Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #39 How to Stay Pain Free with The Foot Collective

Episode Date: December 5, 2018

Have you ever thought about how important our feet are? And how they're connected to so many other parts of our bodies? This week's podcast is with Nick and Mike from ‘The Foot Collective’, a group of Canadian physical therapists on a mission to help humans reclaim strong, functional and pain-free feet through foot health education. The feet are an often neglected part of our body. If you’re experiencing hip, knee or back pain, your feet may be the cause. Nick and Mike explain that although there are many ailments that many of us just write off as something that we just have, or that we've inherited, in actual fact, there may be something we can do to improve these conditions. The truth is, that while we might have a genetic susceptibility, our environment and our lifestyles also determine what happens to our bodies. In our modern lives, we create an imbalance in our bodies by sitting too much and this can expose us to risk of injury. The Foot Collective give some brilliant tips on what we can do to avoid this. We also discuss orthotics and the damaging effects of wearing narrow shoes which squash our feet and talk about how we can help restore our feet to their natural state. After experiencing back pain for years, I found working on my feet made a huge difference. I hope you find this podcast helps you! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/footcollective Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Because the reality is that even what you said before, exercise and movement, those are actually different things, right? Movement is this giant circle that encompasses the whole continuum of what humans are designed to be able to do. And exercise is this very small subset. It's like a little pebble in the beach of movement. Hi, my name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of The Four Pillar Plan, and television presenter.

I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people, both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome to episode 39 of my Feel Better Live More podcast.

My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host. Before we get started today, just a quick word to let you know that I'm going to be doing multiple talks and live events around the UK in January 2019 to celebrate the launch of my new book, The Stress Solution. You can see all the live dates at drchastji.com forward slash events. Today's guests, The Foot Collective, are on a mission to teach the world about the importance of healthy feet, as well as the dangers of too much sitting and modern footwear. We discuss back pain, hip problems, knee problems, and so much more. And today's episode is full of take-home tips for yourselves, but also for the parents amongst you. There are plenty of tips for your children as well. Since recording this conversation,

I have already started to implement some of their tips into my daily life, and I am certain that you will feel motivated to do so as well. Now, before we get started, I do need to give a very quick shout out to our sponsors who are essential in order for me to be able to put out weekly podcast episodes like this one. Athletic Greens continue to support this podcast. I believe that the right nutrition is an essential ingredient to having a healthy and happy life. And whilst I prefer people to get their nutrition from eating real foods, I recognize that for many of us, this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes. So if you're looking to take something

each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around 70 pounds with your first order. You can check this out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Okay, so we're actually here in the Vivo Barefoot boardroom, which I guess is pretty apt given the content of the conversation we're about to have.

Yes, very fitting. Yeah, so Nick, you are, I don't know if you're the founder of the Foot Collective or co-founder, but you're here in London teaching about feet and I really want to delve into that but I thought a really good place to start would be your mission statement it says uh the Foot Collective we're a group of Canadian physical therapists on a mission to help humans reclaim strong functional and pain-free feet through foot health education we're empowering people with the knowledge they need to protect their feet from the dangers of modern footwear

and the guidance to fix their own feet. Yeah, it sounds much more long-winded than what I intended it to be. But yeah, that sums up everything that we're sort of trying to accomplish and convey with the Foot Collective. It's just help people understand why, well, number one, it's almost a hard sell to convince people why feet are important right because if someone wants if you're trying to teach about a certain topic you should

probably convey the fact that it's worth learning about so that's kind of where we start but yeah it's more just educating people to understand how their bodies work so that they can protect themselves from getting into trouble instead of just fixing problems after they happen. Yeah, I see a real synergy in terms of what you guys are promoting for sort of, I guess, physical health and the musculoskeletal system. And the way I view traditional medical problems in we're we're overly focused on symptom suppression and we don't go to the root cause yes and i mean i guess you guys are going to think that the feet are the root cause of a lot of problems yeah and um not necessarily we see the feet as a big problem because most people are wearing footwear that gives them problem at a problem at their foundation but in our uh the seminar that we give it's actually the hip is the bigger conversation that we speak about.

And in the context that a lot of people that have problems with their feet, the hip is a big driver of that because I think we both know most people sit all too, just spend too much time in the static sitting position. And when you look at, you know, the leg bone is connected to the foot bone sort of thing, you realize quite quickly that a lot of people have a hip dysfunction. And some of the ways that that hip dysfunction materializes is problems at the feet. And so we're just trying to demystify and simplify, but also in a way that, you know, not overly simplify, but let people understand how a problem somewhere can lead to problems

elsewhere. And sometimes where the pain is, is not actually where the root cause of the problem is. And I think root cause is a very powerful term. Like we actually work in a clinic in Ottawa, Mike and I, and there's sport medicine and physio in the same clinic. And we're really trying to change, have physical therapy and even how medicine is done in our own community, going away from symptom management and this really palliative approach of dealing with issues after they happen towards one where it's just a little bit of education early enough and effective enough can really do a lot to avoid a lot of these problems. I'm sure you can very much relate in the medical context. Yeah, absolutely, Nick. Look, I wonder what

led you here because you're a trained physical therapist. Yes. And how much training did you get on the foot when you were training? Very little. I don't know if you'd agree. Very little, if not almost none, actually. The foot was extremely overlooked. And that was really part of the major revelation when we started to really look at feet was, oh my goodness, this was not emphasized in school. And it was through self-discovery that we realized we have foot problems ourselves and we're not prepared to deal with these. And so it was kind of using ourselves as guinea pigs to say, okay, what we

were taught in school to provide the foot more support or to provide the foot with more stability or arch support or whatever the case may be. If you look at foot dysfunction as a problem of stiff, weak feet and dysfunctional hips, dealing with those, you know, the symptoms that might result from that or the objective movement issues that result from that by giving a weak and stiff body part more support and more rigidity seems a little bit silly. And so we started going kind of the opposite direction where it was, okay, let's give, let's, let's take the base premise that the foot is like any other body part. If it's stiff, it can, it can be mobilized. If it's weak, it can be strengthened. And the way to do that is remove

support, wean people off of supportive orthotics and orthotics are a very big, deeply ingrained treatment method, especially like we're from Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada. It's a federal government town. Everyone has benefits and everyone's given heaps and heaps of money every year to spend on these very expensive and in our opinion very ineffective kind of treatment method of orthotics of giving artificial support to an already weak area yeah I don't think there's so much I want to I want to sort of pick up on there I imagine there's many people listening to this podcast right now who have got orthotics in their shoes so we're probably going to be very interested to hear why you have such an opinion if I can just

share my own experience for a second some listeners of the podcast may have heard this already I spoke to Gary Ward you know many episodes ago and sort of detailed my whole journey into why I feel the foot is a forgotten body part. And when we don't give enough care and attention to, and, you know, I had a long history of lower right back pain. And, you know, I was at the time a fit guy trying to do things, trying to play squash, and had to give up all kinds of things I loved doing, including I had to take time off work. I couldn't bend down to see patients when my son was born. I couldn't lift him up and I felt pretty worthless. And powerless if you don't know what to do about it.

Yeah, and I was doing all the conventional stuff. I was trying to do the right exercises. I'd go to see physios. And the physios I saw were great, right? But I realized after a while that actually they're looking at my back problem as if it's a back problem and that may sound rather bizarre to some people but it was kind of it reminded me a bit of what we do in medicine you know yes I'm showing a symptom in my back it doesn't mean that's where the imbalance is doesn't mean that maybe my back is taking the strain for other issues in my biomechanics and i met gary gary sort of assessed me and he said

look your right foot is stuck in pronation it is it is um it's not functioning properly and he gave me a few exercises literally five minutes a day or something and instantaneously my back improved and um it was just incredible how but but i had tried everything including orthotics so for years i was wearing a orthotic that was custom made for my shoe yep and sorry for my foot i was wearing that when i you know in my running shoes and my walking shoes i just move it around i thought okay this is cool this is helping me i didn't realize till i met gary and went through his exercises you know i mean we've got shoes on at the moment we both got barefoot shoes on um if i if i unlaced my shoe and showed you that five years ago i had a fully flat foot on or what is regarded as a flat foot with my with my right

foot and i used to wear orthotics for that and since i've been doing the foot exercises and i never wear orthotics i've got an arch back yeah and you must see that all the time right we do and and the whole stigma of um having flat feet being genetic or bunions being genetic of so many foot dysfunctions have this air of oh it's hereditary or and and it's and part of that is okay these aren't hereditary but why do you think that i was trying to look okay why does this person think they's hereditary. And part of that is, okay, these aren't hereditary, but why do you think that? I was trying to look, okay, why does this person think they're hereditary? Was it something you were told to you? Because a lot of people, it's an observation. It's like, oh, my mom has bunions. My grandmother has bunions. I have bunions. This must be something that runs in our genes. And I think the distinction between saying something is familial and something is

genetic needs to be made, right? Because the underlying thing is okay well did your mom wear the same kind of shoes that you're wearing right or did your mom um you know if everyone's got arthritis osteoarthritis did everyone spend a lot of time sitting in their lives so maybe it's the it's what you're doing with your body and the fact that all everyone in the same family might do similar things more so than this is my genetics and i think when you I really think that's part of the deeply rooted problem is because if people don't see it as something that can change, then they don't see it as something that needs to be addressed. Right. And if you take an isolation approach to the body, to something that needs to be integrated, right. If you look at the foot as this standalone body part,

knock-knocked it to the rest of the body, something that is static and can never change, then sure, biomechanically lifting a flattened foot when you know there should be an arch there makes sense. But when you look at the foot as this dynamic, ever-changing body part that if it's stiff, it can be loosened. If it's weak, it can be strengthened. And as something that's connected to the rest of the body, like when you look at it and say, okay, the hip actually affects my foot. Hmm, maybe that's something that I should look at. Could I potentially have a hip issue that's causing my foot to react a certain way and have this kind of flat foot appearance? So I think that's a big, and even something I get people do all the time,

that come in and say, I've got flat feet, I've had flat feet forever, it's genetic. I tell them to stand up barefoot, bend their knees very slightly with their feet straight, and push their knees out to the side. And all you're really acting, you're giving them an external cue of push the knees out to generate torque at their hip. And when they look down at their foot and they see their arch lift off, it's like this big revelation, like, oh my goodness, my foot can form an arch. It's like, yes, your hip affects your foot.

And so maybe we need to look at your hip. Because if you sit eight hours a day, and sitting is one of these things that is always so shocking to see how much people underestimate. Everyone underestimates how much time they spend sitting per day because they don't really think of, oh, when I eat a meal, I'm sitting. When I'm in my car, I'm sitting. When I'm in a meeting, I'm sitting. And it's so easy for people to accumulate eight, 10, 10 plus hours a day of sitting. And if they're not shown the effects of that sitting, because the hip is rarely the, the area that, that people actually get symptoms at, right? Like some people will have hip pain, but, um, you

know, the way we view the body and a lot of lower body problems, it's like most people with a low back issue with knee problems or with a foot problem, the hip is a big player. And until that's acknowledged, um, and, and because it doesn't have symptoms, oftentimes it's overlooked, right? It's like your back, um, where the symptoms are, that's where the problem is. That's really the mentality. And when you dig a little bit deeper and you realize, well, where the symptoms are might just simply be a byproduct of a problem somewhere else that might not be symptomatic. It's hard to make that tangible connection for a lot of people.

But that's a really important thing to be able to do. Yeah, I think you raised some great points there. I mean, you're right. to be able to do yeah i think you raised some great points there i mean you're right if you if you have been brought up or society has taught you that this is just a thing that you've got yeah and you can't do anything about it then you wouldn't look into it yeah you just don't have the awareness to even think about it um and yeah there are analogies with let's say you know something like type 2 diabetes right so oh my mother had type 2 diabetes so that's why i've got it exactly it's really you know our understanding has really developed on that

in the last even in the last 5-10 years about that actually you know genes you know there are some conditions where the genetics really do influence the outcome but for most conditions um you know yeah sure you know the phrase is genes load the gun the environment pulls the trigger you know you might have a genetic susceptibility, but depending on how you live your life, depending on the lifestyle choices you make, depending on the environment you put yourself in, that will determine the majority of what actually happens. And I guess it's very similar thing with what you're talking about with the body and feet. You mentioned anyone with hip problems, knee problems, foot problems, and even back problems, right? We might need to look at the hips and the feet.

And, you know, I would imagine that a large proportion of the people listening to this podcast at some stage in their life can relate to that. So to that so so what are these you know why is it these problems are so rampant now um but also why did you actually start looking at this you said a bit of self-exploration but were you did you have a problem yourself that you couldn't fix or was it a client you couldn't get better what was you know what led you down this road yeah it was really self-exploration you know i went through um you know, physical therapy, the path to physical therapy in Canada is you do an undergrad degree, which is four years university, and then you do a master's degree, which is another two years. So when I came out of school in a program that teaches you how to be in the musculoskeletal sense healthy, I was my most unhealthiest because I just spent six years sitting. I knew nothing about footwear and what was optimal footwear at that point. So I spent a lot of time in cleats. I played rugby when I was

younger. And so I spent a lot of time in poor footwear and I spent a lot of time sitting. And so I literally had a body that simply reflected what I had done with it. And I had squished my feet. I had worn footwear with a heel on it. I had spent a lot of time sitting in school, leaned over, hunched over a laptop or a pencil. And so I had spent a lot of time sitting in school, leaned over, hunched over a laptop or a pencil. And so I had a stiff T-spine, my hips were locked up and I had dysfunctional feet and I really... Snap, snap, snap. Yeah. And just to add to that too, we started looking at movement instead of just isolating the joint. So the big thing is like in our clinic, we'll look at global movements. If somebody comes

in with a knee problem, we'll say, show us a squat. Show us how you stand on one foot. What we often see is that their squat pattern looks pretty bad oftentimes. And their knee might cave into the middle. And it's oftentimes the same type of things we're looking at. So what controls that knee? It's, again, upstream and downstream areas that are controlling these body parts. So looking at movement as opposed to isolated tests,

and we learned a lot of isolated tests in school. If somebody comes in with a knee injury, do five different tests on the knee, but don't look at how they're actually interacting with that body part. That's kind of what we do in medicine a little bit as well. Can you just, hey, can you just introduce who you are for the listeners that are probably wondering where this voice has come from? So I'm Mike and I'm one of the instructors for the Foot Collective. So yeah, I'm from Canadian physical therapist as well. And me and Nick went to school together. So great.

Well, Mike, you know, Mike and Nick are actually sharing one microphone. So they'll be passing it between the two because I actually don't have a third microphone at the moment. But that's all good. Yeah, that's incredible, isn't it? It's about how you really what you're saying is that the body is connected yeah exactly you know it's not yeah it's not that groundbreaking it's but we've somewhere in medicine and arguably in physical therapy as well and the way we look at things we have become very reductionist in terms of what we look at and we're not looking at us as a complete whole um look there'll be people listening who no doubt will will sort of

will connect with what you're saying that yeah we spend way too much time sitting um and there are you know what i wonder if you could tell us what are some of those problems that you get when you spend too much time sitting and then what can people do about it yeah and i think this this whole underlying um premise that we need to take is that the human body is is well engineered we are a machine that is designed to work very well it's been refined over you know millions of years of evolution and so taking this um thought and saying it's natural for us to break down like everyone is breaking down and and really not looking at it from the standpoint of, okay, how do we fix these problems that we're having? But why are we

breaking down? What are we all doing? That's causing us all the same problems. And I think two things that are very blatant to see that you can almost assume that everyone's doing right. When someone comes into the clinic, unless I do my subjective and find out otherwise, I assume they're wearing footwear that has a heel on it that puts them in a slightly toe pointed position that is probably too narrow for what their natural foot shape should be. That is extremely rigid. You take a 33 joint body part and put it in something that doesn't move at all. Um, there's going to be mobility problems there. Um, and the assumption that we sit, we live in a sitting centric culture, right? Um, we're sitting right now, you know,

people sit in offices, people sit in, I don't know of a car you can stand up in yet. So everyone accumulates a lot of this time sitting. And so when your hip has most of its day spent in flexion, with the hip forward and all of these hip flexor muscles put in a shortened position, then all of a sudden when you stand up, you have two choices. You either stand in a bit of hip flexion because they're stuck there. They get really comfortable being there and they get good at being there. So you develop this tone in these hip flexor muscles. So when you get up, you have two choices. You either stand slightly bent,

stooped forward, or you stand up straight. But that kind of vice grip at the front of your hip is not letting go unless you do something to deal with it. And so what happens then is the pelvis tilts forward. So when you're, if you think of your pelvis, your hip bone like a bowl, and you stand up and that bowl tilts forward, you all of a sudden start to over rely on your anterior chain on your quads on the front of of your leg and under rely on the posterior chain your glutes um because they're it's almost if you have a tilted pelvis you all of a sudden lose the ability to optimally fire the abdominal muscles and the glutes and when you you don't have those options, your body finds a way to move otherwise. And it uses the legs a lot more. It, um, it puts the low back in a compressed

position when that bowl tilts forward. So I think people having all these, you know, osteoarthritic knees are, it is so crazy how common it is that people say, Oh, I got grindy knees or, you know, people younger and younger that we're seeing now, you probably agree. People in the thirties are developing knee problems. Like your knees are not designed to break down after 30 years of use. So you're wearing through these wear cycles at a much higher rate than what your natural body is supposed to do. And when you look at when you can't use your main engine of your body, your hip joint, this big, robust joint that takes care of your whole lower extremity, when you have a dysfunction there because you're not exploring any of this range of motion, then you just use whatever strategy you have available.

So what about, you know, a lot of people are now trying to take care of themselves with a bit more movement and exercise in their lives. But if just to further on what you're saying, if we are spending eight hours a day, you know, give or take a few hours, depending on who we are, sitting down. you know give or take a few hours depending on who we are sitting down and that then alters our biomechanics so that when we stand up we're you know we're not standing optimally because over a number of years we will have changed the way we even just stand because it's evolved to you know it's adapted to the environment exactly so if we if you if you take that sort of further so sometimes then someone's got an altered standing position they've got an altered gait in terms of the way they walk but then they think oh i need to be fit so i'm going to go to the gym now after work and they go on the treadmill let's say or the

step machine for like 30 minutes to get their workout in in many ways i've got to be careful how i phrase this because that's not a bad thing to do for your cardiovascular health and many elements of your well-being but mechanically could they be causing more problems because they've got a dysfunctional body and now they're putting a lot of loads onto that body and is that then creating more problems yeah for a lot of people we see that all the time people that are the most active are the ones that are having the most problems and when you layer on repetitions or you layer on load or physical capacity on top of dysfunctional movement patterns not only do you ingrain those movement patterns even further but you've just turned physical fitness or exercise

into a risk factor for injury and so so, you know, our approach is always movement quality first, learn the basic alphabet and be competent in the language of movement of just basic patterns. Can you show me that you can do a squat, which is this fundamental basic human rest pattern should be the default human rest pattern until we invented this technology. We call the chair, which now we've taken to the extreme level and just don't want to let go of the chair. So can you demonstrate to me that you can do a squat? Can you demonstrate to me that you can do a lunge, that you can stand on one leg?

And those really, that needs to take precedent of moving well before you move often because the reality is that even what you said before, exercise and movement, those are actually different things, right? Movement is this giant circle that encompasses the whole continuum of what humans are designed to be able to do. And exercise is this very small subset. It's like a little pebble in the, in the beach of movement.

And those are, I love that. And those are what everyone is doing, right? Everyone consumes these 12 exercises, go on the treadmill, do the stair master, do a lunge, do bench press. We consume this small subset with dysfunctional patterns, which then fast-track us to injury. I mean, I don't want to be too doom and gloom, but the beauty behind this all is when you improve the quality of your movement, you improve your ability to actually consume exercise and consume fitness to your benefit instead of detriment. I might just add there to them. What we see in clinic often is mobility, joint mobility problems. So oftentimes we have to clear the joint mobility up

before we can actually start moving well. So we always break it down for people and people understand the terms hardware and software. So if you look at joint mobility as your hardware, if the hardware is not moving appropriately or like it should, if your hip is not rotating like it should, flexing and extending like it should,

you're gonna have a tough time running the software programs of movement on these joints. So oftentimes we just need to clear up. And again, back to that sitting, sitting causes a lot of hip mobility problems. So oftentimes we have to clear up hip mobility and then we can get people moving better. And it just takes away these, like these breaks, um, or these two to movement and to functional movement, right? Cause you can't, you basically can't move through a joint that's not moving where you're asking it to. So, and again, back to that gym thing, like you'll go to an exercise class and people will be asking you to do a squat, do a lunge, but it's like, maybe my hip doesn't move where they're asking me to move it right now. So

go back to the basics, restore some basic mobility, and then you can start to move better. So that's it. And just how do you do that? So, you know, this is brilliant. I mean, it's super fascinating, but I would imagine some people are thinking, well, this is great, but what can I actually do about this? And is there anything I can do or is it too late?

You can really change mobility at any age and that's what we're seeing in clinic now. And that's empowering, isn't it? Oh, it's huge. You can revamp your mobility so much. It's just a tissue change and a tissue change through loading. Um, we'll give people, oftentimes we call it the big three hip mobilizations. So we'll show people how to do these, uh, and try to restore hip rotation, hip abduction, hip flexion extension. So all the, um, the movements of the hip, and if they're working out at heart and they're spending time

each day, even for five to 10 minutes, like your experience, they can retrieve massive amounts of range of motion, you know, 50% more range of motion they can get. And then again, that allows them to move better. So if you're a modern human, you need to be doing something to maintain your joint health and joint mobility. It's just the way it is. But once you have it, it's easy to maintain it. It's just about getting it that we have to train people how to do so to the people come who come on your courses are they members of the public or they health care professionals it's actually a blend of both we the first thing we do when we do seminars we ask the audience um because our our seminars are open online for anyone to register um there's no prerequisite in terms of being health professional we get um physicians

we get chiros physios massage therapists and we get general public people that are fed up with all of the things they've tried to try to do to fix their feet and are like i'm fed up with this they see some of the content that we're doing and seeing that it's a different approach and they'll come in and the beauty is we try and engineer the seminar to um not be too simple but also not be too complex so that someone that comes in, for example, that treats patients, a physiotherapist will come out of that seminar with a certain subset of information that's applicable to them. And the general public person will come in and also have information that's applicable to them. And the beauty is,

it's really not that different. Those two sets of information are not that different because our goal is to simplify and give effective health advice but not it's very hard to simplify things it's very it's very easy to complicate things this is one thing that we're learning yeah tell me about it i absolutely know i think a really key part of messaging um in terms of what you're talking about what i try and talk about to the public through tv work books podcasts is always about how can you simplify it yes and some people think it's dumbing it down but it's really not actually it's it's a real skill actually i realize more and more it's really hard it's difficult to make things simple yes it's easy to get lost in the science and sort of

almost hide behind it sometimes but what does that really mean for people when i'm really struck by talking about you know the reality of sitting is here to stay at the moment. It's not going anytime soon. From what I can tell you, sure, some people are trying standing desks. Some people are trying to sit less. But people are lost in general. They just don't know where to go. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. And I guess, is there an argument to say that actually we need to train for sitting? We need to train to be able to stand is the thing I'm finding because people that switch, I mean, our whole approach, and it's funny when we have a conversation with a lot of people and it's, you know, starts off because people find out about us through the foot collective. So they assume it's always going to be a foot conversation. And really it's a whole body conversation. We just start at the feet because that's the foundation. So that's the starting point.

But our approach really, you know, I think I took this from Greg Cook. It's, it's a three-part approach and, and it's, it's order sensitive. So it's protect, correct, develop. And what we found is that a lot of people, for example, someone comes in, they have, they're having knee problems. When you ask them to do a squat, they can't use their hips. Then using the knees is the only strategy they have. It's like, okay, you have a hip dysfunction.

You have a stiff hips. Here's what we need to do to correct it. And that person's very motivated. And they're like, okay, I'm going to do this every day. I'm going to do 30 minutes of hip mobility work every single day. But then they spend 10 hours a day sitting at work. And so this whole protect, correct, develop sequence is protect by getting people to understand why they develop

these problems in the first place because the actual correcting the joint mobility all it has to do with is consistency and making sure you're putting your body into these positions on a daily basis but unless you get rid of why they develop the mobility problem in the first place it's very hard to make meaningful progress so i think this is key so if someone's listening to us they've got an office job yes i don't think well hey do you know what i have to sit for eight hours a day right okay i get this i'm going to do 10 15 minutes of hip mobility in the mornings let's say can they still make progress by doing that even if they're sitting for eight hours a day or do you almost need something at the end if you're sitting as well to you know what are the best practices for people who you know look some people are

dedicated enough to actually change their whole lives around and not sit um you know a friend of mine i don't know if you know him tony riddle um yes i've seen him on social media yeah tony's you know he he's you know revamped his life so he spends very little time sitting he has i think his kids and him they squat at at home. They don't have regular tables, regular chairs, which to some people is really extreme. And I guess societally, it is quite extreme. I love it. And actually, you know, that's the way I want to move at home. My wife's probably not quite as convinced as me at the moment. But I tell you, my kids who are eight and five years old at the moment, they've got the most beautiful squats.

They can drop down into anything. When we play cards together, you know, daddy, me, tries to squat, but, you know, I'm relearning how to squat. I would have known at five or six, but I've lost it with all the sitting. So I'm working on it, but I get a bit stiff after five or six minutes of squatting,

but they can just rock out the whole game in a beautiful squat. And I've really, it's great, but I think we all could as kids, you know, and I really encourage him to stay squatting as much as possible, but here's the madness. And I want to move on to this in a second, but maybe it comes in nicely here is that I've explained to him how important the squat is.

And then the fact that daddy has forgotten how to do it because he spends so much of his life sitting. That's why daddy's trying to relearn how to do this. And so he at school will often just squat on the chair and then his teachers tell him off, you know, bottom on the chair. And I say to my son, would you like me to come and talk to the teacher? Because I think it's really important. And I think, you know, it really confuses me as a dad to know what to do because I don't want him to now be sitting for seven, eight hours a day at school and his biomechanics to start changing, but they probably will. Yeah, that's a tough one. We just did. So we have a podcast that we do every week now,

the TFC audio project. We just did one about schools and physical education in particular, because we're engineering a kid's learning environment to be a sitting centric environment, to be a movement poor environment when really a young human needs movement, a movement rich environment in order to actually enhance their learning. You know, Dr. John Ratty has written a bunch of these really, really good books showing some of the research data and interpreting it in a way that's very understandable to say kids brains function better their brains actually get turned on when they move and so to put a kid you know like your son is a great example he he wants to move he's designed to move and we we actually punish wanting to move yeah and it's this very

strange thing where you should be able to sit still for one hour. Why, why should you be able to do that? It just feels completely unnatural. And if he wants to squat in a chair, he gets tagged as strange or as the inability to focus. This is a popular one. It's like for a kid to sit still for one hour and listen to a topic that he might not find interesting and not do anything about it. That's the strange part. It's not wanting to squat and move around. It's not doing anything that should be strange. So it's this very weird perception. But I mean, the way that we talk about sitting is exactly what you said.

Sitting is not going away, right? And so how do you teach someone to cope and develop strategies to protect themselves against sitting by understanding that the trend over time should be to try and spend less time sitting in a chair. And I think saying sitting in a chair is important because if we were sitting on the floor right now, you would be sitting one way. I would be sitting one way. He would be, Mike would be sitting a different way. We're all

sitting in different ways. We're exposing our bodies to different hip ranges. You don't have the opportunity to put your knee in your hip at 90 degrees and never move for long periods of time if you sit on the floor. So I think sitting in a chair, the way that we tell people to work on that is as time passes, try and spend less time in the chair sitting position. But there are going to be times when you have no choice but to, right? If you go on a flight, if you're in a meeting, we don't, we don't tell people you should be the only person standing at your meeting or, you know, you can't stand in your car. So for every hour that you accumulate in the sitting position, it's kind of like a balance sheet. You spend four hours in hip flexion. You need to work. You know, the offset that we give is for every hour of sitting,

it's one minute of hip mobility work per side. And the main mobilization is hip extension. So extension is getting your leg behind your torso is the opposite of having your hip bent to 90 degrees. And so that sounds achievable. You're giving what you're saying for every one hour sitting. Yes. One minute of mobility work each side. ball you're giving it you're giving what you're saying for every one hour sitting yes one minute

of mobility work yes each side so on a typical eight hour office work day and i get that you know the typical working culture is changing all the time but on eight hours and that would mean you're asking someone to do what eight minutes on their right hip and eight minutes on their left hip yes and ideally spaced out throughout the day so that you're not left at the end of the day with heaps of hip mobility work to do. You do it throughout the day. And what people realize quickly is I don't want to do 20 minutes for the hip mobility every day. So I'm going to take, okay, maybe I take two hours of my sitting out. So now I'm only sitting for six. I can do six minutes per hip, two minutes at my first break at work, two minutes at lunch, two minutes. So what are these? I mean, first of all, guys, I would say that if you want to get some inspirational advice around this,

just just follow the foot collectives, Instagram accounts. I think it's absolutely brilliant. There's loads of inspiring posts. So what is your handle there? It's at the foot collective at the foot collective. Is that where you share most of your information? Yeah, that's our primary. That's our primary platform. And we havefootcollective.com is our education site so we'll post uh podcasts we'll post uh written content tfc-shop.com is where we sell our our products but it's there's also videos posted there and this mobilization that we give the main mobilization we give people to be able to reclaim their ability to connect with their glutes and push their hip back into extension there's actually a video of that on tfc-shop.com if you click on videos the video is there and we're going to be improving our video

so people can go and have a look at it and see what that video is like i was just if you can't remember that then the i'm going to link to all of the things that i talk about with nick um on on the show notes page which will be drchastity.com forward slash foot collective. Everything we speak about, there'll be links to that there, links to your videos and all that sort of stuff. So are these things that people can do in an office? Yeah, I would say that it's completely feasible to do in an office. Like, you know, the one that's shown on the site is basically you get down on one knee and you're doing a series of glute contractions to stretch out the front of your hip. Essentially, you're mobilizing your hip into extension. Very feasible to do it in an office.

Another thing you could follow it up with is a short walk where you're exposing your hips to extension repetitively, right? So walking is a series of hip extensions and we just, you know, sitting is the kind of the opposite of walking. I'd also add that if you do a little bit of engineering around your environment at home, it's a lot easier and you don't have to do as much work to mobilize your hips. For instance, again, you're, you watch a half an hour of TV per night, sit on the ground when you do it. That's a great way to sit, to mobilize your hips without even thinking about it. You're because the ground in order to sit in one spot,

it's going to get quite uncomfortable. You're going to have to keep moving and you're putting your hips in completely different positions. Very, very simple. And a lot of our patients will simply sit on the ground for their half an hour, um, you know, Netflix show at night and, and accomplish what we want them to do. So, so there's different little, little hacks, if you will, that you can, you can get your, your body and your hips mobilized, um, you know, without having to do too much about it. But that is something I do actually, if I'm ever watching something in the evening, which is pretty rare these days, but when I do, I won't sit on the sofa i'll sit on the floor and um you know it's just a way of just way to be more efficient with your time and actually you you gotta i guess it's that wider point society and the environment is working

against us to be healthy yes and therefore if you don't have a strategy to to combat that there's going to be a consequence. I guess it's an uncomfortable truth, but it's the truth nonetheless. Oh, very true. Yeah, you do need to, and it doesn't have to be time consuming, really, but you need to know, first of all, what is it doing to me? So the education part is huge. And then you need to know, here's what I can do to manage this. Because, again the the downstream

consequences are really what we we end up seeing in a clinic from a clinical standpoint what are those downstream consequences like we were talking about joint replacements earlier joint replacements are a big one the hip and knee replacements are just skyrocketing these days and we see them at younger and younger ages um and and once we see you know you do a little bit of backtrack work, and these are the type of people who have completely lost their hip mobility at a young age, and then it causes them to compensate and move differently. They wear their knee joints and hip joints and things like this. And it's like, well, we need to really start looking at why is this happening instead of just like, okay, let's replace their joints with the newest technology. That's great that we can accomplish that. But really, why is that happening, right? And it really is this in conjunction with

things like back pain. We'll see teenagers come into our clinic more and more these days, neck pain, back pain, same thing. They're sitting all day, they're playing video games all night, and it's causing these same consequences to come out at younger and younger ages. Is there a certain age where you are, and maybe it's not come through to the clinic yet, but I'm wondering, I guess this is a slightly personal question given that I'm a father of two young kids. I'm just wondering at what age in conventional schooling does this start to shift their biomechanics? It sounds like movement is really important for kids, only for their biomechanics but also for their brain their ability to learn all kinds of things which i think is equally as important but you know what sort of age are we

seeing kids bodies started to change from this excessive sitting yeah i mean we we see kids that are far too young to be coming to us with pain um Um, it, it really is this. And the worst part is that only it's the most active kids that have the most problems. Like we talked about before, if you have dysfunctional hardware and bad software, because your joints are stiff, then you're going to express that software. And if you do it through five times a week on a basketball court, you're going to have problems significantly quicker than someone who perhaps only walks or sits as well, has most of a sedentary lifestyle. So the beauty about kids is that they're so plastic. The minute they start to work on things and the minute they understand,

Oh, my knees hurt because my hips are really tight. And this is all I have to do to make my hips loose. And you're telling me all I have to do is play video games on the floor instead of on a couch. Oh, this is pretty easy. And so you have to give them strategies that play into what they want to do. Instead of saying you need to spend 30 minutes extra every day doing things that you really don't want to do. And this is where this whole, you know, we use balance beams a lot, for example, in the clinic. And the balance beam is literally just a tube of metal that you get someone to stand on and you see how well they balance. And the beauty about that is there is no queing required. There's minimal kind of hip mobility things that they need to work on, but it's a very true and

honest screen. If a kid can't walk back and forth on this tube of metal, they have a hip stability issue. And it's not to say that just by walking, we'll correct all this, but it's a big part and it's fun and it's playful. And I think we need to bring back this enjoyment for playful movement. And even adults, adults never never play is that something that adults who are listening to this can actually purchase and use for themselves to train well we tell people like a starting point a really easy starting point for our patients is go buy a two by four of lumber that's six feet long and every single day sorry in english sorry in british english what is that a two inch by four inch piece of structural like framing

timber framing timber yeah that's basically um what would that be 10 centimeters wide by uh two meters long okay and all you do is walk heel to toe so in a straight line the piece of wood because it's raised off the ground will force you to walk in a straight line without looking at your feet walk back and forth on that five minutes a day the amount of people that cannot walk in a straight line without falling almost instantly is staggering. And it really makes it obvious how big of a hip dysfunction they might have because they can't stabilize. Their balance is way, way off. And, you know, the balance beam, which is a round beam, one of the reasons we really like that is it's more challenging. So it gives you a really good glimpse into how quickly you can improve

your hip stability. Because what is balance? Balance is your foot sending a signal to your brain, your brain telling your hip what to do to stop you from falling on your face. And how quickly that signal happens from your foot to brain to hip determines how quickly you can correct your position and avoid falling over. So that's a really delayed signal pathway. If your feet are dysfunctional,, our feet are sensors, right? They're designed to sense the environment around us. Like you mentioned earlier, it's your main point of contact to the ground under you for

most of what you do. And so if they can't work as a sensor because you've been covering them up with a big air bubble or a layer of cushioning, they lose the ability to send that information to your brain to process. And I think that's one of the, we just saw there was a really big problem with feet because everyone, just like everyone sits and doesn't think much of it because it's so normal, people all seem to be wearing footwear that compresses their foot, which if your toes are all squished together, you're going to have a much harder time stabilizing, right?

It's harder to balance on something that's narrow than wide. Just on a basic level, that makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, for a lot of people. And that's the beauty about the stuff that we teach. It's really, it's very intuitive when you word it in that way. And, you know, everyone spends more time sitting than they probably should in a chair. And I would argue that the vast majority of people, unless they're looking and seeking out information on footwear companies like Vivo Barefoot that are making footwear that's more tailored towards a natural human foot, they're also going to be wearing footwear that takes away from their foot function. So by getting someone doing something as simple as standing on a balance

beam, you literally help to reclaim the ability of their foot to splay and to take in sensory input and their ability for their brain to tell their hip what to do to make sure that they're staying within their center of balance. And it's very simple, but very powerful. It's like we're getting hit from two angles here. So if we talk about the hips and the feet, we're putting a huge strain on our hips by sitting so much. Creating an imbalance.

Creating an imbalance on our hips, which is going to cause problems in our feet potentially. But we're also doing it the other way around. We're putting ourselves in shoes that are narrow, shoes that have got a heel on them, particularly women, I guess, but guys as well. Guys as well. Dress shoes, men's dress shoes are... Yeah, I can't wear them anymore.

I just won't wear them anymore. I just hate the way I feel. I wore them for years. But I would argue the formal shoe that you're wearing right now is a leather... That looks like a men's dress shoe, but it has no heel. It has a significantly wider toe box.

And if I took that and twisted and rotated it, it would probably move fairly freely. Yeah. I mean, I love them. Since probably about five years ago, I started transitioning to barefoot shoes. And once you get it, you just can't go back. I know. That's a tough thing. It's a hurt on the wallet for some people.

Yeah, it is. And loads of my friends now and patients are also feeling the same once you get it once you feel your feet moving when you walk you feel that feedback from the grounds you want it more you it changes your gait actually it does if you're hammering hard you know if you've got a cushioned shoe you can walk down a pavement and you can have appalling gaits and hammer that heel into the ground because you're cushioned as soon as you've got a cushioned shoe you can walk down a pavement and you can have appalling gates and hammer that heel into the ground because you're cushioned as soon as you've got a barefoot shoe on you can't do that anymore because yeah you'll feel it so it changes your gates immediately yeah it's just it's a feedback thing and for for most people it's the same that can be said about barefoot training so we'll get a lot of people you know in a gym setting and that's another thing like gyms don't like training barefoot or,

but if you can wear a shoe or train barefoot, you're, you're not only getting more feedback, but you're getting more stability off the ground too. So it's like, once you go there and once you feel that it's hard, it's really hard to go back. And we always ask the question, like, why would you train with, you know, these big thick soles? If, if you knew the difference, you, you would definitely be there. The same can be said about runners and things like, and stuff like that. But it's really important that way. It's a sensory thing. And we've had patients in our clinic, elderly patients in particular, who were made these like big, robust, orthotic, supportive footwear, will take their shoes off and get them walking and their balance is instantly improved. Their stability is instantly improved, their risk of falls and things like that. So it's not just for younger people, it's for older people

too. Yeah. I, you know, I, I, I've, I've been doing that with my elderly patients and also with my mother, I've taken her out of these thick cushion shoes, you know, that the elderly should wear either barefoot or in barefoot shoes. And of course she's, she's closer to the ground. She can feel the ground. Her proprioception is better. She feels more stable just from the fact that I've actually, it's just such common sense, really, if you think about it. You're just taking me. And then like the analogy I give people is like,

you know, when you see someone walking on ice, like we're from Canada, there's a lot of ice. When you see someone walking on ice, their whole body, because it doesn't know, it's unsure of its footing, will stiffen up. It up it's a safety mechanism right it doesn't want to let you move freely because it wants to stiffen you up yeah if you're wearing a heavily cushioned shoe people literally look like their their brains will not let them express mobility at certain joints and will lock certain joints up because it doesn't know if you're standing on a like a

three centimeter air bubble tell me your brain doesn't feel a little bit threatened by the instability of that surface and yet we consider that a quote unquote good cushioned shoe it's so it's very upside down and if you put uh if you put shoes on a dog just see what happens right have you done this well we've seen videos of it and they don't know what to do they can't walk and it's this weird thing and they can't feel the ground and there's videos you can find on youtube And it's essentially the same thing happens to us and to a lesser extent, but it's, it's, it's just that if you can't feel the actual earth or the ground underneath you, you're not getting that sensory information in order to allow you to move well.

So it really is so crazy, isn't it? That, you know, I only really had my eyes opened up to this out of sheer necessity. You know, I couldn't get my back better. Um, I only really had my eyes opened up to this out of sheer necessity. You know, I couldn't get my back better. I had taken a load of pills that my doctor had given me. I'd been all around the houses. I'd been to a spinal surgeon. I had an MRI scan. I went to all kinds of therapists and, you know, they were all trying their best to help me. No question. They were lovely, really trying. But it was quite clear after a while that if i was going to sort my back out i had to figure it out by myself and that's how i that's how i felt maybe not everyone's had the same experience but i thought right so people said to me oh wrong and you are you know six foot six and a half so nearly two meters tall you're always gonna have back problems

i just refuse to accept that i thought i just don't buy that. And I literally would find, I would research, research, research. And that's when I came across Gary and I saw some of his videos and I thought, wait a minute, that makes sense to me. There's something there. It's lit a spark inside me and that led me down this path.

And I want to shout this from the rooftops because it has transformed my life completely. Not only my back pain which then had a knock-on effect on the way i felt about myself or the things i can do it gives you confidence you feel better mentally all kinds of things movement freedom when you're not in pain you have movement freedom yeah and it's not just movement it affects everything um and you're right the more you go down this road the more you think it's just intuitive. So I guess one thing I'd like to ask you is, if we go down the assumption that we're engineered pretty well, so most of us come out of the womb with pretty good biomechanics.

And you watch kids move and you watch kids squat and most of them have got it. So at some point in their, you know, if you live in regular society, their biomechanics starts to change because they're put in chairs, they're put in schools. So one thing we can do with them, of course, is not put them in narrow footwear as well. So that would be one thing. So that's certainly something I've adopted with my own children. I don't buy heeled shoes and I don't buy cushioned shoes. They only wear, they're either barefoot or they wear barefoot shoes um because i can't help but actually trying to apply that to them now that i've felt the benefits i don't want them getting

into my shoes in their 20s and then having to you know reverse all the damage that has been caused trying to unshoe their feet you just don't shoot them in the first place exactly yeah um but apart from the footwear and you're right there is a cost implication to that. And for some people, it may not be that they can do that. And I totally understand that. What else can, I guess, let's start with kids. Let's go to adults. So what can kids, what can parents who are listening to this do with their children, for their children, do you think, to help reduce some of the ill effects

of society's norms on their children's biomechanics? Like I said, we did a podcast on the potential of physical education in school. So physical education right now is a class where you might be put in a group setting and given a bunch of dodgeballs and throw them at each other. Why not use some of that time to teach kids what like kids can understand their way out of injuries. It's this beautiful thing where if you explain something in a way that, you know, if you want, I think Einstein had a quote that said, if you understand something, you should be able to explain to a six-year-old.

And when we, you know, people have the capacity to understand their way out of injuries by just understanding the base elements needed for a healthy body. So if instead of, you know, people always ask, what's the best shoe? It's like, well, that's, that's not a very clear question. Cause I don't know what you're doing with the shoe. And I'm not going to tell you to buy a certain style or model, but how about I just tell you what to look for in a shoe so that, okay, the, the prime, the, the most optimal footwear might be something like a, for example, Vivofoot Shoe, where it's got all the features. It's got a wide forefoot, thin sole, very flexible, all that kind of stuff.

But if people know the features to look for, then they can go and evaluate their own footwear. And maybe it's not perfect, but they can try and get as many elements as they can based on what they have available, what price point of footwear they have, what places they have available to buy it. And even just teaching the basic sitting offset, like for every hour hour you spend sitting your hips are going to get a bit stiff and maybe you have to get buy-in from a kid saying okay if your hips are stiff you're not gonna be able to jump as high in basketball you're not gonna be able to skate as fast exactly you need to get buy-in because they don't want to they don't want to hear you're gonna get hurt they're like hurt i don't know i'm not gonna get hurt you can jump higher on the trampoline you can you know that sort of stuff

you can you can throw a football are football are these hip exercises these hip mobility um sort of things that you recommend is it something that adults and parents can do with their children 100 i would say they need to the adults need to do a problem way more than the kids yeah it's just for me whenever you you try and create that change in families or kids you know i find it's much better to do it together so i'm already thinking now i'm going to look at your videos and i'm going to maybe you know my kids will be you know loving this the latest mad idea that daddy's come up with but to you know actually maybe we do it all together for five minutes before dinner each evening we just get there we do our hip mobility and then we eat dinner well it's just something is it's like we brush our teeth for five to 10 minutes a day and or, you know, brush and floss our teeth, but

we don't really maintain our joint health, right? So it just if we can instill that in our kids, it's like, yeah, so we should be able to do these things with our body. And the other thing, too, is getting our kids involved with these like martial arts, gymnastics, some of these more movement oriented, as opposed to like classical sports. I mean, classical sports are great basketball, soccer and all that. But it's some of these things, it's all it's all barefoot, it's all learning how to move your body. And it puts the body in different positions develops flexibility and all that. So that's another great path you can go down. But like you say, just something as simple as learn some of the basics, get your kids doing

it with you, because it's good for both of you. And really, it's about just doing these little things to maintain your joint health over time. So you're, and again, kids would understand that. So your body moves well over time, we need to do these things, just like we need to brush our teeth, so our teeth don't fall out, right? It's the same type of thing. Is there hope for people? Are there things that they can do that busy people can do when they perceive they don't have much time? What are the things that they can do to actually, I mean, you've touched on some of this already,

but just to really drill down, I always like to lead people towards the end of the conversations with some inspiration, some real practical things that they can do to improve the way they feel, but also improve their joint health right now yeah one of the most beautiful things because if you're preaching something a solution

to a problem okay if the problem is your feet are stiff and your hips are stiff how can you make a very simple solution that's hard to screw up because if i give you this complex 10 stage mobilization and you don't do it correct you're not only wasting time you might be facilitating a you know a bad problem or a bad pattern so the first thing people can do is when you're in the house, take shoes off, go barefoot in the house. The amount of people when we asked in our physical treatments that wear footwear in their home, whether it's because they were advised to do that. I literally had a lady once that was advised, this lady was in her mid seventies, was advised to never ever take shoes off, even in the house, even in the shower. If you want to know the most dangerous thing to tell a 75 year old

woman is put shoes on in the shower. So I think, and the person that told her that was her doctor and her doctor is not trying to hurt this lady. Her doctor is simply giving her advice, trying to help what, with what she feels is good advice. And so I really think it's just this, um, people are misinformed and aren't being given simple solutions to big problems. So spend time barefoot is the biggest thing. The more time you can spend barefoot, the more time you're actually resetting a natural foot, the more time you're taking information in from your foot that can be given to your

brain to direct optimal movement. Look for basic patterns. So people always say, well, how much hip mobility do I have to do? Well, number one, the sitting offset is a good start, right? For every hour of sitting, do one minute of hip extension work. Um, and then those are the things they can see on your websites. Yep. Yes. And yeah, in the, um, yes, I'm just trying to think of whether or not the dosage was on there, but yeah, yeah. Those are all things. We'll figure it out and I'll check it. And if it's, if there's a link there, I'll pop it in the show notes. And we're going to update some of this stuff because I think you bring up a good point of just giving like what are one, two, three tangible things that don't take a whole lot of extra time.

And really what we're finding, the more we have these conversations with people, it's not so much about adding a bunch of extra things, a bunch of good things. It's about taking away or modifying the negatives. Yeah. Right? things. It's about taking away or modifying the negatives, right? Because if you modify the amount of sitting you do or how you sit, maybe you sit on the floor for two extra hours and two less hours in a chair, that is way more powerful than doing 30 minutes or 10 minutes of hip mobility work, right? So it's figure out, protect, correct, develop, educate people on what's causing their problem and give them more importantly than that is give them strategies to be able to modify or

eliminate some of these problems. Then you can give them the stuff they need to do to correct it. But that's even a secondary thing, because if you don't, if you do the correct without the protect, you often continue to run into problems. And the last one develop is essentially, okay, now that you have functional hips, now that you can express these basic human movement patterns, now we can talk about what you can do to layer on fitness, right? And for some people, the starting point is, okay, your, your hips are very, very stiff. You're running. So maybe we need to temporarily remove some of that running volume. And maybe one thing you started with is you carry two heavy weights and you walk around at the gym instead of

lifting weights. More people need to, people should be carrying more and lifting less. I don't know if that makes sense, but like instead of doing squats, maybe you just need to people should be carrying more and lifting less i don't know if that makes yeah but like instead of doing squats maybe you just need to carry two heavy weights in your hands and walk around you load your posture you force yourself to stabilize at the right joints in order to express a pattern like walking in a good because it's very hard to screw that up right the minute it's self-limiting the minute you get out of optimal alignment your brain literally says you're not allowed to hold these weights anymore it's too heavy for you and it makes you drop them so that's great it's hard to screw up because i think a lot of people do get a bit worried with mobility exercises especially when they watch them online is am i doing it right is there something i'm doing wrong and i love that

about do less of the bad stuff and just walk around with weights and your body will stop when you actually just can't do it anymore it's beautiful we even treat uh high level like almost national level power lifters um and and by doing loaded carries they literally enhance all of their athletic performance because it's just reinforcing stabilizing at the right muscles to put yourself in a good position um so stuff like that and even like sitting on the floor, you can't screw up sitting on the floor. Like if your butt gets sore, that means it's a signal to move. And that's an important signal because it tells you you need variety in your joint positions. Whereas, you know, I had a, I treated a lawyer once and he's like, I got the best chair. I just spent a thousand

dollars on a chair. It feels like I'm sitting in a cloud. And I was like, that's the exact same reason why you're coming to see me with back pain, because you'd have no signal to ever change position. And you're putting yourself in this one statue like position for 10 hours every day, all day. And so we just have to, you know, take you out of that static position. And it's, you know, here are some things you can do at home. Here are some ways to modify your environment, right? If a chair is there, the tendency is to sit in it. So if you eliminate some of the time that chair is around, maybe you put your chair literally in the closet for two hours a day, you don't have the

option to use it. And so you engineer your environment to make it foolproof so that you put your body in positions that it should be in. Do you like standing desks? Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think people need to shift towards a standing centric workplace. Problem is it's not a black and white conversation, right? Because if you've spent 15 years stiffening up your hips to be really good at sitting, when you stand, your hips are not going to be able to get in an optimal position to stand. So it's, there's some work to do to get you closer to being able to stand. And I think a good place to go is okay. For every offset, the sitting effects of your day-to-day sitting. Okay. That's a good place to start. It's for every hour of sitting, try and do a minute of this hip extension extension work spend time sitting on the floor at home instead of sitting

on the couch then you can slowly incorporate more standing and less sitting in a day but if you flick the switch and do it right away oftentimes those people run into just as many if not more problems by standing all day because now you're not only are you in a poor position you're actually fighting gravity in a poor position so it's it's very hard for a lot of people your first point point was, you know, just be barefoot when you can. When you're in the house, be barefoot. And I think what's fascinating for me, you know, I grew up in an Indian household. And so culturally, we don't wear shoes in the house. So, you know, if you go to Asia, you go to Indian family.

Well, you know, not just in India. There is a tradition where for most of us where you don't wear shoes in the house so I'm used to that and I remember at a young age um going to my friend's houses and and I used to think oh they all wear shoes in the house there's I always used to find that a little bit a little bit funny and actually the the guy who introduced us Luke is a really good friend of mine um I remember actually in his flat in Edinburgh, he's always, you know, Luke will probably listen to this. So he may have changed it now as he's got really into the barefoot culture. But I remember he'd always have shoes on. So we'd get ready in the morning, let's say while I was staying over. And as part of, you know, putting on your jeans, putting on

your shirt, you would wear shoes as well. Whereas that's the, I never do that. I only wear shoes when I absolutely have to. And I find that really interesting that culturally, I mean, what's it like in Canada? Yeah. A lot of people, I mean, a lot of people wear shoes because their feet are cold and it's one of the, but what's funny about that is when you look at, okay, why do body parts get cold? Cause there's no blood flow going there, right? There's no warmth getting delivered with blood flow. So if you jam your feet into something, even if it has a huge amount of insulation, if it's crushing your foot and not allowing your foot to move or articulate or the muscles to fire, how would there be any warmth going to that foot? There's no blood

going to it. That's a great point. I did this experiment with my girlfriend. I went for a hike with her when it was fairly cold. She's used to wearing these big insulated boots and I got her to wear Vibrams, which are nothing. It's basically a glove over your foot. She's like, my feet are going to freeze. And her foot got significantly less cold than what she thought because there was muscle there was muscles working hard to bring blood flow into the foot so her toes didn't get cold it's very interesting i mean that's incredible i think so so relevant for now you know we're filming the not filming we are recording this in uh what are we middle of november now and it'll probably go out in the next

few weeks so you know in the uk it will no doubt be colder than it even it is today when this goes out and i think that's really that's a very very strong message you know and it makes sense doesn't it if we're not using our feet the muscles aren't working you know of course there's not going to be the same amount of blood flow we're going to be more you know more prone to getting cold so i think yeah thank you that's a that's a fresh point for me i've never heard that yeah a bit of a tangent but i i kind of came to that realization that made the hypothesis the other day and i haven't been proven wrong from it so you know for example people that are say i don't spend time barefoot at home because my feet are cold i say well here's a movement that you can do to contract the muscles of your foot next time your foot gets gets cold, roll your foot over a lacrosse ball and do a bunch of these

contractions. Like what's the easiest way to get warm in the winter? You go outside and do 10 jumping jacks. You'll get pretty warm, right? And it's like wearing gloves. If you can wear really, really thick winter gloves, but if you never move your hands whatsoever, not a whole lot of blood flow is going to be called to go to the distal extremities. So it's, yeah, it's very interesting where some solutions are so simple.

You know, we have an insanely complex piece of machinery in the foot. There's four layers of muscles. There's 26 bones, 33 joints. We only have a joint in our body if there's movement designed to go there. And so if you have 33 jam-packed in this tiny little thing we call feet

and you wear a shoe that allows zero degrees of motion at any of those joints, your foot is going to get stiff. And if your foot gets stiff, there's no need for the muscles to do anything because the joints don't move. And that's, I think, this epidemic of plantar fasciitis. Everyone knows or has heard that word because everyone has stiff, weak feet. And the solution we're giving to reduce symptoms is provide more support to an area that's stiff and weak, which would be like you come to see me with neck pain and me putting you in a neck brace for the rest of your life.

They abide by the same physiological principles, right? The foot and the neck, they're both these dynamic body parts that just react based on what you expose them to. So give them less support, use the muscles more, mobilize those tight joints. And really it's the simplicity of restoring feet is so beautiful because it's very simple things.

Just going barefoot alone will automatically strengthen your feet. Hey, I think that's a really inspiring place to end our conversation. I mean, there's just so much more I want to talk to you guys about. Maybe next time you're over in the UK, we can continue this conversation. For sure, I'd love to. Guys, I really appreciate your time today. I think you're doing fantastic work. You know, what you're trying to promote to the general public,

but also healthcare professionals. I think it's going to help a ton of people. I just want to thank you for that and sort of acknowledge you for that. Oh, thanks for having us. Hey, no worries. Thanks a lot. No worries.

And we'll see you next time, I hope. Sounds good, Rangan. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. I hope it has left you feeling inspired to examine your own movement habits and potentially introduce some of the hacks and exercises that we discussed on today's show. Links to everything that we discussed today, including the hip mobility exercise videos, can be found by going to the show notes page for this episode at drchastity.com forward slash foot collective. Please do let us know what you thought of today's episode by

tagging us on social media. In fact, why not take a screenshot right now and post it on your social media channels. If you do enjoy my weekly podcasts, one of the best ways to support it is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. These reviews help to raise visibility of the podcast, which in turn helps me to attract better guests for you. And of course, the best way to support it is a good old-fashioned way of simply telling your friends and family about this podcast. Research shows that up to 80% of what a GP sees in any given day is in some way related to stress. This was one of the key factors behind me writing my book, The Stress Solution. It's full of simple and accessible tools to help you live a happier and calmer life and is available to order right now in paperback or in the audiobook which I am narrating. For those of you new to my

podcast, my very first book, The Four Pillar Plan, is all about helping people to make simple and accessible lifestyle changes. If you don't have a copy yet, please do consider picking one up. And for those of you listening in the US and Canada, the four pillar plan is available to buy there with a different title, which is how to make disease disappear. That's it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I will be back next week with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes is always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.

I'll see you next time. Thank you.