching up shoes, having a pair of minimal footwear in your quiver, and also having some again. I always say less is more, but having some amount of cushioning and some footwear is a good idea for sure. Very well said. And you're doing a great job of answering all the questions that I have written down here as a follow-up. Because as soon as you started mentioning the minimalist footwear, I'm like, Oh, you mentioned at the start of the interview, the, you've been in the industry a long time, you've seen a lot of trends and one of those trends being that born to run barefoot running, follow your natural technique without any footwear and. Um, want to get your, your thoughts on those, but as you suggested, a variety of footwear is probably the best thing. For sure. Yeah. Well done. It, yeah. The, the, the minimalist footwear is funny, right? There's like anything there's what you believe and there's what you really do. Right. There was, I love telling the story. So, you know, in, in the heyday of the barefoot minimalist movement, uh, a bunch of researchers and I got invited to this, uh, event that in New York city, um, in the States and. They had all like the barefoot gurus, all the barefoot people you read about and all these books are all there. And they're all saying, you know, I run barefoot all the time and I always learn my forefoot and I always do this and that all the time. One of my colleagues put a camera in the bushes and just videoed foot strikes of all these people. And I'm not gonna call anybody out, but one of the most prolific like barefoot, you know, advocates the entire world, kill strikes, right? And I don't care if he has strikes, it's fine. I have no problem with that, but he's telling everyone that he always forefoot strikes. So there's proof of him coming around every single lap, he'll strike it. So it's just one of these things that we say we wanna do and people say, I'm minimalist, I'm barefoot, I forefoot strike all the time. You might for a little while, but then you get tired of your body changes. So there's a lot of misconceptions out there. And some people say minimalism is stupid and it failed. Well, it didn't. I mean, look at what was on. Look at the shoes that were on the wall of your local retailer, you know, 15 years ago. And then minimalism came about. And then what happened was all shoes across the board kind of got a lot more simple, right? They got a lot more things stripped down. They got lighter, they got lower, they got more flexible. So, you know, there was a systemic penetration of the idea of minimalism into every aspect of running shoes down the line. And even today with a lot of the maximal shoes out there, right, they're not just what we had 15 years ago. thicker, they're totally different, right? So, you know, minimalism did not fail. It got the link between the fact that shoes are filters. And if you put too big of a filter between you and the ground, body starts to do some weird things, right? You put no filter between you and the ground, you have really good feedback, right? It's a great training environment. Yes, I roll on my runs in a minimal shoe, but there's a metabolic cost to having no cushion. So if you... call me, Hey, we're going to do speed work. We're going to do a race. I never would do speed work or race in a minimal shoe because I want to hit certain splits, right? Just like you. So there's a time and a place for minimal footwear for sure. Um, but cushion does do wonderful things. And again, have a quiver, right? A quiver gives you all the advantages, none of the disadvantages. Yeah. Some of the runners I've worked with in the past, um, they have been injured and constantly in minimalist footwear. And it's almost like an ideology or just like an identity. They just don't want to go to back to traditional footwear or like support. It's, I took this person a long time to realize that maybe it's fine just to still keep your minimalist footwear, but also trade out and have it for, um, you know, have some minimalist footwear to Uh, have some traditional footwear just to relax that those muscles are like change the loads on your body instead of it just being such a high demand on the feet every single time you're still keeping really strong if you wear your minimalist footwear, you know, a couple of times a week, but you do need that reprieve sometimes. And that variety that the body's asking is reducing that risk of overload. On the body, because that's exactly what running injuries are. They have repetitive overload, you know, one single load to one part of the body eventually, and then. Um, becomes overloaded. So we do crave or desire that, um, shift in load through the bodies and the shift in demands, and that can be done with changing up the footwear. Totally. So well said. I have a story. It's a woman I worked with years ago and I actually asked her, I'm like, Hey, can I video you real quick? I want to use you. I teach when her case all the time. Right. So she is a, she was, you know, mid fifties runner, super wonderful lady, uh, very consistent, very hardworking. And. you know, she'd been running for a long time and with great success. And, you know, the whole minimalism thing came up and she kind of got this brainwash that if she couldn't run a minimal footwear, that she wasn't really a runner and she came and saw me and she's like, Hey, so here's the thing. When I wear kind of more traditional shoes, I actually feel great, run great. No issues. When I wear my minimal shoes, I get sore stiff, swollen, can't run. I'm limping around in pain for days after I'm like, okay, you just solved your own problem. But then she's like, you know, well, I wouldn't know why. And one of the things is, again, she was an outlier, right? She had something was called how it's rigidous, which means that her big toe won't bend, right? Won't bend up. So as you walk and run, you have to roll over and bend through your ankle and then roll over and bend through your toes. And she couldn't roll over and bend through her toes, right? Her foot didn't move that way. And so when she tried to get minimal footwear that didn't have that toe rocker built into it, she couldn't run without compensating, not just her feet. everything, right? She had this huge, we would call whip, this rotational shift in her leg as she ran. And so, you know, look, like some of that, we made some progress in, in far range of motion, but I was like, look, for most of your runs, being in the shoe, it's going to have a little bit of cushion, a little bit of heel drop, a little bit of toe rocker, is actually meeting your individual needs. And so, you know, if you're confused, you don't know where to go, go find a trusted physio that you, you know, that you can work with and say, Hey, look, can you be a little cursory check on like, How much I move through my foot and ankle, how much stability demand I've got. Right. And let's talk about footwear and really have the conversation. What I need, right. Um, you may be blessed with a super great, uh, especially running shop you can go to that can help out with this too. But you know, if you're, if you're kind of lost in the fog here, there's a lot of people who kind of get this stuff now. We're, we're beyond just like everyone must do this. Everyone must do that. So feel free to seek out some people that can really help give you individual answers. Yeah. It's good to have someone like that on your team and like keep them and have Good advice, someone with a bit of wisdom, just if you do have any of these queries about these misconceptions or trends that you see. On the topic of misconceptions, I often like to ask experts on a certain topic, what are the mistakes or misconceptions they currently see or they have seen in the past? And we've put the barefoot misconception out there. Are there any others that you can think of? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head earlier when you said most running injury injuries or overload type injuries and you know, it's. People get very worried, right? When you start mixing up things. And so, yeah, for example, when minimalism kind of first became a buzzword, there was, you know, six months after, you know, a lot of these shoe sales started to take off. There was a paper which looked at, you know, two runners who got stress fractures in a minimal shoe. Right. And so it's like two runners get stress fractures every five minutes in the world, right? So it's like, I, that's, it's ridiculous, but the paper got a ton of attention. So again, it's like, instead of saying what should everyone do, say what should I do? Right. And so then, you know, the flip side of that was people say, Oh, it's going to take a year or two years transition from regular shoes to minimal shoes. No, it doesn't. I mean, your body is metabolic. It's adaptive. Right. So, you know, muscles, tendons, bones, ligaments, soft tissue, right? They all adapt, right? And so, you know, it doesn't take two years for soft tissues to adapt. So if you're somebody who's, you know, quote, average, you may adapt to a certain rate. If you're somebody that comes in with a lot of baggage, right? You've got a lot of stiffness in certain joints and you know, let's say you sprained your ankle 50 times in the past, you know, your stability demands are totally different than somebody who's never sprained ankles, because when you sprain ankles, you don't just tear ligaments, but you actually destroy the neural appropriate sets of input that those ligaments possess. So you have to work on up regulating some of your muscle control to get that position sense back. So there's so many things out there that just driving us in terms of everyone must do this to progress. It's like, no, that that's, you know, again, make things individualized and. You know, we're, this isn't 15 years ago where we said, if you're running and things hurt to stop running, right? I mean, we know more now. We don't know everything for sure. Uh, but I think that. Get an individual assessment, individual evaluation. If you're having individual problems, it's one of the things that just drives me crazy as we finish up, are there any other final takeaways that we haven't yet discussed that you think the listeners and runners in the running community might want to learn more about? I think just again, I would approach your running as having a mindset of building a better mousetrap, right? Um, The reality is, and runners don't like hearing this, but because they say, I just want to run. And the reality is I just want you to run too. But running alone is not enough of a stress to develop proper strength, stability, bone health, tendon health, right? Like it's not. And so that's why you, it's really imperative. And I beg all runners who don't get this already, you do need dedicate time to take care of your body. It doesn't need to be an hour a day. doesn't need to be even a half hour a day. Okay. It might be just, you know, two times a week, three times a week for 15, 20 minutes, right? Terms of stability work. And you definitely better be throwing in a strength work session. Again, can be 30 minutes if you want to, at least one time a week. But this stuff will pay off in spades to build a better muscle strength, to build a better bones, to build a better tendon integrity, right? Like that's the parts that you need to build to put into your running. Running is a wonderful sport. to train your heart and lungs, right? It's a cardiovascular aerobic and aerobic sport. It is not a sport that's bent on building the chassis. And you need to develop time to, excuse me, you need to find time to put these things in your training plan. Again, as we said before, not just one, you know, one week a year, not just, you know, in the off season, right? All year long. And if you're kind of still puzzled by what I just said, every single elite athlete out there is already doing this, right? And every single athlete who's not elite, who's like, I'm not elite, I don't have to do this. You fall in that bucket where research shows 80% of you will get hurt at some point in your running career and 50% of you will get hurt every single year. Please don't become a statistic, right? You have the power to take time out of your schedule, make a focused attempt to put things into action and make your body better. And I think if runners approach this as far as what can I do to improve my quality and not just how many kilometers do I run a week? then we start to see things change. Yeah. And when you're talking about time and efficiency and all that sort of stuff, when you're talking about the, first of all, the coordination, stability, the toe yoga, it doesn't take out a lot of time in your day. Like you can do that while you're brushing your teeth or while you're waiting for the kettle to boil. And then when you talk about the load, the split squats, the single leg deadlifts, hopefully the runners who have already been listening to previous episodes of this podcast, they'll know they should be doing strength training already. But... if they slowly adapted now doing it in bare feet, maybe doing a few of these variations where it's more challenging for the foot and to build strength of the feet, it's not really taking out much of time anyway, because they're already doing it. So it's just integrating the foot strength and the foot function into what they're already implementing. So there shouldn't be too much time taken out to adopt these really crucial steps for runners. Totally. And it can make this real simple to put into action, right? So again, if you want, two little kind of things like that kind of beginning, entry level type stuff. Go to the Mobo board website. Again, even if you don't have a Mobo board, there's two exercises you can do on flat ground. One is basically called the banded twist, right? All it needs is an exercise resistance band, which I'm sure all of you have at your house already. And it's really critical on the side that band pulls from. So look at the video. But basically you hold the band in front of you, you just twist away from the band. And that twisting motion kind of drives your big toe in the ground to anchor your foot. That's one. The second one I mentioned earlier, the little kettlebell pass around. If you don't have a kettlebell, just get a water bottle. As heavy as you can make it, eight to 10 pound is ideal. So two liters or so, just pass it from hand to hand. It's actually great because the water sloshing around gives a little bit instability. But those are two great level, well kind of entry level exercises to work on the stability aspects. And again, as that gets better, make, excuse me, to start with, make sure you really master this, Get control of it. Don't let that squishing water wobble you around and make you put your foot down. Make it challenging enough, not too challenging. That's the biggest thing. People wanna make things look cool for Instagram, which is not my goal, right? I wanna help you really learn proper stability first, as you get better, then you start adding in the load, right? You start adding in the challenge. And that comes, and I think a lot of you who are starting out with this, it'll come faster than you think. But if you skip those steps, all the bad habits that you've already got, you just take them and you put load on them, and then you're gonna say, Well, those exercises hurt you. I'm gonna say, no, the exercise didn't hurt you, right? Weights don't hurt you. Putting bad form and bad control into loaded movement hurts you. So make sure you build those building blocks properly. Yep. Well done. Like you can tell you've been talking about this for however long. You can tell you're super passionate about this topic and it's incredible useful information. I will include themoboboard.com. I will include anathletesbody.com in the show notes. Are there any other links or any other websites that I should direct the listeners towards? Uh, no, that's it right now. I mean, we can, we have a mobile board up Instagram site as well. And I try and post some relevant stuff on there about a foot health education. So, um, and yeah, there's lots of resources out there. I've done, you're welcome to try YouTube and Google, but yeah, just, uh, always learn, keep your brain learning. It's a good lesson to finish with. So Jay, thank you very much for coming onto the podcast today. Thank you for having me. It's great. And that concludes another Run Smarter lesson. I hope you walk away from this episode feeling empowered and proud to be a Run Smarter scholar. Because when I think of runners like you who are listening, I think of runners who recognize the power of knowledge, who don't just learn but implement these lessons, who are done with repeating the same injury cycle over and over again, who want to take an educated, active role in their rehab, who are looking for evidence-based long-term solutions. not accept problematic quick fixes. And last but not least, who serve a cause bigger than themselves and pass on the right information to other runners who need it. I look forward to bringing you another episode and helping you on your Run Smarter path.