Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #71 What Makes Us Human with Tony Riddle

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

This week I sit down with natural lifestyle coach, Tony Riddle, who plans to run the whole length of Great Britain completing 30 miles every day for 30 days completely barefoot in order to show what humans are capable of and what he believes is biologically normal for us. He also plans to raise awareness of sustainability along the way. Tony believes that we are a species that is destined to be innately empowered, wild and connected yet our modern lives are removing us from this natural state. For the last 18 years, Tony’s whole raison d’etre has been to find ways of living that are more in sync with our human biology in order to allow himself, his family and his clients to thrive in this modern world and in this episode, we discuss what he has learnt. Tony believes that the closer you take people to nature, the better able they are to heal. Many would consider Tony’s lifestyle extreme – he has no chairs in his house and is mostly barefoot. Tony explains why he has made the decision to get rid of all the chairs in his home, why the squat is so important and why having functioning feet is critical for our overall health. Tony also shares some simple ways that office workers and night shift workers can improve their health whilst at work. Finally, Tony shares some of his top tips that will help us all feel better in our everyday lives. This conversation provides a really fascinating insight into what Tony believes is the true essence of being human. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/naturallifestyle Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine your kids went into a school environment where they were taught what their fundamental needs were to allow them to thrive, you know? Except we have environments that remove their needs, right? We have chairs that they have to sit in for hours. Fundamental need is movement, right? Without movement, we suffer. Then we have, they go to the dinner hall, right? Then they've got food groups that aren't aligned with a biologically normal food group, which means they're going to suffer. Their digestion will suffer. That's three more. What's the air quality? What's the habitat?

What's the environment? Is it connected to nature in any way? Even for our kids, and we're caring parents, but we put them into environments that can be for eight hours a day that aren't enabling them to thrive. He's actually put them in a place of suffering. It's insane. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, to thrive is actually put them in a place of suffering. It's insane. 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 71 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chastji and I am your host. So, last week you may have noticed that I did not release a podcast. Now, this is the first time in five months that I've missed my Wednesday 1pm publication slots. I'm really sorry to those of you who were waiting for it last week. Basically, I've been

feeling a little bit overwhelmed and overworked over the past few months, and my family and I booked a last-minute holiday. Now, whilst away, my wife and I did consider getting the podcast ready for release, but finally decided against it. We thought that having a week together with ourselves and our family, when we could all switch off, would be much more beneficial for our well-being. So we basically decided not to release one. We've come back feeling a little bit more recharged, but starting to question why, when on holiday, life can feel so relaxed and stress-free, get one back in our day-to-day lives that could feel like the polar opposite. Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could

all bring a little bit of that holiday calm into our day-to-day lives? And this is something I'm certainly going to be reflecting on over the summer and thinking about what changes I can implement into my own life to make this happen. So this week on the podcast, I sit down with natural lifestyle coach, Tony Riddle, who plans to run the whole length of Great Britain, completing 30 miles every day for 30 days, whilst being completely barefoot. He's doing this to show what humans are truly capable of, and what he believes is biologically normal for us. He also plans to raise awareness of sustainability along the way. Tony believes that we are a species that is destined to be innately empowered, wild and connected,

yet our modern lives are removing us from this natural state. For the last 18 years, Tony's whole raison d'etre has been to find ways of living that are more in sync with our human biology in order to allow himself, his family, and his clients to thrive in this modern world. And in this episode, we discuss what he has learned. Tony has no chairs in his house and is mostly barefoot, and he believes that the closer you take people to nature the better able they are to heal. In our conversation Tony explains why he has made the decision to get rid of all the chairs in his home, why the squat is so important and why

having functioning feet is critical for our overall health. Tony also shares some simple ways that office workers and night shift workers can improve their health whilst at work. And finally, Tony shares some of his top tips that will help us all feel better in our everyday lives. This conversation provides a really fascinating insight into what Tony believes is the true essence of being human. Now, while some would consider his views extreme, I think they are super interesting and challenge our perception of what being normal really means. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Now, before we get started, I do need to give a quick shout out to the sponsors of today's episode who are essential in order for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. Athletic Greens continue their long-term support of my podcast. Many of you are well aware that I prefer people to get all of their nutrition from food, but I do recognize that for some of us, this is not always possible. Many of us are choosing to supplement these days. And if you do, I think you are much better sticking to a supplement that is derived from whole foods. 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 are 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 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Tony, thanks for making the journey up. Welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast.

Thanks, man. Thanks. How was your journey today? Journey was great. Really simple. A lot of sitting down? Do you know what? I moved around a fair bit. I did sit, but we all sit so that it's about what do we do when we get out of the chair, I guess.

Well, Tony, I've been looking forward to talking to you for a long time now. As you know, a big fan of what you're doing, the sort of work you're putting out there. I thought the best place to start would be that you go on Instagram by the name of The Natural Lifestylist. Indeed. What is a natural lifestyle? What is a natural lifestyle? Yeah, it's a difficult one, isn't it?

For me, it's about rewilding behaviours. So under the guise of The Natural Lifestylist, I've managed to get into, well, coaching from students through to millionaires and billionaires encouraging them to find more natural ways of living in urban environments so what does that mean you know we have ways that we can move sleep rest play eat digest with our social tribe as well community friends family and then even in a spiritual context. There's natural ways of doing things or there's social norms of today, right? So biological norms or social norms, which is a process of rewilding for me. So rewilding to me kind of means that I look to the natural beings and natural places of the world to find ways of living that are more in sync with our human biology, you know?

So it's stuff that we lose sight of and we have concerns for the environment of today right sustainability and there's a shocking fact of 60 of the wildlife has has been removed since what 1970s that's half an adult life but we're failing to understand that the wild humans also are being removed from the planet. And for me, it's a terrifying thing because we have Peter Kahn's term of environmental generational amnesia. So every generation that's born, they're born into a new social norm. And if we remove more and more of wildlife and more and more of wild humans and more and more of wild nature, unfortunately, we just see the compromised world of today. You know, you were on the train just

now you obviously live in london yeah i'm an urbanite right yes and when you look around and you see people um are you able to tell when you look at people around that actually you're not a wild human you're a modern human and is that problematic well it's an insult really because i used to work with um a company called wild fitness right and their thing is turning zoo humans into wild humans right and it's an insult calling people zoo humans that you know you're just born into a social norm so it's not i'm not a wild human i'm still an urbanite but i recognize ways of living that are going to enable me to thrive in a city rather than survive in the city does that make sense yeah yeah so you just i observe people and i might look at their posture and i might look but really there's no judgment there for me anymore i've kind of worked through that i used to get frustrated with urban life and

i realized that there's another rung on the ladder of consciousness to get to a point where you say i have compassion or empathy rather than oh look at these people walking around look at the state of society look at this i don't have that anymore it It's more, oh, here's, look, I get it, they're operating at a certain level. So we just, I kind of pull back a bit. And rather than judging the situation, just let's try and find ways that are going to help support people, you know? Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, you know, you sort of touched on personal growth there, aren't you? And the more we go down that road i know on my you know i've spoken about this on this podcast many times before but the more you go down that route the more you understand yourself

the more you can change those behaviors and actually the less judgmental you become and when you start to learn and retrain that part of your minds it's just it's just a more chilled out way of living and being right so you're not looking at people anymore and going god i wish i could sort their posture out saying hey of course i'm going to be like that that's a result of the environment in which they're living um and that must have been quite a refreshing perspective for you to take i'm guessing oh yeah absolutely and it's been i guess it's been a really refreshing take for my my family and the people around me because my parents would say to katarina you know

what's wrong why does tony have to be so extreme in what he's doing she's always not being extreme he's just found a way of living and if he wasn't to live it you'd have to question his integrity and what he's doing you know so yeah it's a much nicer position to operate at but again just being so rather than it be my ego that says oh this is a really great position to be in aren't i this it's just again it's this understanding i guess the closer you can get to having your physical social spiritual needs met the closer you are to being more human the more you can be on those magic numbers of compassion again empathy you know it's just i guess again it's for me it's always just been

about being my own guinea pig in a way so being the example so rather than even preaching or telling people this is what you should be doing it was to be an example because I had gone down the path of I had all the knowledge you know I had all the research and I was in a gym that I owned in West Hampstead and I'm standing in my, it was a boxing club, 1950s boxing club, but we had a natural lifestyle philosophy behind it, working with wild fitness. And so these personal trainers are coming to see me and they're all standing in the gym space and I'm standing in the boxing ring of great places to be holding a presentation from. and I'm preaching. I'm saying, these are the ways that we should be living. This is a natural lifestyle, how we sleep, eat, play, move, everything else, right? Social and spiritual needs. And if you don't have those needs, you're a human in suffering. And yet there I was, I wasn't sleeping. My food was out because I was still having to use pacifiers for the stress I was in, in the environment I was in. So I had all this amazing knowledge, I just wasn't living it. And so in that moment of recognition of me talking to these, the room filled with

personal trainers, this tube train just blasted past the doors. It was in an old railway building and the tube blasted past and it shook the building. And in that moment I had this, oh my God, like you're a fraud. Here you are, espousing this amazing lifestyle and you're not living it. So that was it for me. I closed the gym and I went bankrupt and we lost everything in that moment. But it was the best thing that ever happened because it was an opportunity for me to look at myself and my behaviors and then go through the philosophy and heal myself in that process so it wasn't then about i wasn't being socially extreme again i was just trying to find ways of living that more biologically normal things that were enabling me to thrive because previously i

was just surviving and who wants to just survive right it's like yeah there's a few things out there where these strike a chord with me the first one is that you seem to you seem to have been on this journey to find the life that the lifestyle that actually resonates with you not for anyone else not for you know joe across the street but for tony riddle actually what is a lifestyle that i want to live that's going to help that's going to make me feel whole um and that's i think quite inspiring for people because no matter what journey, you know, anyone listening to this is on, I think it is about trying to find your own journey, finding out what works for you. You obviously went to, you know, quite an extreme case of actually shutting down, going bankrupt, all that sort of stuff to find what works for you, which

I think that's something we can all learn from. You said that phrase, a human in suffering. And that really struck me. So, you know, I'm currently a GP. I've worked in specialist fields before, but I've been seeing patients for almost 20 years now as a doctor. And I've never heard that term, a human being in suffering, but I guess that's what I see day in, day out, walking into my practice as a GP, are people in suffering. I've never thought about it like that, but whether someone is coming in and they're struggling with their weight, or with their mental health, or they've got migraines, or whatever it is they're coming in with, on some level, they are suffering. They're a human being in suffering, hence they're coming in with on some level they are suffering they're a human being in suffering

hence they're coming to me to provide some insight and and some guidance to help remove the suffering yeah and so suffering can mean anything can't say it doesn't have to be symptom it's just a symptom and it's a symptom of the environment and the habitat and that can be the habits within the habitat or the learned habits within the habitat right yeah goes into epigenetics again right the environment isn't it yeah one of my behaviors in there allowing me to suffer you know yeah and how do i find ways of healing that and again i found that the closer i could take people to nature the more i can heal them so i've been privileged some incredible lifestyles i've been flown around by private jet just incredible stuff and it doesn't matter where people perceive they are on the monetary slide of success. If their needs aren't met,

they're suffering just the same. In fact, some of them are even more unhappy, right? So how does that work out? So then I realized that it almost doesn't matter how much money you have, if you're still suffering, you're still unhappy, right? Okay. So then this old saying of money can't buy you happiness i'm not it's not so true it's just knowing what to spend your money on not what you may want but understanding what your needs are and this could come into and imagine an educational model with kids we have kids right imagine your kids went into a school environment where they were taught what their fundamental needs were to allow them to thrive you know except we have environments that

remove their needs right we have chairs that have to sit in for hours fundamental need is movement right about movement we suffer then we have they go to the dinner hall right then they've got food groups that aren't aligned with a biologically normal food group which means they're going to suffer their digestion will suffer that's three more yeah what's the air quality what's the habitat what's the environment is it connected to nature in any way you know so even for our kids and we're caring parents but we put them into environments that can be for eight hours a day that aren't enabling to thrive he's actually put them in a place of suffering it's insane when you view it that way it's like oh wow yeah, wow. Yeah, and I'm not detecting even an ounce of judgment in the way you're saying that.

Again, it's not. It's just an observation, right? And I think it's important to say that because I think when we talk about parenting, when we talk about our children going to school, a lot of people can get quite defensive about that because obviously every parent, I think, is trying to do the best that they can for their child based upon what they know, based upon their

environment. That's all you can do. That's all you can do. And I want to explore how you have actually gone on that journey to change your environments. But for those people who don't know, I have not followed Tony on Instagram or on Facebook or wherever and seen some of the stuff that he does. A lot of people would perceive what you do as biologically extreme. So for instance, it's my understanding that you don't have any chairs in your house. Yep. Right. Now I love that. We'll talk about why I love that and how I'm struggling to get that through in my own house. But let's just, let's explore that. I think that's a really sort of

specific point we can look at now and showcase to people what you're talking about. So why do you have no chairs in your house? Just because I want to raise as many social extreme eyebrows as possible. No. Again, we are a species destined to be innately empowered, and connected right and the way that comes around is that we have this amazing physicality social and spiritual self and when you understand the physical self again one of those fundamental physical needs is movement and play okay so um i i used to own a pilates studio. And so I thought that was on the rung of the ladder of movement. And most of the people that come and see me, it was really

symptom relief, you know, trying to reconfigure a posture that was basically compromised by modern life. And it's the modern part of life, which is a sedentary lifestyle. Now, 83% of the UK are living in urban environments. We're spending 90% of our time indoors. What are we doing in that time indoors? Most of it's sitting, right? So if we're sitting in one posture, and I have a Pilates studio that's designed for symptom relief, why keep dealing with the symptom? Why not go to the cause, which is the chair? And then if I look to nature for the perfect example, because I looked at the natural world and the natural beings of the world for the solution because again we can only look to nature for a natural condition right so i can do that through sleep rest play whatever it is in this case it's right look at the chair does

a chair exist in nature no and then we look at okay there's studies that show there's a hundred different rest positions on the ground so if we then look at there's a hundred different rest positions on the ground once you understand them you can see that they're little micro nutrients of the macro skill of actually standing up right so so beneath all that standing the upright posture let's say you've got you have kids right so we observed our kids i because i have a movement background i was just obsessed and recording bit by bit by bit of their movement which is their motor skill milestones how they unravel so they have various different rest positions on the ground that enable them to become upright beings all right none of that involves a chair but they manage to get completely upright they have the best postures

ever right up until the age of six seven you don't have to go why do you don't have to go to physios or pilates just have incredible physiology and you, lift, carry, you can do all these things that we're having to relearn and reconnect with. They already have it. So for me, I had to remove the chair because I had to be the best example for my kids. So if I'm sitting, my kids are going to want to sit. I can't say to them, no, you're not allowed on the chair. So you have to keep unraveling all these hundred different rest positions so partly was to be the best example of a human being for my kids to observe the behaviors but mostly it's just every one of those rest positions helps feed and nourish an amazing physiology that then the macro skills can come from walking from running through jumping through

lifting through carrying through throwing defending, all of those things, the hierarchy within them is the posture. And the micronutrient or element of that macro skill of the posture is all the ground rest positions. Unfortunately, when we sit, it's detrimental to the posture because we get locked in the hips, locked in the ankle. We turn, revert back into a very old primal pattern if you believe in evolution like 35 million evolutions we're a c-shaped primate so when we sit down we then start to take on the c-shaped spine of the primate it's very quick and then if you start to then put a pad in front of you or a computer in front of you or a screen in front of you you adopt even more of a c-shape which we call slumping but really it's just taking adopting a very ancient spinal position then when you stand from that of course the head

position is totally out it's forward of the base of support which means then when i simply walk or i run or any of those things it means i have to keep striding further and further out because otherwise i'd fall over if the foot wasn't there so it's just it's just understanding that the ground rest positions is nature's cure really for a lot of the ills that i see within people's posture or within their physiology yeah so there's joints that primarily should be offering mobility some offer stability the pelvis should be offering stability and the fracal spine should be offering mobility when we sit down in a chair it defies all of that but when you upload the rest positions on the ground like simple things like kneeling i'm doing now up on a chair this is a single leg kneel but it's the single leg squat just the same it nourishes the ankle

stabilizes the knee immobilize the hips and then i can build my posture above it so it's opening up the locomotive joints and then allowing the muscles and the tendons within that system to understand their role which then we can become more efficient minimize the risk of injury and aesthetics we just have a system that understands its role therefore i'm going to be physically stronger and look physically stronger and more empowered because my posture's aligned you know yeah no it's incredible i'm a complete subscriber um to your philosophy. I, you know, people may have seen about a year ago, I posted on Instagram and you did as well. I had a long

session with you where we worked a lot on ankle mobility and some of these squat positions. And I was really good for a few months, was diligently every morning, starting the day as part of my morning routine with at least 15, 20 minutes of work on my ankles that sort of slipped a bit of the last few months um but a few things i really want to touch on so the squat you know you're a big proponent of the squat and it is interesting for anyone with kids if you watch your children squat they they've just got the most beautiful perfect squat and it's fluid isn't it it's fluid they're not thinking about it they're not trying to squat and um it's something i've really been talking to my kids about a lot it's one of those things where i've always said that parents well what i've learned in what nine years being a parent now and again i'm learning all the time but i i've learned that actually kids seem to do

what they see you do not what you tell them to do oh yeah they learn for observation yes anything vocal 100 so if you know for example you're trying to encourage your children to have a healthy diet i would say to parents well the first step is actually to make sure you're having one yourself and your kids can see that because if you're going to eat something particular that's not healthy and then you're saying no you have to eat this way you know you may have the best intentions but i think it's going to be very short-sighted in terms of how you know, you may have the best intentions, but I think it's going to be very short-sighted in terms of how, you know, what results you get from that. Same with screen time.

If you're always on your screen in front of your children and you want them to reduce their screen time, it's going to be very challenging. But you're a hypocrite. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? That's underneath it, really.

Underneath it. They're just going to see that and go, no, well, Danny's always on his screen, so I'm going to be always on my screen, this sort of thing. And I guess you're taking it further to movement so here's a problem that i see so kids are able to squat beautifully um but at some point and it seems like you're saying it happens after the age of six they start to unlearn that pattern that basic pattern maybe being in chairs

all day at school there you go slumped over books, all this kind of stuff. And I remember as a kid, right? So my parents are Indian immigrants. They came, my dad came here in the early 1960s. And every other summer, I used to go with my brother and my parents to India. And we'd spend the summer in Calcutta. And I remember in my, well, in both the houses I stayed in, in my mum's house, my dad's house, there was always help in the kitchen. And I remember the vivid imprint in my head of one of the helpers in her sari just literally squatting all day cutting vegetables. Not having to move out of position, just literally squatting next to this sort of big curved knife and just cutting veg all day because it's a

natural resting position. Whereas if I try to do that, and I have tried to do that in my kitchen, I get to about five, six minutes and I'm really feeling it. And so if a parent listening to this goes, okay, that's great, right? I want to model this behavior for my children. Here's the problem. So many of us like myself have forgotten our bodies have unlearned how to do a squat so we actually are unable to do a squat properly so we can't model that right behavior so what should we do then yeah again we going back to we have forgotten it goes back into peter khan you know it's like this environmental generational amnesia and it's about templates,

right? So you're like, you know, if you've had a template, you've at least seen someone squatting. I see people that actually have no template for what a squat might look like in the first place, you know? So it's stripping it right back to that. What can they do? Well, to start with, just simply trying to squat with your heel up is the first example you know you can hold the edge of a table just keep your chest up and then just squat slowly down so you allow the heel to come up because most of it is that we're locked in the ankle believe it or not it's that it's that it's that joint really it's being compromised and then the next stage would be a thick book put a book underneath your heel and then squat down so rather than having your heel off the ground you then put a support behind it and then over time this then you minimize it and minimize it and minimize it until it ends up at ground level because ultimately you want to get

to the point where your squat actually feels like a rest position not an exercise yeah we see squatting as an exercise and the way exercise physiology and bodybuilding messed up the resting squat because people were told you shouldn't squat with your knees beyond your knees your knees beyond your toes and you shouldn't let your hips drop in it any lower than your knees well how is it that in natural cultures and beings of the world they've all be everybody destroyed of injuries none of us would be here today right because it'll be injured right yeah so that once you have to have a first of all a template i guess to understand what a squat looks like so research flat-footed squatting or squatting naturally or natural cultures squatting or something get a template get an image of what it looks like first and then you know that's what

otherwise you're so consciously incompetent you're not going to understand what it is you're trying to achieve in the first place and then just put little supports in one behind your heel if you're still struggling use an anterior support like a door handle make sure the door's closed um or a banister rail or yeah a chair the back of a chair or something that will enable you not to fall backwards yeah and then allow the heel to pop up and then play around with lowering the heel and you can do that by holding something and lowering the heel back or by popping a support behind it but you you have taught many people myself included some of these techniques and i think you've do you have an online program yeah i have one there's an online squat tutorial there

i'll send i'll give you a link to that for your listeners um yeah i'll put it i'll put it in the show notes i'll put a little discount code up for them as well how's that um and that's a six-week tutorial and it's only the six week is actually about squatting the rest of it is about the rest of the ground rest positions all the resting positions because they're the micro elements of the macro skill of squatting because you have to get to squatting before you stand so all the other rest positions are about nurturing the squat position to get you up onto your feet with the correct joint actions and the right posture to be able to stand up to get you up onto your feet with the correct joint actions and the right posture to be able to stand up. So there's week by week, there's little uploads within that. So some are about the posture, some are about the mobility for the ankles and stability for the knees.

On one level, could this be one of the reasons why so many people get injured when, let's say, you know, they're sat down all day at work in an office, they're sat down, let's say you know they're sat down all day at work in an office they're sat down let's say on the sofa in the evening they sit maybe in the car or the tube or a bus or a train on their way to work so day in day out for seven eight nine hours a day their natural movement capacity is being compromised yeah and then they get um you know let's say they listen to a podcast that i might do with a runner i think yeah i'm gonna I'm going to do it. I'm going to start running in nature. Yeah, it's going to be incredible for me. And they start doing it at the weekends and they do it for a few weeks and then they start to get injured. And I see this a lot. And so I guess the point I'm trying to make is,

if we have altered movement biomechanics as a result of the environment in which we are putting ourselves in day in, day out, that can actually hinder our ability to do a lot more of those exciting activities that we might get inspiration about and then we can't do it is that is that something you think is reasonable yeah so again so let's talk about running for instance right so the best runners in the world let's look at tribes people or the tala humara right who are featuring born to run they can whack out 400 miles in 48 hours right which is like what it's just it just seems so extreme but actually it's biologically normal and it's a social norm to them they're not a sitting culture right and they don't wear footwear or they wear minimized sandals that they've built um so yes so that the micro element of their macro

skill of running hasn't been altered so they haven't compromised the very posture that is needed for running and if you don't have the appropriate posture then you don't have the appropriate patterns that come with it which is biomechanics again so it's kinetics versus kinematics kinetics is the study of the forces within running and then kinematics are the shapes i make due to the forces and then a byproduct of that is the muscles and tendons that i will be using so in theory if you don't have a good ground rest position ground resting game on that's strong and up into a squat and can't squat to stand squats to stand i tend to say i would cut back on mileage and start to address those things first

because running is the macro skill you need to address the micro elements of the running skill and many people say yeah we just run naturally well that's not true because 70 percent of runners giving up through injury that's the american college of sports medicine and so 70 percent of runners are getting injured we have to question that because if you look at dan lieberman's work right we know that we are literally born to run it's what shaped our physiology because that's what shaped the sapiens and everything around the way that a knee operates the pelvis the pelvic stability or core stability the head shape the neck position otherwise we would be a bigger brain stronger physiology sitting here we'd be neanderthals but we're not we're sapiens sitting here just we're a urbanite species of a sapien and so if that's the physiology that shaped us what is it that shaped the amazing running

arboreal animal that the sapien was that we've traversed the most incredible terrain and hostile environments to get us here today what's beneath that and beneath that is the ground positions the squatting so those guys aren't getting injured they can't afford to get injured because it would if going by that stat like 70% going out of injury that's like saying only 30% of us would be here today yeah do you know what i mean it's like that's powerful it's like well what what is it that they're doing differently that's why i always go to nature as the filter and going by ground risk position it's not just about the physiology you have to understand that even you go like five ten thousand years ago to yoga and ayurvedic traditions

they were building postures for what they were building it to be able to hold the posture within meditation deeper and deeper so you could go beyond that so that has a spiritual context to the shape so if we build a really strong ground practice it means that we can rest in position so there's not just a physical experiment there socially there's a there's an experience because it's demonstrating the appropriate behavior but also spiritually you get much more connected and in your body and it means if you go into deep meditation or you go into i don't know ceremonies or something else it. It means you have a strong vessel, a physiology that can sit in pose for hours, you know? So there's a fit.

And the same as a Tata Humana, they're running isn't, it's not about cardio. They're having a physical, social, and spiritual experience, you know? They're reaching profound states in running, which is kind of what I've started getting to myself in achieving through breath work and the right technique. It enables me to be more relaxed. yeah i love that thought it's a physical social and spiritual

experience and i guess one of the reasons i see running exploding these days is because people are craving that sort of you know that that that escape from the prison of modern life and modern living and i think running is a very accessible, or people perceive it to be a very accessible way of getting out there and just feeling free. And that statistic you mentioned really marries up with whenever I do a podcast with a runner. Loads of people love it, but a lot of people will also say, I'd love that feeling inspired, but I can't run. I've had to give up because of injury. And it really sort of fits. People are hearing this stuff they want to. And I can tell you my own story on that is that I had 10 years of chronic backache, maybe between the age of something like 21, 22 and 32, 33, something like that.

You know, time off work, couldn't lift up my kids, had to give up squash, had to give up all the things that I love doing. And so I never really ran because I couldn't because when I ran a bit it would really hurt and on my on the journey I went on to try and get to the roots cause of my back pain uh which took a long time I found a guy who uh I think you know Gary Gary Ward yeah and uh what the foot what the foot book exactly and uh I've had Gary on the podcast before one of the earlier episodes and he's basically Gary's Gary assessed me and he you know again I'm overly paraphrasing the complexity of what Gary found but he said he said wrong and look your right foot isn't working properly it's sort of in many ways it's gone to sleep and we need to get your right foot working properly and when we do I think that's

going to have a significant impact on your back okay absolutely and i would do five minutes a day on these exercises he taught me and instantaneously i could feel my back loosening up and so i've been through a whole rehab period off that but i haven't had back pain now for years i will now lift sofas tables i i don't have to manage my back pain anymore i know it's gone i know um you know there was a mechanical component there was also an emotional component because it got to a chronic phase right yeah for sure and you know we can always explore that but the point i wanted to make is that i know what it's like to be injured not be able to go out and enjoy these things and since i've started to get in touch with my feet again right i now can re-engage in all the activities I want. I can now go and run.

And I'm like, wow, I love running. And I never used to because I never could do it. But now I feel the freedom you get from running. You know, obviously we were together at the weekend in Devon when I didn't just run, I did a swim run event for the first time, which again, I've just got this new found confidence in my body to go, you know what? I feel strong. Yes, I've never been in open water before. Yes, I've never swum those distances before. I've never ran those distances before, but you know what? I kind of trust my body now. So let's just go and see what I'm made of. And so I just want, I wanted to share that. So people listening to this, you think they can't run, there may well be a way back and i think these ground living postures that

you're talking about and relearning how to squat is an important one um there's so much time i want to talk let's go into let's go into feet because we've just been talking about feet so rewilding the feet is it's just as equally as important as ground rest positions and then there's one more which is hanging for me so between those three systems that's how i get people back into running it's not even talk about running i'll just go through ground rest position so how important are the feet well they're the base of support aren't they for standing walking running lifting climbing even um balancing so it's a bit like i guess it's a bit like if you think about your car you would know you would need good tires and good wheels because without them it doesn't matter how good the engine

is you know if you've got lopsided tires or they're not if your balancing's out or something's out you feel it immediately in the steering wheel right um so yeah 26 bones 33 joints over 100 muscles tendons and ligaments in the feet right so then there's up to 200 000 receptors in there feeding information back to your movement brain to make you super efficient and minimize the risk of injury so going back to that kinetics and kinematics we're receiving information from the environment for our feet you know and that enables your movement brain to write make the right calculation so one might be posture yeah great to have you could work on an amazing posture then but then put a huge amount of rubber underneath you and that dumbs down the information

that you receive from the environment so you no longer get the signal to tell you the areas of your feet you're even standing on um so there's specific loading points in in the feet as well which are designed for body weight and certain areas that are designed more for balance so we can break the foot down like that as well um so dudley morton did a lot of work around there and looked at specific loading points again in the evolution of the human foot so if you look at the big toe what I call what we call the great toe it's like four times denser and thicker than all the other toes so which one would be for load right okay the big toe right makes sense then you have the ball of the foot so Nicholas Romanoff

from Poe's method helped identify this ball of the foot and then also to minimize the amount of weight that we put through the heel but if you think of it you want kind of two-thirds of your weight in the front end of your foot and a third behind when you're standing and if you can tune into that that's great if you're wearing a heel behind you you're messing with that whole situation but also you're messing with the ankle joint how it responds to the information it's getting from the base of support that then means the knee is affected the hip is affected so just by having a really solid foundation of the foot with the right signals coming back to the movement brain we can create ankle mobility then we can have knee

stability then we can have hip mobility then we can have pelvic stability then we can have thoracal mobility and then we can have neck scapula stability but it all starts with the foot starts with the feet so we've got people intervening with a massive plug word and it come in the gyms core stability you've got work on your core and i had a pilates studio i recognized it we teach people just how to strengthen their core but what's the point in strengthening someone's core if they don't have any hip mobility or ankle function or thoracal mobility because the moment they get off the exercise they're just as weak so the idea is to again address the way that the feet behave because that information has a massive impact on how the brain behaves with movement and again you minimize the risk of injury and you're more efficient so from

a survival perspective that's what enables the great running species and movement species of today is the fact they get the appropriate signals from their environment so they can create the right action within that environment and if you dumb that down by putting any i think it's anything above four millimeters between you and the earth you start to dumb down the information that your brain receives which is incredible and that's just that but then when you start to wear footwear that's narrow in the toe box it then creates extra an extra shape something else changes within the foot the big toe drifts over and you can no longer recognize that the big toe which is four times denser and thicker than all the other toes you can't recognize it as a

lever or a pivoting component therefore the foot starts to roll and we great gain something new and when you understand the evolution of the foot you're growing like it's almost like a gorilla toe that's the bunion right yeah it's growing something else because you've lost perception of where the big toe should be as its main support leverage pivoting point which then enables the ankle to collapse so we have this prescription that comes in oh yeah i've got flat feet well actually you don't have flat feet you just have a collapsed ankle and your big toes off so let's rewild the feet so i i just go through a series of exercises for feet which helps enable the feet to get back into the appropriate shape for you to create the appropriate amazing postures that should be developed above it so for people who listen to this you think that could be um

affecting them are you saying that in every case or or in many cases or you know all is not lost even if you have spent 35 years in sole shoes and you're getting injuries and your feet are flat and you've been told you have to wear an insole are you saying there is still hope your body can still adapt and you can get a lot of it back absolutely i'm going to use an example i talk about this guy a lot it probably drives him nuts but he's now 78 his name is yahudi gordon so he was um he was a pioneer of the active birthing movement so natural birthing he almost rewilded childbirth right for instance um so he came to me um how many when he was 72 six years ago and he said i really love i love to learn how to walk and i was like 72 i want to learn how to walk right it's interesting okay okay so let's hop

up on the treadmill and then i on the treadmill i can then record the guy from a side profile not from the front not from behind and that's the podiatry trick if i record someone from behind and i haven't addressed their posture they're going to be loading areas of feet they're not designed to because the head position alone the head how much the head weigh yeah i can't remember but it's about about 5.5 kilos right it's a huge weight when you actually give someone 5.5 kilos oh my god this is huge and the further forward it goes the further forward you stride the further forward you stride the more you supinate naturally and then the more you over pronate so you over supinate and over pronate because the head position is forward so don't go recording people from behind or don't record yourself from behind record from this from

the side and then you can see where the head position is in relation to the hip so i want to be able to draw a plumb line head chest hip and then the foot underneath almost and you watch if the head position's forward the foot just goes way out more forward and forward and forward so for this guy 72 he was crumpled up stooped and again massive massive strike foot going way forward huge supination pronation okay so let's have a look so and then we went through rewilding feet um ground living so ground resting positions for a 72 year old went all the way through it through kneeling started off culturing in the kneel first then single leg kneeling then double leg kneeling and then eventually got to the squat and he's now squatting so he sets his timer for 30 minutes a day

incrementally five minutes here six minutes there whatever his timer for 30 minutes a day incrementally five minutes here six minutes there whatever and builds his 30 minutes like the edo portal squat challenge right and then he can build 30 minutes a day and then it builds into a new habit he then straight away it was footwear footwear had to go out right and he's doing vivo barefoot right we're all familiar with vivo right yeah everyone knows on this podcast exactly and we're on the big vivo event this weekend and so straight away it's vivos for him so he now wears vivos the whole time doesn't own another pair of shoes um from ground rest positions we went into hanging and hanging then through hanging positions because you have to understand that we're talking about sapiens which is 270 000 years let's say

but underneath it all we're arboreal as well so we've got practices that go way back so if you believe in evolution there's that 35 million years somewhere if you climb down the phylogenic tree you understand we had amazing brachiating abilities we were hanging swinging climbing so when you start to incorporate those again it enables you to get back to the wrist the elbow and the shoulder and scapular components of well we have that in us we're brachiating apes just the same we still have the same capabilities we just we have the amnesia again and then that enables the rib cage to lift and when i get the rib cage up i can do all the stretching i like for the thoracic spine i've done it with people for years and years and years only when i started to use hanging it was like wow okay now they're getting the strength

to hold it there this isn't about the flexibility everyone bangs on about flexibility but you need flexibility and strength that kind of comes in with mobility and strength and conditioning so i could then strength conditioning this guy yahoodi's posture through hanging doing active arches and then into bent arm strengths he's now physically much stronger through that process that 72 year old has now climbed everest base camp um bhutan um mount kenya yeah he's just he's just wow so his morning looks like and we've done I've done a whole natural lifestyle number on him so he's slept in an air purified room um has his office set up with a bar so he can walk through hang on the bar he has a mat that he can squat on to kneel and then he does his meditation does his breath work ask the cards in

the morning gets the tarot cards out and then he has a standing desk where he operates at squats and stands squats and stands does an amazing smoothie of probiotic prebiotic symbiotics and then walks down to the tube in his vivos people say ah would you like a seat he goes no no no no and he hangs on the bar above and he hangs while the tube's moving the tube stops doors open he squats then he does a bit of breath work you understand so he's he's basically become at the age of 78 an opportunist so he's finding ways of living again that are enabling him as a 78 year old to thrive and when he meets people that have known him for years and years they're like wow man what's going on you look

amazing and it's because he carries himself better. He sleeps better. Physically, it's just a better being, you know? So he's removing what I would say, again, going back into suffering. So if we look at even just the rest positions again, you think about it, if movement is one of those things, if you remove movement, you get human suffering. If we're all sitting for eight hours a day ten hours a day we're suffering for eight to ten hours a day you know you know if your feet are in a shoe that's compromising and as in the environment the petri dish of the of the foot is a compromising shoe cells behave in two ways bruce lipton right you have growth and you have protection right so let's say we fill our petri dish up with um nature right so we're gonna have a natural

footbed for the foot to behave how it should do we're gonna put ground rest positions in there we're gonna put the appropriate amount of sleep in there lighting everything else that feeds that set that dish you're gonna get a growth promoting state if i go into a petri dish and i say right here's a pair of compromising shoes here's a chair here's really bright lighting here's some inflammatory food groups i'm gonna get protection you you know? So do we need to redefine the pet tradition in modern life? Is that the problem? We're saying that the environment determines our behaviour, right? So if that is your environment, you work in an office for eight hours a day, you have to commute and sit down let's say let's say you you drive to work right you know how much difference is this stuff going to make when you

have to live in that environment and and i guess the follow-on question to that is what if someone's listening to this and go tony that sounds great uh what you're doing what your 72 year old buddy has done well that's just too much for me. I, you know, has the train already left the station? Has culture moved on? Why are these things still relevant? And what would you say to someone who's listening to this, who's sceptical and says, it's too late, I can't do that into my life. Well, again, I'd say a 72 year old dude rocks up at my door

and look what he's doing now. He's a completely empowered being because underneath it, innately again, we're wild, we're connected and we're empowered beings, right? It's just something happens along the way. and i have my perception of schooling and stuff like that but it's never too late it can't be because all you do again you just get the stuff from the petri dish and you just put more growth promoting things in there but they have to be small steps

because if you just go right okay here's your i'm going to put all this stuff i'm going to put it in there and it's just too overwhelming and what happens is then we get an emotional response and we all know what happens when we get an emotional response. We turn into the first six years of our life, right? And then that might mean, oh, I need the four-year-old sugars or the two-year-old something behavior comes in. We operate at the two-year-old or four-year-old or five-year-old or six-year-old level. So it's never too late. And it's also, you just have to look at the environments differently. And I say, try and become more of an opportunist, right? So it can be the tube, right? I can choose to sit, right? But I'm going to, if I have an office environment and my HR department don't

like the idea of standing desks, right? And they don't like the idea of you moving around too much. Don't sit on the tube because you're going to be sitting down for eight hours, right? That's what, you have a choice there. You make a choice choice between this is the old self and this is this is the compromise old self in this petri dish and this is me going to be go return back to my wild innate empowered state right because we're born with that naturally so how do i do that okay simple things right can be okay here's here's an opportunity we're doing a podcast now i can be sitting or i can be kneeling i know that kneeling is nourishing the ankle the knee and the hip right and guys for those of you listening on audio we are recording this on video you can check it on youtube or my facebook page or on instagram i actually it's funny you say that because i

if i could squat for this entire conversation i would have exactly but i can't yet i'm working towards it so maybe if we redo this in a couple of years i might be able to but i've noticed that you're not sitting on that chair you're making a choice to nourish your body with vitamin movement and the ways you want to and the more and the more you just look at these little up those the better you feel and then the better you feel you go okay i'm gonna have a go at this so you could even say right for this month alone what are the physical needs so let's look at the physical human needs, right? You have movement, you have sleep, you have rest, you have play, you have food, you have sunlight, you have air, right? Sex, whatever. Right, let me get,

let me work on one of those a month, right? Let's work on movement this month. Let me work on empowering myself. I'm going to choose to, and it's choose, you choose to do this. I'm going to choose to sit less. Or I have Tuesday. I blog about a Tuesday. It's Tuesday. Morning peeps. It's that wonderful day of the week. It's Tuesday, right? It's the day where you make wonderful choices. Choose wisely, right? We're known as the sapien means wise. Let's be wise in our choice. So let's say I'm going to choose. I'm going to have a picture in my mind of how I want to be. And I'm going to pick Tuesday to behave like that. I'm going to choose how it is I want to be. And time you do it you'll think oh my god it feels

amazing and then when it starts to do it starts to unravel and unravel into every day yeah every hour suddenly you'll look for more nourishing things that are going to help nourish physically socially and spiritually to remove your suffering I did a talk in um Santander asset management team right so they brought the whole team around so this is Tony Rood and I've deliberately wore a suit so people could see it was relatable and a man bun then so you can imagine it would have been if I wasn't wearing a suit like this man bun hippie had rocked up and I wore my office evivos right because again that's not about what you're running it's about what you live in in theory right then each individual person on that

floor after my tour I went around to see them all and i just said right these are the things that you can do within this environment so you can slide your chair out you can hold your desk you can squat you can set a timer every 25 minutes ding timer goes off squat at your desk how long for just do three or four squats just something to get movement back in okay and to go into like allow it again like we discussed earlier allow the heel to come up so you're not you're not looking to be really strict it's just hold the edge of the table keep your chest your head up and squat down allowing your heel to come up little tiny little bounce at the bottom and then stand up again and then do that maybe five reps and then take a walk from one end of the office to the other get back to your desk

buy something living for your desk buy a piece really really simple to look after you don't have to walk you water them every 14 days right you can even go away for two weeks on holiday and come back they're still they're still all right they might be a bit unhappy with you but a little bit more till they pick up again the other thing was right okay you're working late who's working late oh i'm working like amber glasses we just talked about amber glasses on here right so we know that through various studies now that lighting is playing a key factor in in suppressing melatonin we also know that melatonin then has links to anti it's an antioxidant it plays its role in apoptosis which is this ability to transfer unhealthy cells into healthy cells is needed for that so then we can

look at cancer there's other incredible stuff there where we could say it's petri dish one two and three but they did a study of night shift workers in a simulated night shift with loads of blue light they did night shift workers in the same blue light but wearing amber glasses and they did a sleep study of people in a dark room they then did their melatonin test in the morning. The first group that was in blue light with no glasses, zero melatonin, really low levels. Group two, or let's call group two the sleep one in a dark chamber of sleep, high levels of melatonin. And group three, still the night shift workers,

but in a blue light experiment, but with amber glasses, had the same levels of melatonin as group two that were in the dark. So if you're having to work late, again, you can't expect your whole floor to install circadian lighting we're getting there we're not just not there yet um so i would say take the responsibility yourself for your own area and if you want a growth promoting area at work work on your movement work on the air quality and work on the lighting um if you're a photographer i, it's very difficult to play around with that. So just be just, yeah, it's not going to happen. And then the other one is just breathing. So things like getting into a parasympathetic state of breath. So you can do a nasal in breath,

so breathing in for say four seconds through the nose and then do an out breath for eight seconds. If that's too long for you, go to a three and six rhythm the key is rhythm here so you could do box breathing you could do a three three three three inhale hold exhale hold you know around a box and think of a box there or just do it yeah and inhale double up on the length of the out breath but it's rhythm and it needs to be like a three minute round of breath that to really drop into what is parasympathetic which is rest and digest so you're saying three minutes three minutes yeah to get into that state and also if you have um if you have kids this is what we do because we like to mindfully eat so we look at how the um rather than saying grace or something like that we just go through things like breath work again before dinner time so so because rest and digest means that you're going into digestion so if you're in the office again

it's about you're about to consume something build a relationship with the food as well because you could take that into the natural instance would be foraging i have a relationship to the environment i have a relationship to the food the sensory information it prepares my enzymes my whole digestive system compare that to a sandwich in a packet i have a relationship to the food, the sensory information. It prepares my enzymes, my whole digestive system. Compare that to a sandwich in a packet. I have no relationship to it and I wolf it down in seconds. So breath work and just a mindful practice around eating will assist your digestion. Why is that important? Because that's how we get the nutrients or the wealth of that food group to the health, to cells you know i could have the most incredible diet right but i could have a really terrible digestion and you know i'm not

absorbing anything so the people with a really poor diet but great digestive system are probably better off you know i think there's such a key point and um a lot of the talks i've given recently i've said that you know i explained the whole stress response explained that actually um you know we are not designed to eat in that sort of stressed out state yet many of us are eating on the go we're checking our emails at the same time we're rushing around and eating our healthy lunch in a very sub-optimal state and I've one thing I've discovered in clinical practice over the last few years is sometimes when people think they are reacting to foods they might be of course but in many cases i found that when i teach them some relaxation techniques before they

eat and they're eating in a much more relaxed state rather than a stress state those reactions go away so the question is was it the food probably not it was it was the fact that you were eating in a state where your body is not designed to eat. So you can't assimilate, can you, with the food? Yeah. So if we just dive in there a second. So you and your family, you, your wife and your kids, obviously you don't have any chairs at home. We will go back to that at some point. I think that's super interesting for people. But you're about to consume your evening meal, talk me through that what happens in the riddle household at dinner time um it often depends on how to lula is because she might be on the table at that stage how was to lula to lose now three so let's put some um contacts here how old are

your kids so they're now nine seven and three and then we have a new baby on the way katherine's now 22 weeks congratulations yeah man fantastic exciting okay so at the moment three if five of you sitting around for dinner yeah so just i'm really keen for people who are listening this to some of what you promote might be perceived as being quite extreme right but i don't think it is i actually think there's so much we can all learn from it so that's why i'd love to go through like a sample dinner time to see if people can learn something from it and start to apply some of those principles if not all of them in their own life yes we because we don't of course we don't sit so again we can take sitting into that same model of suffering which we've covered so we remove the suffering so

therefore the organism shouldn't be so stressed anyway because sitting is stressful for the organism because we're affecting our physiology although i'm just going to add there that if you have never squatted for and you're used to your whole life um sitting in a chair if you suddenly go from that to like squatting for your dinner of course it's going to be more stressful it's going to be more stressful yeah achy so just play with it so there's there's again there's a hundred different rest positions so the squat is just one we there's i'm kneeling now so there's double leg kneeling, single leg, and we can just roll out different rest positions. And you'll often see that.

So if you set up like a hyperlapse of my family, you'd see the kids are just from one position to the next. They're never in a position for too long. So their physiology gets a signal, their mind gets a signal, it's a bit uncomfortable now, I need to move, which doesn't necessarily happen in a chair right we can be we can just go off cerebral world for eight hours right yeah um so you often get that signal so they will that's what will happen then the foot say for instance the food is in front of us we will sit and we will honor the

plants and um the environment and we breathe and we just respect the food group what do you do with this breathing um again just a simple three second in six seconds out or four seconds in eight seconds out so breathing in through the nose will help you reach the lower lungs as well uh vasodilation as well because there's nitric oxide through the nose how long are you doing that for roughly before just a three just a three minute process of just sitting and just concentrating what we're about to consume so i love that because that actually has real practical take home for someone listening who maybe doesn't feel ready yet for a squat or a rest position so you can of course sit in a chair and just breathe of course so i think that's a very practical take

home do like you're saying three minutes is ideal really to really tap in. I think really drop in because it gives you the rhythm that you need. But also, I mean, there's lots of studies around breath and it seems to be, there's certain things like nasal breathing, key factor to parasympathetic breathing, box breathing works,

this doubling up on the out breath. And there's a period of time that enables you to drop in. Now sitting, if you are going to sit, I just, at least honor posture while you're there so think about lifting your rib cage because this is about breathing right and the rib cage obviously the lungs are sitting underneath this you want your lungs to operate

their full potential start thinking about being more upright and lifting the chest and your rib cage as as you say that i actually am changing my position it's amazing you hear that and it makes me just sit up a bit more and it's just and it by having a ritual you see at dinner time it just changes things it gets you back in the body again and it's about what you're receiving we're all receiving aren't we so i think it's nice just to spend a moment to just have a relationship more with the food that you're about to receive you know yeah and also take time so i'm mindful of it myself because i'm ex-military and it used to be this thing where you just go into they call it the scoff house right i mean that's that just gives

you an idea that's the dinner hall and it's literally that people just go in and eat because they have a minimal amount of time they have to be back out on parade or doing something else in basic training you have this quick turnaround it's terrible relationship with food literally just wolfing food down and it is wolfing that's the thing um and so for me i really had to work on that to be a better example for the kids and then it's about chewing so chew your food until it becomes a liquid so the key is i think i heard what was it um chew chew your liquids yeah and um swallow your and and and drink your solids you know so you're basically chewing your solids until they become a drink yeah and um swallow your and and and drink your solids you know so you're basically chewing your solids till they become a drink yeah and yet your smoothies and your juices chew them so you get the

digestive enzymes going again otherwise it's what are you absorbing you've got some i've just gone through i've just made this incredible smoothie this morning i've put banana avocado pak choi celery maca spirulina all these things in it. And I just neck it. It's about, again, the relationship between what it is you're putting in your body. I think it's such a great, great point. And I've got to say, that's the one I struggle with the most. I think my whole life I've wolfed down foods. The last six, seven years have been a voyage of discovery for me. I've changed so many aspects of my entire lifestyle but the one thing i still struggle with is eating fast and how do i know this because i see my son doing exactly the same thing and it kills me because i know i've modeled this i know exactly i know i've modeled this

behavior and that he's just mimicking what he's seen and i'm trying to get him to slow down but i'm thinking well you know he's not going to do that because all he sees is you wolf down your food he's not listening he needs to see yeah but but again look i'm not i used to beat myself up about this and um you know like you you were sort of a lunacy right at the start you know about personal growth as i do more work on myself the more i realize actually i'm doing the best that i can um there's many great examples i hope that i've set him that happens to not be one of them but you know what we're not perfect we're all imperfect and yes I wish I hadn't conditioned him to do that but I'm going to try my

best to first of all work on myself and then hopefully showcase to him that there's a different way of doing this um my daughter is so good at doing this she is so mindful when she eats she always is there for like she eats really slowly she chews everything and i watch her i think wow you know that's she's she just naturally is doing that despite her father being a pretty poor example of that one thing i i must say i do um because i i sort of i really do see more and more that we can talk about personal choices and behaviors and i think that's great and i'm all for empowering people but that environment we're surrounding ourselves with makes you know really determines a lot of our choices so i love the fact that because you don't

have chairs at home you can't sit in a chair right so automatically you're going to have to find other solutions um my kids rarely rarely watch television it's not just not something that we you know in fact we're thinking of getting rid of the telly we removed ours but but they do occasionally but the deal i make with them is okay you can watch as long as you're squatting yeah nice so brilliant yeah and it and it works because they're like okay you know daddy i will squat when i'm watching so here's the thing one of my mates came around so that's a bit harsh isn't it i said mate that's not harsh at all they can squat perfectly you know my son can drop in a squat he can sit there for no problem at all I said I'm actually not doing anything harmful to

him I'm not punishing him I'm actually I think I'm helping him because he's like gets to do what he wants to do but he's also squatting there for 20 minutes while he's doing it well it's the reverse of harmful I think I sat down with Rich and Rich Roll. So we did a podcast, didn't we? And we were talking about ground living. Yeah. And he said, oh, your kids are going to need therapy when they're older. And I thought, well, actually, it's almost like this.

To think about it, it's actually the reverse in a way, because you're basically just their physical, social, spiritual needs again. If you align it more with nature, the less suffering we have, right right so if you get back in the body and you get back in the physical vessel when you become a stronger being then in theory emotionally you have you're more connected right so it's again i think with i think with television you bang on there i think if you know if you want to watch a film and a movie why not squat when you're not squat or not even squat you again there's a hundred rest positions just choose them and just go see how many you can do i quite like that with the kids let's see how many of these we can practice you know what i'll often

do and and um is like this wall here uh if we are watching a film as a family which again is pretty rare but if we are i can't maintain a squat without support for a long period of time so i'll often squat against the wall here so i'm still i've got my heels on the ground i'm still but i'll be watching it against this wall and it's funny because there's a couple of things to explore here one is what is a social norm so rich roll says to you uh your kids are gonna need therapy when they're older right and i get that because what they are doing is socially abnormal compared to the current norm it doesn't mean it's doesn't mean it's not optimal it's perceived as social extreme right it's a social extreme behavior

in in this environment exactly and and this is not the environment in which we as humans have evolved to function optimally which is one of the fundamental reasons why so many people are struggling with their health these days on many, many levels. But I think that the wider point here is how much can people constantly struggle and fight against an environment that is working against them? Okay, so I think the first stage is to remove struggle and fight

and just go with acceptance, right? This is where we're living. So we're living, we're an urban species, we're living in an urban environment. So again, what can I do within that environment to empower myself? So if I know, you know, some HR departments, they won't allow standing desks, right?

And for some people, even just a standing desk alone, if they have poor posture because they haven't been using ground rest positions it's just as detrimental you know you can sit with poor posture or you can stand with poor posture they're both just about so it's just it's just having templates again and again there's so much we can do in rather than seeing it as battling and i think it helps to travel as well and go around we lived in ibiza for a year right and other people are a floor culture there they're ground living you know our kids got to roam around pretty much naked the whole time it broke my heart coming back into london a little in a way because it's like that is okay on the heath is okay to take our tops off or is okay to do this and they would just be roaming free in Ibiza so of course there's there's a change that occurs culturally wherever we go can I just clarify that point did you

move to Ibiza so that the way that you and your family choose to live would be easier and more acceptable what it there was many things we wanted to basically get in a way yes because we we were living in Windsor and we had this amazing setup this beautiful place that our little cottages on a green massive willow tree in the middle and the kids would just roam we had the doors open they just run in and out and that was that was incredible because it gave them freedom just the same we're close to nature um but it was different the community was different right so we was we had again we were socially extreme because we had no chairs and this and that and kids weren't eating the same food groups

as the other kids and i know about female and that you know there was no gluten no sugar no dairy were plant-based and people were like who are these nutcases that guy's got a man bun you know and so we just said you know let's we knew people in ibiza and we've been going over there a lot and it was like okay this is a great setup for us there's a good community and good vibe over there but London reeled me back in and part of this conversation as well is that London's reeled me back in I'm working with a developer and I'm doing like a co-working wellness well-being lifestyle build so it's about bringing as much of that physical social spiritual needs into a building as possible so that so that we can work on changing the template of the office

environment yeah because it has to be that we look at buildings from a from a sustainability perspective as well but just understanding that if you're in charge of the building it's your build or you're you're a developer we need to be we need to raising the game because again we're affecting people's health here so if we can basically create environments that people go into and rather than ram wellness down their neck i don't want to create a space like that we wanted to create a space where you just go and you go oh my god i feel well in here this is amazing so we're creating like gardens that you walk through to get into the building and then playing with movement and air quality and lighting and all kinds of things to try and get as many physical needs met.

But then we want to build a community in there because it's about social needs as well. And then we know that once you get physical, social, spiritual, it's the spiritual needs then that will come through that because we're bringing in sound healing and meditation and yin practices rather than high intensity. I want low intensity. There's enough high intensity in the world.

So I'm just going to try and get people to understand how to breathe again. So just by, again, it takes time, but it is shifting. There's more and more happening in that space. It reminds me a lot of the chat I had with Dan Boettner, who's studied all the Blue Zones. The Blue Zones, blue zones amazing yeah release that episode just a couple of weeks ago um feedback's just been absolutely incredible because um you know he has this phrase he said in the blue zones people are not pursuing health health ensues from the environments in which they're in yeah it's a symptom exactly and it's you know if we create those environments that you're trying to do with office space and you know my my big passion is how can we do this with schools so that kids

from that young age are not shoved in chairs all day and not losing some of their innate um you know biomechanical functionalities or whatever they're not losing that and having to you know like at my age i'm trying to relearn how to squat you bet your bottom dollar when i was six i could squat absolutely fine yeah spending hours you know trying to do that so i i do think you know changing that environment is important i did i went out to i went out to beadale school to their dunn any which is like the lower years and um amazing space so you're amazing it's out by petersfield it's incredible it was it was basically at one stage it was it was a school that's way ahead of the game right and so i arrive and it's a new um head and she contacted me said i would you like to come out and have a meeting and so i go out and i arrive and it's beautiful settings and we're talking for what must be two hours and

i'm looking around i haven't seen a child yet he's got this amazing info it's a beautiful day it's so sunny and it's incredible grounds and they could grow stuff there so while they're in the classroom and i said well you know first seven years of life you know let's not let's not let's not ram on the intellectual brain let's enable them to just see this amazing environment become reconnected with nature because you and i've i've had to go through a rewilding process i've had to reconnect and i have to learn how to become empowered and you know lovely empowered t-shirts what we all love wearing but the kids have that so it's it's almost our responsibility to create school environments and work environments and home environments that help nurture that you know yeah and that's that's where it's at for me it's just about again that can

happen in the school environment work environment or the home environment yeah and it's out of your hands really if it's the school environment but that's if people are listening in it's the schools that need to challenge it as something so i did a post um uh interview with the outdoor journal and they did like a four-part series with me and the last one was about children and education and i was in a way this unfortunately the system's almost broken right because in five to ten years time where are we going to be as a species with tech improving the way it is yeah um we have to basically we have to have that conversation of what are we preparing the kids for you know and how do we create environments

that keep nurturing those innate abilities right how do we enable environments that keep nurturing those innate abilities, right? How do we enable them to understand what their physical, social, spiritual needs are so that they don't have to sit down and have a podcast like this to understand how to do it, you know? But it takes, it's our generation, we have to take on the responsibility to be the change. And it sounds so cliche, this be the change, but it is. It's literally just by your example and again don't let that be overwhelming that might mean anything you know yeah that could be anything it could be any little small change that you can think of that will make you a better human today will have an impact in your child's home the child's environment you know

what they're observing yeah and it's all about the observations the observations that you make in those first years become the templates for the rest of your life yeah so if those observations have been made and they're compromising yeah you might have they might have to reconnect when they're older but you know what i had to reconnect so it doesn't be any problem you know and part of it's been an incredible journey learning how to reconnect and rewild and become empowered i think that's a reassuring thing because the hardest thing as a parent is to hear oh the other years are important you know six first six years of life that's what the program and gets laid down oh no what have i done you know i'm getting empowered now and my kids are already nine or ten you hear this all the time i feel the same but the reality is you

know what it's gonna happen you're not gonna be perfect and actually if kids have to relearn it when they get older well so be it then they have to as you say you you're doing it i'm in the process of doing that it's not necessarily all bad it can be you know it's just part of that journey right yeah we see it as doom and gloom but you know we're living in an amazing time right now right i mean we're going down this path of being information rich and experience poor but the information's there right and then it's up for us to go out and experience it so we are living in an incredible time our parents didn't have what we have now right no you know they didn't have the ability to access what they had and they're also walking around with like post-traumatic stress disorder from wars and stuff you know so we're we're unraveling all that while we're at it

yeah no you've given us loads of practical take-homes that you've already offered for people you know they're these resting positions that you know that a lot of these exist on tony's instagram so you can see them there well you know if there's any links i'll definitely link them in the show notes there's you know a daily practice if i think you said a 30 minute squat aim aim to squat for 30 minutes a day is that you don't know it's again not because again it's overwhelming think of it like you set a timer 30 minutes and every time you get into the squat position whether that's with a heel support or even holding onto the table, anything that you can do to get into that rest position. Firstly, view what the template is for squatting. You know, have a look at an image, Google squatting and resting squatting. And then you accumulate 30 minutes in one day. So a 24 hour clock there,

you just have to find, accumulate 30 minutes within it that might mean a minute it could mean 30 seconds whatever's comfortable for now and then what happened is they all will stretch that i've got people just squatting for 30 minutes no problem now but they started off with a minute two minutes here three minutes there and it grows and grows and grows until it becomes the new habit and then you go back to you know how you see it's amazing with kids we were saying yeah then they just suddenly drop into a squat and you're like wow okay and then they just get back and they move on then they squat again you get back to that state because it's it just again it's innate right it's a name and then that will by default improve i'm guessing your walking gates or your running gate it's just automatically going to start to improve yes and it's a micro

element of it so those macro skills of standing walking running anything anything you want to an application that you want to put into the gym it will enhance it so i have um you know a pool of clients with yogis and martial artists that come and see me and they're they they they were injured in the knee and in the pelvis right so they're trying to put through very ancient disciplines through a modern sedentary posture so you could even take rewilding back even just to 5 000 10 000 years ago we know that we weren't a chair-sitting culture so that's what i have to do with those guys it's just getting them back to understanding the ground practices that those masters of those amazing disciplines

were performing you know that's rewilding you're still taking them back it's not going back 200 000 years but we need the template of 200 000 years to understand others that's why that's what the squat is that's his origins and then if i want to put in any yoga practice or any martial art practice i have to look at where those originated from and what's the difference between that culture and where i'm at now right so that's how you heal a knee basically the knees the most it's incredible it can cope with like 500 pounds of pressure it's insane the level of knee injuries i see coming in the door once i just get three to squat back in they miraculously just unravel and they're healthy again you can believe that the knees in between the foot and the hip isn't it and the knees almost takes a strain of what's

going on at the foot or the hip you sort those out exactly and then it's happy and then they go back to their practices and guess what everything gets ramped up the yoga practice improves and so does the martial art practice so imagine what that's going to do to just you know if you want to take a walk down the shops or yeah you know go for a little park run you know i mentioned earlier on that my experience with back pain and it's incredible for me that my progression to sort of barefoot living as it were, and you've got to understand that culturally, I grew up in a barefoot household. So as a lot of people know, Asian families, we don't, certainly my culture, you don't tend to wear shoes in the house. It's just, you always take your shoes off before you come in. It's just how I've always lived. So for me, that's norm. You

saw when you came in today, the shoes are outside because we don't wear shoes in come in. It's just how I've always lived. So for me, that's norm. You know, you saw when you came in today, you know, it's, the shoes are outside because we don't wear shoes in the house. It's just not something we do. So I have been barefoot a lot in my life, I guess, but I have also worn cushioned shoes. But here's what happened. As Gary sort of helped me wake up my right foot, as it were, I liked the way that felt. And then when I would go into my shoes, I'd be like, oh, I can't really feel my foot anymore. So the natural progression for me then was to go, well, I sort of want footwear that allows me to feel my foot. And there are a few barefoot brands there that I found, but actually because I'm so tall and I'm a UK size 13, most of them didn't make a UK 13. And that's how I found Viva Barefoot actually, is that they made a UK 13 and that's how I found Viva Barefoot actually is that they made a UK 13 and I bought a pair of shoes wore them I thought I feel like myself I feel like when I'm walking I can feel

my foot moving and over a couple years I started to progress you know it was it was initially it was my sports shoes but but within two years every single shoe that I wear is a Viva Barefoot shoe because I love the way that I feel in them. And then what would happen is that I remember once I went to a wedding, right? And I thought, oh yeah, I've got to be smart at a wedding. And I don't really have proper smart vivos at the time. So I wore some old smart shoes that I had, probably worn them for about six, seven hours. At the end of the day, my hip was aching. I felt my gaits was different as I was walking. And I thought, hold on a minute, Rangan, right? Enough's enough. You know, you've

suffered for years. I don't care if it's a wedding or anything else. I am not wearing heel shoes anymore. Got rid of them. And thankfully, I now have got some Vivo smart shoes that I can wear with the suit. But the point is for me, I'm not doing that because someone told me to do it or someone lectured me to do it. Gary didn't even tell me to do that. I just started to discover for myself, oh, I like feeling my feet. I like feeling the move. So the natural progression for me was to go down that route.

So I think barefoot living is also something that people can probably learn a little bit. If it comes down to that petri dish thing and it's the home environment, it's often where I start people on their barefoot things. Just remove the shoes when you're at home. Just walk around the home barefoot. And it's always surprising the reaction because it's, oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, all right. And it's this thing about just taking shoes off and actually witnessing that you have feet.

I did a workshop for this company called busy buttons like a creative group yeah and they coach kids basically and they said would you like to come in and do a rewilding workshop and i was like yeah i'd love to okay so we they took them out to virginia water no saville gardens beautiful park and so we all sat down in a circle and i got all the kids around in the circle and i started taking through breath work and i said okay i want you to close your eyes kids and i want you to tell me what tell me what listen and tune into nature what you can hear and one of them went a lion i can hear a lion okay it's time to move on okay everyone stand up i just want you to do this just

take your shoes and socks off and they were all really alarmed what we've got to take it what we're on we're standing on the ground. I was like, just trust me on this. Just take your shoes and socks off. And they took their shoes and socks off and they went off. They were just screaming, running, just like they'd been literally let out of a cage. It was incredible to witness.

And the guys, Leon and Luella, who run Busy Buttons, were like, Tony, what are we going to do with the next? I said, we're not. We're just going to observe them. Just have a look at our amazing work. This is it. It's done. That that's all they needed that's almost how disconnected we are so simple little things like around the home definitely just take the shoes off and and just experience the carpet at least you know no no i love it i absolutely love it again another

great take-home tip for people culturally is it is there isn't it it's like we were saying like you had the sitting culture it can be a squatting culture it can be a ground living culture it can be footwear off culture just again it's just that they're much more aligned with how it would be in nature yeah it is incredible and you know it's i i think one of the reasons i i resonate with your work so much is i have a tendency to extremes myself not with my patients i'm always quite measured with my patients and when i'm trying to help them i will say small changes but when i when myself i often go all in um so for example i would absolutely love to get rid of all chairs in this house i because i know what that will do is although i find it hard at the start i will skill up it will force me to

skill up and in no time at all within two or three months i know that'll be my new norm and it will mean yes maybe i'm sitting on a train or i'm sitting in an office somewhere but when i'm at home i will have to get better at that so here's the problem um you know i like many people i've got a partner so my wife doesn't share the same viewpoint on this as I do in the sense that she's like, yeah, I get it, but it's just a bit weird. And what about when my, or your parents come over, you know, we need to have chairs for people. I said, yeah, okay, fair enough.

Well, maybe we'll keep some, but maybe our dining table can be low down and we can always squat there. And so I guess what I'm asking, it's not, it's a slightly selfish question, I guess, but I'm hoping the listeners will get something for us. It's loaded. It's loaded not it's a slightly selfish question yeah I guess but I'm hoping the listeners will get something it's loaded it's a loaded question you know what would you say to people or you know to my wife uh when they're sort of um expressing let's say a a reluctance to go all in on something like this have you got any advice um I take I mean you're doing you're doing best steps already just I'd get people off the sofa at least and just if you're watching if you're doing a netflix binge

take it down to the ground yeah and just see that actually you know i'm going oh hang on i'm going to pilates i'm going to yoga i'm going to all these things why am i doing it uh it's because maybe to help my posture but the reality is if you don't sit so much and you put stuff on the ground you don't necessarily have to go and do those things yeah again yoga doesn't exist in nature right neither does pilates but they have the most incredible postures and i think from a parenting point of view do do i do i want my child to be an amazing upright being and if i do i have to basically be the example so if if your partner doesn't agree with it i'd still be the change myself and be the behavior because you can't preach to people anyway you have to be the light right with it i'd still be the change myself and be the behavior because

you can't preach to people anyway you have to be the light right so if i want to be the beacon this big bright beacon it's just about behavior and we didn't always ground live it's just the kids got to i think four and two um before talula came along and i could see lola already we had trip trap chairs right now we'd already had no strollers we already had slings no car seats because we weren't driving we used to carry the kids everywhere so they had minimal sitting it was only really when it came to dinner times let's say right and i already could see lola's posture she started it started to go and again it's just gravity right and that c-shaped primate kicks in and i was oh i just can't believe this is happening yeah you know and and partly

because she's observed us sitting whereas talula and she had no no sitting furniture at all so even when it came to her playing with a doll's house she was like looking at the high chair like something animal object she had no idea what it was you know she could relate to the the bed and where on wardrobes but she't understand what a chair was. But the difference was with her is that she becomes so strong. She was not like a child learning to stand. She just stood and she was robust, solid, already climbing at like 12 months, rock climbing.

Just the motorcycle milestones unraveled a lot earlier. It's amazing to be able to witness that and see. For me, it was just profound. It was profundity there. So I think with the, again, with i just i observed it and i said you know i'm the i've created i'm creating this environment yeah so it's they they can't say we don't want chairs they it's my responsibility so i just said like katherine i'm done i don't want i just can't see this anymore these are my reasons what do you think? And I just laid it down. I said, look, this is the clients I see. These are the symptoms I see.

Why are we putting this on our kids? In theory, why are we injuring them? Because my clients come to see me have injuries due to sitting. I class them as injuries, you know? So I just, there was no excuse. But it makes sense you saying that. It's not judgmental. You're not having to go to people.

You're on one level, the way in which you see the human body. They are injuries. They are human beings in suffering. And it's integrity for me. I just, it just, I couldn't, I had a practice. And then I ended up closing my Pilates studio for the very same reason. Yeah, it's about integrity. You know, people would come in, the same symptoms.

And I can't heal them in the Pilates studio because that's not about that. And they put the same compromising footwear on to get back to their car so in theory by the time they got back to the car they all had exactly the same ones they walked in with i just give them an hour of movement and therapy rather than movement therapy and the movement therapy exists actually outside the pilates studio outside the physio practice outside everywhere else it can happen in the home it just means just even if you keep your dining room table and chairs just minimize it just go onto the ground do a netflix binge in a box fit box set you know box set in a shin box set well what netflix can now become or a film a family film session can now

become a movement session really because it's like okay what you know if you guys have been doing it on like say on a friday evening after school or on a saturday whatever do it but do it ground living and then suddenly you're still having that same you know socially normal experience but actually doing it a slightly different way and you're working on feeding your body that natural movement so it is it is inspiring yes okay look if you eat organic food right have organic movement you know if you you know breathe organic air you have organic sleep is that's that's another way of looking at it it's just it's understanding that there's the there's the processed version of something and there's the organic version of it yeah you're just bringing that to movement which is it was a beautiful

uh way of looking at it so we've been chatting for ages and we haven't still got onto the thing that i was most excited to talk to you about so you know I guess what we've been talking about so far has laid the groundwork quite literally for this but you are I didn't plan that that just came out but you are doing something quite incredible this September which almost feels like an extension of everything you've already been doing on your social media with your own life with your family's lives you're taking it one step further can you explain what you are doing this September yeah so starting from the 1st of September I will be running um from Land's End to John O'Groats so it's 30 days 30 consecutive days of running 30

miles a day but I'm doing it barefoot so i'm running from lands engine on a groves as you want to clarify that you're not wearing barefoot shoes no just barefoot barefoot you are properly barefoot yes and naked butt naked feet yeah you're gonna be naked as well well there might be moments okay so i mean this is incredible you're basically running more than a marathon a day for 30 days. Absolutely. Completely barefoot. There's a whole host of questions I want to ask about this, but why are you doing this? Well, firstly, I just, again,

I'm tapping into what I feel is the physical, I've reached this physical, social, spiritual pathway really with running. I no longer see it as a physical thing. So it's enabled me to, it's to prove what we can do, what's in the what we can do what's in our physicality what's biologically normal again but also it's good for me the human being to be doing it it's a good example to show all these are the things we can be doing in my mind but also i'm doing it to raise a platform for sustainability so i'm interviewing sustainability and environmental

experts along the route so each day i get to interview somebody different and the way I see it is I can do all these amazing things I can go out barefoot running I can go climb I can swim I can jump I can balance but really that's creating a platform and with that platform is a very important message behind it is going to be for the environment which goes into this generational amnesia thing i want to just raise as much awareness for not just the human being but for the habitat you know where can people find details off this um well follow me on instagram at the naturalized stylist on my website tony riddle.com um and there's a few videos and things and links that we're putting up there and you're gonna put the whole route online aren't you the route will be up that's coming up soon and that will give you that means

that you can then join at any stage we've also got plug plugolution they're involved so there's going to be litter picking events along the route on weekends for you to kind of join i get like a forest gumper feel feel to it then that'd be amazing so are you inviting people to come and join you and absolutely i'd love that you know as i say it's a social experience right as well so but they don't have to be running barefoot no you can just come along and run i'm also gonna i'll also be running you know holding a few workshops and tutorials and things like that along the route as well so you can come in and get a little bit of a tune up from me vivo barefoot involved as well i've got their wagon joining me as well on certain stages which will then give people like pressure plate examples where their weight is when they're standing and we can again get some talks and workshops going to help people and

improve people in their running style but also for things like squats and ground living that will all be in place when i know we're currently recording this podcast um something like what are we 24th of june something like that i know that the route goes online on the 1st of july so by the time this podcast goes out i think the route will be up yes i'm certainly gonna be looking i will absolutely love to join you certainly with my kids if i can to run part of the part of the distance but barefoot running um across the uk a lot of people listening to this who are quite foreign to let's say everything that you're talking about maybe maybe this is like a complete oh my god wake up oh my god i just don't know where to start barefoot running i'm a fan i run in barefoot shoes um i have done for the last years i spent a bit of time doing the exercises

i think i think maybe your exercises that i saw online also on the viva barefoot website there are a few exercises if you know bouncing to a metronome speed of 180 bpm I did a lot of time trying to retrain myself so that I could run in those shoes and I wouldn't consider not doing anything in those shoes anymore I love you know on a separate note I love that one thing that I love about that brand is for people who think I am not paid to promote Viva Barefoot at all I would just absolutely disclose that as a doctor i just i'm a huge fan uh that it's really changed my life personally well they're great for the human they're great for the environment man i think that's a really important thing that we can but they sort of say barefoot is best but if you're not barefoot wear our shoes which i think

is great and so they're going to help support you but you're not going to wear their shoes you're actually going barefoot well i'll wear their shoes outside the run yeah you know because again it's about preserving the feet so it's almost like don't run in their shoes live in their shoes you know yeah absolutely people often say barefoot running isn't applicable to the modern living environment because it's all very well for people um 2 000 years ago let's say but we've got roads and we've got tarmac. What would you say to that? I trail run barefoot and trails comprise of mud, impacted mud, grass, more impacted mud, tree roots, boulders, stones, horrible gnarly stones. i will trade tarmac for that any day in fact the harder and smoother the surface the better in a way because it's like the

beginner's model so for me i get people running on really smooth hard surfaces so it's easier yeah because the harder the surface the more compliant you have to become so let's say you and i were jumping up and down and we're jumping up and down on a really hard surface what gives the hard surface or us us us right so if you jump up and down on a really rubberized floor what gives the rubber the rubber right so then if we understand compliance and stiffness if i jump up and down on a really hard surface i become compliant which means i can start to tap into the mating tendon structures and elasticity that the body possesses if i jump up and down and really rubberize stuff, I get really stiff. So all my tendons stiffen. So all the ITB, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis issues I see come through poor posture and hard surfaces,

but with rubber. So you wear rubber underneath your foot, a rubber sole underneath your foot on a hard surface. You become hard hard above the floor's hard below and it's just the shoe that gives so you lose all the amazing tendon actions that the body possesses and i tell you you know i remember as a as a younger gp i remember seeing problems like this coming in or plantar fasciitis and you know they'll be so frustrating because you send them off to physios that often come back often it wasn't getting rid of the problem. And I felt very limited back then in terms of what I could do, whereas now I look at it completely differently. I see that as a symptom of the way that they're living, the shoes that they're in, the fact that they're not working their feet and

their tendons in the way that they're designed to be worked. And, you know, there's a few exercises that Gary taught me that I, you know, which are very similar to a lot of things that you you talk about it's just it's the same thing with it's just rewinding right and just getting them working back yes at the same time i'm not i'm look at the end i'm not suggesting anyone goes out there and just starts running on tarmac immediately you have to learn to break your feet up so if you think if you've been if you've been in a compromising foot shape like a narrow toe box with rubber underneath it, first of all, the narrow toe box will compress the toes into an unnatural position. But the rubber, remember, makes you more stiff. So you stiffen the foot in that position. You're in a really stiff arches, stiff shape, and then it's the ankle that collapses because the arch

can't soften. So every time your foot hits the floor, it's like the arch does this, ding, and then it goes boing when it comes back up again when the arch is rigid it's the ankle goes ding and then over again so we end up this over pronated gnarly ankle experience so firstly is to yeah rewild the feet you know there's there's loads of stuff out there look for toga just google toga and how do you spell that t-o-e and then ga like yoga but to. And then Vivo Barefoot, they've got some videos up there. And it would just give you an opportunity to play with the feet. In my first week of my squat tutorial, here's my sale. In my first week of my squat tutorial, the first week is all about rewilding feet.

So there's stuff that you can be doing in there. Again, just get the feet out, experience them. Walk around the garden, walk around the home, whatever you can do. Break the feet up first. Vivo Barefoot, we've hit the nail on the head there it just gives you the protection you need really but you still get the feedback so the point is it's a wide toe box it's minimal um there's i mean there's so many brands out there but i mean i've been coaching running and then into barefoot running for a long long period of time we started off with the pose method with nicholas romanoff most of the injuries we saw were knee injuries and lower back from heel

striking born to run came out and then suddenly bam yeah we were just dealing with achilles problems because people just thought they could take their shoes off and go and run barefoot they weren't getting it necessarily from being barefoot on hard surfaces they were getting it because they hadn't changed their running shape yeah exactly so firstly is to just understand there's a specific posture you have to go into when you run so i would start to think about keeping your head your chest and your pelvis stacked and keep your feet underneath you draw a line on the ground and then try and jump on the line on the ground flat-footed ding ding ding ding ding ding really relaxed soft in the knees soft even in the jaw and the shoulders wrists floppy and just try and stay really relaxed, soft in the knees, soft even in the jaw and the shoulders,

wrists floppy, and just try and stay really relaxed and just get a tempo going where you're just bouncing up and down. Don't try and land on your toes or your heels, try and land flat-footed and just keep that rhythm going. And then that will help you understand that there's a head, chest, and pelvis segment, and then try and move forward as you're doing it. And that's, running is just a series of single-legged hops. So that's teaching you to run on two two feet then you lift one foot up and you hop on one leg then you're running on one leg continuously and then you do 10 of those then switch to the other leg then you can do eight eight six six two two and then go and then you're running are there videos online yeah yeah so the squat tutorial is going up so that would be our i think it's we're launching it um in august yeah guys guys i'm going to link to all of this

stuff in the show notes and then the show notes page for this episode is going to be drchastity.com forward slash natural lifestyle i think that's an appropriate url to to sort of get all this stuff and yeah tony's website everything that he's doing his social media handles everything we've spoken about including some of these videos i have actually one of your squat um online courses i went as soon as i saw you talk about it i went and bought it straight away i think it's been brilliant yeah so i think if people do want extra guidance um and how they might start introducing these concepts into their own lifestyle i think it's a great one i've got to ask you on that barefoot running you mentioned injury before and what about people are saying that sounds great

but what about your feet you know are you not going to start bleeding are you not going to start hitting rocks that are going to mean that you get injured and obviously you can't guarantee you're not going to get injured but um you feel pretty confident don't you that you can expose your body and the soles of your feet to this sort of um terrain this sort of terrain yeah why is that look we did this the swim rumblers on this weekend right we arrived late because i was doing the tutorial on friday we were filming it but then we joined on the the sunday so we did the walk and we did the swim and so everyone turned up they had their their their swimsuits on their shoes on and so i turned off my swimming shorts right and so i've done no shoes and no

shoes i've done i've done cold immersion work i've done ice baths and so i've built resilience there but also we're born with all the gear we just have no idea how to use it so people like wim hof has done amazing things for that right and it's the same with the feet that once you expose yourself to nature again we choose it's a modern phenomena it's a modern thing you know so for 270 000 years what were we doing and again we have this misconception that everything was really soft but there's bedrock and there's all kinds of it's actually more traumatizing for the feet so my what happens is it's called adaptation again so the more stresses you put it under the more we respond again so my feet become they've become like jelly almost it's like a gel

almost like my own jelly pads i've gone back to being a running animal in a way um and because my posture's where it should be it means i'm not loading for too long on the ground in fact i'm very light so i often catch people by surprise when i'm out running i'm literally behind them i say excuse me and they jump out their skin because i don't hear you no i'm nasal breathing so it's not like i'm you know it's all through my nose so i'm nasal your mouth shuts my mouth shut yeah so i went to the first stage was to tape it up so i just literally just breathing and no out through the nose um and that just keeps me super relaxed again whilst i'm running and aerobics i'm not going into anaerobic stores i'm just i'm going to try that you know because i'm amazing and i do the

parkrun every saturday morning with my son and um i watch how he breathes and I I didn't know how I should be breathing but I sort of you know in the stress solution there's a whole chapter on breathing and I talk about the benefits of nasal breathing and I thought you know I probably should be just breathing through my nose when I'm running so I make a real effort to keep everything relaxed in my upper body and try and breathe through my nose but i think taping up my mouth would probably be a great way of sort of enforcing that the other way is to you have to tape you have to come back a bit so let's say for instance originally i would be running let's say i was doing 10 minute 10 mile 10 miles out in training and not much concentration on nasal beam just breathing i would go in and out nasal breathing

if i was going up here i'd start breathing in because it was i was burning off too many stores so what i found was my by taping up i then went from i went from say eight minute miles down to 10 minute miles i thought wow okay it's gonna sound ridiculous what a drop but then over time it's just gone back up now i'm now under eight minute miles you know but super relaxed and your body's had to adapt to that but the recovery's better so i'm that's pure aerobic running then and like you just keep pushing the aerobic threshold so it has an overlap into many things but as i say like the feet adapt they really do yeah for me it's it's just been a process and the feet and the posture and everything else just gets stronger and stronger for it we build more resilience it feels like a real evolution of where you started to where you're now you're going to do this amazing event in september 2019

incredible i'm interested to see what might be happening in two years or three years or five years where you may take this you know and i don't know if you even know that at the moment then we need to get a few ideas yeah yeah let's do one step at a time um tony i have so enjoyed chatting to you i think i genuinely think that the content you're putting out there is going to be so helpful yes i think some people it might be too much initially to hear it and but i think my hope is that it just sows a seed for people and at least they start thinking about it and going wait a minute yeah there's something in that maybe maybe i'll take my shoes off now when i come home or maybe I'll think about how much I can squat each day.

I very much try and apply the principles I've read you talking about. They really speak to me. I try my best to do that. Again, I've gone off the boil the last few months. I think this is a nice reminder for me to get back into my morning routine of waking up my feet and getting my ankle mobility going.

I'd love to finish off with take-homes homes for people i know we've covered quite a lot but as a way of summarizing this podcast is called feel better live more i genuinely have seen time and time again with people feel better in themselves they get more out of their lives and i think everything you stand for is very much a reflection of that. Can you leave my listeners with some of your very top tips on how they can start introducing these concepts into their life that is actually going to, you know, improve the way that they feel almost instantaneously? Yeah, I think the first stage is like morning rituals are a great one. rituals are a great one literally just the moment your eyes open is to remember that we are innately wild yeah innately connected and innately empowered and then i so i start my day with that i'd recommend that and then also gratitude and just have you know thanks for all those amazing beings that walk before us you know just give gratitude for everything around you um your family your friends and just people that

enable you to do what you do on the daily um breath you know a breath practice again i think learning a breath practice that you can just upload throughout the day is i think it's golden really i think because we're ramping up the stress a lot of the time and i find i've had to do a lot on social media recently and so i just moments like okay i'm gonna go back to breath now and take it back to breath so with three minutes of breathing a day be enough for someone who's never done it is that a good thing to start with there's someone gave me a great tool that just check in with your breath just do that just every time you check in with breath put a tick in a book in a book and what does that mean check in with your breath every now and then if you catch yourself just take

an inhale through the nose out through the mouth okay back to my breath and then that's it tick and then off you go if you have to go into a stressful situation a meeting start cycles of breath before you go in if you take a stressful phone call or a stressful has a phone call has been stressful take it back to the breath before eating take it back to the breath um there's up regulating there's down regulating so before sleep again you want to just down regulate it so going back into parasympathetic if it gets to say three o'clock in the afternoon and you're going for the three o'clock four o'clock slump it's coming in rather than hit the caffeine okay um go to breath but charge the breath this time so it's more like a not almost on the brink of hyperventilation you're up regulating so it'd

be more like a bit more wim hof style bit more wim hof style transformational breath style just just get more oxygen on board and really up regulate the system and that's amazing so that's the breath is amazing tool um and again movement you know just in your everyday life i think just get out try and get out to nature and move more you know i have this thing about setting timers you know average urbanite spends 90 their time inside at least try and get your 10 you know try and set a timer for two hours 24 minutes and try and be outside for two hours, 24 minutes. You know, get to a local park. We're blessed in London, right?

London's incredible, right? As an urban experience, because like 8 million trees, 3,000 parks, right? There's 30,000 allotments and 3 million gardens, right? So really there's enough there. If you go in search, but you can find it and get out into nature and just, nature has just the same ability to drop us into that parasympathetic state as breath work.

Yeah, 100%. Even nature scenes. So have nature scenes even on your screensaver. Just stuff that helps you check in. There's studies that show that just looking at flick books of natural scenes drop people into a parasympathetic state. And then, again, urban settings, sympathetic states. So it's just understanding that. So if I'm in an urban environment, maybe work with the breath to keep you in a parasympathetic state and then again urban settings sympathetic state so it's just understanding that so if i'm in an urban environment maybe work with the breath to keep you

in a parasympathetic state and then when you get the opportunity you know 10 get to nature sit under a tree read a book if you have to answer emails even just get out get out into the park another nice way to do your meetings out there you know there's a lot said for that kind you know set up a meeting and so do you mind if we walk i even set meetings up the ponds now right we go to the ponds have a dip in the water then get out and then we're going for a walk and we have a meeting i would imagine those meetings are a lot more creative than had that not occurred beforehand oh it's incredible you know it's just people are again people be a surprise once you invite people in you'll be a surprise what they're open to because a lot of time people want this they want to be able to become more empowered. They want to become more

wild and set that amazing macro state of well-being. They want to experience it. Sometimes they don't know how. And if you have the tools, why don't you come with me this weekend or come out for me for a walk in the park? And if you don't have a community, just build one. Yeah, love it. Tony, so many great tips there. You know, as I always say to people, just even just try and choose one thing that you heard in this conversation and think, oh, let me just start there.

One small thing, start there. Exactly. And build up. There's so much you can be doing. And, but just, it has to be small steps. Again, if you do too much, it's short-lived because we just get an emotional response to it.

So try and steer away from that and just make it nice and calm. Don't look at me too much as an example because you because we just get an emotional response to it so try to steer away from that and just make it nice and calm don't look at me too much as an example because you might think i'm socially extreme but it's taken me a period of time to do what i'm doing i've done it in small steps yeah you know like sawing up my furniture is a socially extreme thing that didn't happen overnight it came through years and years of studying posture years and years and looking at what are the natural forms years and years of this to culminate years and looking at what are the natural forms years and years of this to culminate in that one thing of me saying right we're ground living now but that's the small steps that got me there and that's the journey and also don't ignore the

journey you know it's all one thing and if you see people around you doing amazing things understand they've also had a big journey getting there it hasn't just happened overnight yeah no i love that tony and i think what you said about watching yourself and don't let that put people off i hope when you go onto tony's instagram um i hope you'll find it inspiring maybe not what you are able to do right now but it just shows you what is possible when you go through this rewilding process tony thank you for uh coming out today really appreciate you spending so much time with me good luck in September. Thanks, mate.

I'd love everyone to- Come join me, come join me. Hey, I'd love everyone listening to this to think about checking out the website, seeing where you're going to be, supporting it. Are you going to be posting on Insta Stories a lot? Absolutely, there'll be some live videos going up. There's the interviews will be going up.

I've got some people documenting it as well. Vivo, as I say, they're providing a bit of a stage a bit of a platform through the wagon and so yeah there's stuff happening around it there's a lot of hype coming up so um yeah keep your eyes peeled yeah if there's room guys i'll join tony maybe we'll do an instagram live from one of them as well so um to let you guys know how it's going tony thank you so much good luck with everything i'll See you again soon. Awesome. Boom. That concludes today's episode of my Feel Better Live More podcast. So what did you think? Has this conversation challenged some of your views on what it truly means to be human?

Do you agree with Tony's views or do you hold a different perspective? Some of my team who have heard the conversation have said that they really struggle to listen to it while staying sitting down. They're simply listening to Tony's views, encourage them to get up or even to have a go at squatting whilst listening. Whatever you think, Tony and I would love to know your thoughts. Tony is most active on Instagram at The Natural Lifestyle List. And I, of course, am on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Please do use the hashtag FBLM where you can so that I can easily see your comments.

You can also continue the conversation about the podcast in my new Facebook group. If you go to Facebook, type in DrChastastity Fort Pillock Community Tribe, you will see a really supportive and safe community to talk about all things health related. I really would encourage you to get involved over there. And for those of you who want to explore Tony's ideas a little bit further, he has kindly given me a discount code for my listeners to access his online courses. If you go to vimeo.com forward slash the natural lifestylist and type in the code feel better live more 50 you will get 50% off both his running and his squat tutorials. If you are even remotely interested in what Tony had to say today I would highly encourage you to try them out. what Tony had to say today, I would highly

encourage you to try them out. I've had several one-on-one sessions with Tony and have really benefited from what we did together. If you go to the show notes page for this episode, which is drchastity.com forward slash natural lifestyle, you will be able to actually click on that link to his online courses. I've also got the discount code there for you. You'll also see everything that Tony and I spoke about, his website and other resources that I think you will find useful. You'll also get a link to my YouTube page where you can see some of what Tony and I worked on together. If you enjoyed the episode today, I would highly encourage you to check out episode 39 of my podcast, which was about how to stay pain-free with the foot collective.

In that conversation, we talked about the importance of foot health and foot movement for our overall well-being. In our podcast today, we also mentioned Gary Ward, the chap who pretty much fixed most of my back problems. I actually spoke to Gary in episode 12 of this podcast. So again, do check it out. If you want to read the full story of how Gary helped me get to the root cause of my back pain, I explained this in full in my first book, The Four Pillar Plan. Many of the exercises that we did together are detailed in that book. I have to say so many of you have been in touch with me since that book came out to say that those four exercises, which take a maximum of five minutes to do, have really helped you with your back pain as well as your hip pain. So it's just great to see that the exercises that helped me have also helped so many others. So if you or someone you know may

benefit, I would highly encourage you to check out my first book, The Four-Pillar Plan. Just a quick reminder that this book was also released in the US and Canada with a different title, How to Make Disease Disappear. A quick reminder that my latest book, The Stress Solution, four steps to a calmer, happier you is available to buy all over the world now. In that book, I tried really hard to explain clearly what stress is, where it lives, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it. It's a great tool for pretty much all of us who live in the modern world. Whether you think you're stressed or not, if you feel overwhelmed, if you struggle with your mental health, I think this

book is a great resource. You can pick it up in paperback, ebook, or as an audiobook, which I am narrating. If you join my weekly shows, please do consider supporting them by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. You can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media channels. Or you can simply do it the good old fashioned way and tell your friends about the show. I really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vedanta Chatterjee for producing this week's podcast.

That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure that you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure that you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest episode. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.

I'll see you next time.