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Check out each of these companies because they are absolutely awesome or they wouldn’t occupy this revered space. Seriously, I won’t promote anything that I don’t absolutely love and use in daily life:

• Peluva: Comfortable, functional, stylish five-toe minimalist shoe to reawaken optimal foot function. Use code BRADPODCAST for 15% off!
• Mito Red Light: Photobiomodulation light panels to enhance cellular energy production, improve recovery, and optimize circadian rhythm. Use code BRAD for 5% discount!
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Brad’s Favorites on Amazon

I have a newly organized shopping experience at BradKearns.com/Shop. Visit here and you can navigate to my B.rad Nutrition products (for direct order or Amazon order), my library of online multimedia educational courses, great discounts from my affiliate favorites, and my recommended health&fitness products on Amazon.

TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype hacks, shortcuts, and science talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:38):
What happens is when you step on a rock, and when you step on an uneven surface, your foot moves around inside the shoe and generates trauma and inflammation and pain and soreness. So, my foot felt like crap when I wore the most.

Brad (00:56):
Hey, I wanna talk about the benefits of Peluva five toe minimalist shoes and a barefoot inspired lifestyle overall. A commercial recording, perhaps? Perhaps. But we are committed to promoting foot functionality and overcoming this disastrous slide into foot atrophy and dysfunction that is the essence of modern lifestyle and life lived in elevated, restrictive shoes. So you want to talk about ancestral health and getting back to basics and eating the right food and getting your sunshine and getting your exercise. We also have to look after our feet because when we encase them in restrictive shoes, we develop lifelong bad habits, dysfunction, weakness, atrophy, and hence, we have these ridiculous statistics, such as 78% of Americans complain of chronic foot pain. What is the approach or the treatment that’s right, orthotics, even prescription medication and surgeries and advanced things like that. But it’s also this obsession with ever more comfortable, cushioned and encased shoes with more arch support, more features when you’re talking about or orthopedic shoes.

Brad (02:21):
Uh, did you know that Medicare covers like two pairs of shoes per year for elderly Americans that are in the Medicare system, age 65 and over? Isn’t that kind of ridiculous? Of all the things that your standardized, uh, nationalized healthcare policy should cover, they threw in a couple pairs of orthopedic shoes because everyone, of course. Is gonna have a foot problems and foot pain. There is a way to escape from this disastrous decline, and that is to rebuild your foot functionality very carefully by transitioning over to a more barefoot-inspired, inspired lifestyle. So, of course, you want to go barefoot as much as possible, uh, in the safe areas such as your home, uh, or you know, somewhere where you can get onto a beach, a turf field where your feet are protected and you can confidently go barefoot because there’s not too many opportunities for that in general.

Brad (03:16):
That’s when we want to go to the minimalist shoe and the most functional and minimalist shoe possible, and we contend at Peluva that you must have the articulated five toes in order for your shoe to truly be a barefoot style shoe. And we use that term loosely in the shoe industry the day these days where you’re talking about barefoot shoe this and barefoot shoe that, but you must have the articulated five toes in order to truly allow the foot to function as it’s intended as it’s doing when it’s barefoot. So we call that toe splay, allowing the toes to widen upon impact of every stride and grip the ground and en enable the, uh, balancing of moving body weight and generating forward propulsion. When your toes are encased in a single box, it does not allow that properly. In particular, the big toe must be allowed to operate independently from the other toes and in multiple planes of motion, notably the big toes, the most important joint in the entire body for the human gait pattern, both walking and running, because it balances your entire weight over a single joint, every step that you take and every stride that you take running, of course.

Brad (04:34):
So I came up with this list of reasons of the benefits of wearing the ultimate barefoot shoe Peluva and living a barefoot inspired lifestyle. So, I talked about the five individual toe slots, and the other important or mandatory features of a truly minimalist shoe is a what’s called a zero drop sole. Zero drop means there is no difference in height off the ground from where your heel rests and where your midfoot and your toes rest as opposed to virtually all regular shoes, dress shoes, or athletic shoes have an elevated heel, and this is by many experts, including Katy Bowman, believe to be the single most destructive feature in the modern shoe. When you rise your heel off the ground higher than your midfoot and your toes elevated heel, like you can clearly see in a running shoe or a dress shoe with a nice big fat heel, what happens is you inappropriately load your skeletal weight over the balls of your feet rather than on the heel bone from which the human body is designed to stand.

Brad (05:47):
Think about it. If your heel, stand barefoot and you anchor your body weight back onto your heels, this is going to help you stack your spine appropriately, have your shoulders in alignment with your spine, have your neck and head in alignment with your spine, and everything is stacked over the extremely dense and crossed-reinforced calcan bone that’s designed to hold skeletal weight. But as soon as you get that heel off the ground, you are now pitching your body weight slightly forward, such that it loads inappropriately over the midfoot. And what does that promote? That’s right, hunched shoulders, a compressed cervical spine and everything moving forward off that beautiful stable plane and balanced center of gravity, just because you’re wearing an elevated heel shoe. Of course, when we take off running down the road, more damage and dysfunction is caused by that elevated heel.

Brad (06:43):
In particular, it promotes that very common heel striking, breaking, jarring over striking pattern where the heel lands first rather than the correct way for humans to run, which is a midfoot strike over a balanced center of gravity. So the number one on this list that I’m gonna work through of the attributes of a a truly awesome barefoot inspired shoe like the Peluva, is the five individual toe slots and the zero drop sole. And the sole is also, uh, needs to be flexible, not firm and rigid, because we need to allow the foot to go through its natural range of motion rather than basically on every stride slam into, let’s say, a very rigid sole that you might find in a hiking boot or a work boot. And as an aside, of course, we need to wear protective footwear for all manner of modern activity where we need that safety factor.

Brad (07:41):
If we’re working at a construction site or, for example, pedaling a bicycle, you want a rigid sole bicycle shoes have steel plated soles so that no energy is dispersed, uh, into the sole, and it’s all dispersed to turn the pedal in a revolution without any loss of power. So for specialized activities, of course, you need rigid soles with reinforcement or whatever the shoe design we’re talking about but not for promoting foot functionality. So, uh, the five toes is the key feature along with zero drop, flexible sole. Other minimalist shoes that have the highly touted wide toe box, or of course, vastly superior to a shoe that pinches and constricts your toes together up in front. But they don’t, these, these shoes are not as offensive as a regular shoe, but they do not actively relax, reelect, reeducate and realign your toes like the five toe shoe does.

Brad (08:43):
You need that five toe functionality to truly call it a barefoot shoe. Again, if you’re wearing a wide toe box minimalist shoe, that’s great, congratulations. You’re not actively damaging your feet by squeezing ’em and constricting ’em all day. However, they’re just sitting there and if they spent a lifetime being pinched together, they’re not going to realign and reeducate without devoted intervention. So you see the popularity of fitness enthusiasts, health enthusiasts wearing toe spacers throughout the day at rest, the things that they have in the pedicure shop where you can put your toes into these slots. They’re usually made with, uh, rigid silicone, and they’re stretching the toes out as you relax at home and watch tv, whatever toe spaces are very popular. We looked up, uh, research and they, they sell billions of dollars per year of toe spacers today.

Brad (09:39):
I suppose a lot of that’s in the beauty market, but people are really buying these things up to help improve their foot health. Now, when you wear a five toe shoe, you are forcing those toes into their slots at first. We get a lot of comments from customers saying, yeah, they’re really hard to put on. Congratulations, as Mark Sisson says, if they are very difficult to put on, that is your sign your indication that you desperately need these shoes. And what’s really cool is if you commit to wearing them and continue using them every day and allow your feet to slide into their natural pattern rather than being pinched together, what happens is the shoes become easier and easier to put on. And I can definitely personally attest to that. If I showed you a photograph of my feet, I have the baby toe especially, is wedged up and pushed into the side of the other metatarsal, uh, from a lifetime of wearing cycling shoes, running shoes, and what have you.

Brad (10:43):
And I have, I have had great difficulty getting at least that baby toe into Peluvas where I really had to work hard and, uh, wedge it with my fingers and get it into its little slot to stay there. But today, after years of devoted effort, I have a little bit easier time getting that baby toe in because this is the only shoe I wear, and I no longer have that experience of forcing the toe up against the other feet to go and run 10 miles and all that crazy stuff I used to do back in the day. So that’s the first bullet of the ultimate barefoot style shoe with those features, zero drop, flexible sole, and five toes. Uh, next, what’s interesting about the Peluvas as the, uh, the modern rendition of the five toe shoe, you may remember the original five toe shoes that came out about 18 years ago had very minimal padding.

Brad (11:39):
So it was basically a sock with some rubber reinforcement on the bottom, and you walked around like you really were in bare feet with a little protection. That’s great, and that’s certainly the most authentic barefoot you ever designed for mankind. But what happened back in the day was people got so excited about using these shoes, but their feet weren’t well adapted to have that immediate and abrupt transition away from a lifetime of wearing elevated cushioned shoes. So what happens when people tried to do crazy stuff, like go for a long distance run or a long hike or play basketball in a five toe shoe with minimal padding is it’s too traumatic, and you get overuse injury or even acute injury from the insufficient protection. So the goal here with Peluva was to make a shoe that was versatile enough for people to wear during all manner of everyday activity and comfortable enough to wear all day long.

Brad (12:39):
Now, that requires a bit of a compromise. So after years of R and D, the Peluva shoe, the Strand model, the one that’s basically designed for everyday use and fitness use has around nine millimeters of protective cushioning. You put that shoe on. The goal here is to make it feel like you’re walking barefoot on a putting green. So you wanna have a soft and comfortable interaction with the many hard, manmade modern surfaces that we encounter both indoors and outdoors. That’s most of the time when we’re wearing footwear and doing something, we’re walking on these unnatural artificial hard surfaces. So the real hardcore barefoot style people that saw these shoes and gave us some critical feedback, like, yeah, nine millimeters, that’s a bit too much padding for me. Guess what? When you think about really, uh, honoring the ancestral model and living, you know, a as minimally as possible, our ancestors did not have any sidewalks or hardwood or marble floors to walk on.

Brad (13:46):
They walked on packed African savanna grass, or they walked on snow, or they walked on the beach, or they walked on dirt. And so their barefoot experience was much less, you know, harsh than what we might encounter today if we decided to disavow our worldly possessions and just go around living a barefoot <laugh>, barefoot life itself. So we have the nine millimeter protection as a wonderful compromise to enable wearing the Peluvas even on hard, manmade, modern surfaces without getting that excessive trauma, discomfort, and injury risk. Okay, there’s the answer if you want to ask. Why is there nine millimeters of cushion? Some of the other models have even a bit more cushion, the more fashiony models like the Miami or the Napa, but we have that nine millimeters there to allow you to do more things, more people to do more things in Peluvas.

Brad (14:43):
The best thing about this shoe is that it’s built for walking, and walking is the centerpiece of a healthy, active, athletic, energetic lifestyle. The book Born to Walk, of course, details this concept, but we have many experts today in fitness, health, exercise, physiology contending that simply increasing all forms of general everyday movement is more beneficial to your health, disease prevention, and longevity than adhering to a devoted fitness regimen. That’s right. And the research in this area is called the concept is called the Active Couch Potato Syndrome, where we see even devoted fitness enthusiasts who otherwise have really strong sedentary patterns in their daily life, are not immune from the disease risk factors that are seen in sedentary population. There was a study that we detailed in Born to Walk came outta Denmark where they had, they categorized people into four different sort of lifestyle designations based on their activity patterns.

Brad (15:54):
And so there were active couch potatoes. There were people that were that had a good baseline level of daily activity, as well as devotion to fitness. So those were the active fitness people. Then we had people that were of course, inactive and didn’t do any fitness. But the interesting conclusion that came outta the research was that the people who just maintained a general, a nice general baseline level of daily activity scored higher than the fitness freaks, who otherwise were people that, you know, did their 6:00 AM spin class and then got on the subway and rode to the office, sat at a desk, rode home, and sat on a couch for their evening leisure hours. So just moving more in general, everyday life is the number one fitness objective. And then, doing, of course, the wonderful benefits of strength training and sprinting and doing team sports and doing active lifestyle, uh, fitness lifestyle.

Brad (16:56):
That’s great. But first you have to get your butt up and move more before we even talk about <laugh>, how much you can bench and so forth. And so this is the ultimate walking shoe. And because walking has such minimal injury risk, you can put a pair on right now with that nice nine millimeters of cushion and take off walking down the road. Unlike the people who foolishly tried to use minimalist shoes to go and do endurance running, and the impact trauma of running, even jogging at a slow pace is two to three times body weight with every stride versus walking, which of course is never more than one times body weight because the distinguishing feature of the human walking gait pattern is that one foot is on the ground at all times. Remember how in the Olympics and race walking, they, they’ll disqualify someone who’s shuffling a little too fast, and both feet are on the ground, off the ground at the same time.

Brad (17:53):
So walking is characterized by having one foot remaining on the ground at all times. Therefore, your body weight is always supported. There’s no extra G-Force, there’s no extra impact load whereby, and running even slowly, you are generating two to three times body weight impact trauma. So even someone jogging five miles at a slow pace, who weighs 150 pounds, is accumulating 2.3 million pounds of impact trauma on that slow jog. And doing that in an ill-advised manner when you’re wearing a minimalist shoe, suddenly that you’re not adapted to that is a recipe for overuse injury risk. So our mission here is we’re not recommending that you buy a pair of Peluvas and then take off and put in, uh, your 10, 20, 30 weekly miles with this fancy new pair of shoes. It’s to walk more and do everyday lifestyle activities in Peluvas. So these are the ideal walking shoe.

Brad (18:51):
And as you become more adapted, they’re also a fantastic shoe to wear for most, uh, gym workouts. So if you’re taking a step class or lifting weights, especially where you want that balance, remember I talked about the appropriate skeletal loading. So when you have weight on the bar and you’re trying to hoist it off the ground, or you have weight on your back and you’re doing a set of squats, you definitely want a barefoot style experience so that the proprioception from your the soles of your feet, sending a message to your central nervous system to regulate, um, body weight and regulate, regulate, uh, that weight moving through space is super important. And shoes definitely compromise that. So Peluva is the ultimate shoe for walking and for gym activity. And like I said, as you get more adapted, you can do more higher impact, such as a side to side gym class where you’re doing, the bar class or the step class. But most people should be able to comfortably transition right into a minimalist shoe for most gym activities. But walking is, walking is the, the, the premium way to increase all ways of general, all manner of general everyday activity.

Brad (20:06):
Another key distinguishing feature is what’s called ground feel. And this is where your incredibly neuro sensitive feet perceive feedback from every foot strike, then the neurons in your feet, the densely packed neurons in your feet send a message to your central nervous system to help you make the correct decision in real time of how to organize and balance moving body weight. So it’s critical to have this proprioception. It’s called the awareness of your body moving through space on every foot strike, the messages sent to the brain. The brain decides how to organize and initiate complex kinetic chain activity, such as running, jumping, walking, moving sideways, lifting something, carrying something, okay?

Brad (20:58):
So ground feel is destroyed when you have an elevated cushioned shoe. But with Peluva having this minimalist type sole, it’s called a customized low durometer, EVA midsole that’s very soft and flexible and mobile. And then the tread pattern is if you look on the bottom of one you’ll see that the tread is placed only at strategic wear points. So it’s a minimal type of tread pattern rather than just about every running shoe or athletic shoe has a single strip of rubber that comprises the sole that touches the ground. So it’s not individual pieces. You also might remember the Nike free shoe, which came out with this kind of a waffle, iron looking sole that had different, uh, little cubes that moved independently so there would be more flexible and more barefoot like. So that is what you want.

Brad (21:52):
You want that flexibility and that preserving the sensation of ground feel with every stride. In contrast, the stiffer the soul is the more, uh, you know, one dimensional or the more singular the experience is where it’s just a single strip of rubber and the thicker it is, that’s when you cut yourself off from the sensation of what’s happening on the ground. The best example would be like a work boot or a rigid hiking boot where you’re just clumping along and you’re like a robot stomping through, uh, through, through life rather than feeling and experiencing, uh, the nuances of every step and what’s underneath you. The best way to really experience this is on a rugged hiking trail with a lot of debris around. And you can look on the Peluva YouTube website. I have a video, Brad Kearn’s Cactus to Clouds, where I hiked on the single most difficult hiking trail in the United States, maybe the world as measured by vertical gain out in Palm Springs.

Brad (22:58):
It’s called the Cactus to Clouds Trail, or the Skyline Trail. And it ascends get this 8,400 feet of vertical gain in the first 9.3 miles. There is no other trail in the world that maintains that incredible ascension rate for that long, and it’s very rocky, very bumpy. There’s a couple, few hours where we’re doing it in the dark, so we can’t really see that well. And when I hiked this in my Peluva strands, what was amazing is, yes, of course, I had all kinds of strange, unusual, uneven steps where I’d step right onto a rock, right in my, in my midfoot. And what happens when you have the ground feel is your body weight adjusts and your balance and your stride adjusts to negotiate even the craziest obstacle that you step right on, and you are no worse for the wear, you navigate it successfully, and there’s no problem.

Brad (23:57):
In contrast, I also did the hike with elevated cushion, super elevated in cushioned shoe because I wanted to protect against my recent Achilles surgery. So I said, dang, I’d love to hike in Peluvas, but I would better wear these big giant shoes. And guess what happened, even with the maximum padding and maximum protection and all those attributes that we love to see in the marketing copy selling us these big giant shoes. What happens is when you step on a rock, or when you step on an uneven surface, your foot moves around inside the shoe and generates trauma and inflammation and pain and soreness. So my foot felt like crap when I wore the most cushion protective shoe, as opposed to wearing the absolute minimalist shoe where I could feel and adjust in a much more authentic and organic and natural barefoot style manner.

Brad (24:55):
I know it might not make sense on the surface, but I really want you to understand this concept is when you clump around with the ultimate super padded, super cushion shoes, it’s not fun and games, it’s traumatizing to your feet, even if you don’t feel it right in the moment on your metatarsals, when you step on the rock, what happens is the trauma, the impact trauma is inappropriately dispersed throughout the lower extremities. I mentioned how the foot gets torqued inside the shoe when you take a misstep, but also if you for are, for example, doing an endurance run on nice, smooth flat pavement. So forget about the hazard of stepping right on a, a little rock. You’re just clomping along. What happens is because your proprioception and your ground feel is disturbed by the elevated cushioned shoe, you do not realize how shitty your form is.

Brad (25:52):
In a sense, with this heel striking, breaking overrid pattern that is exhibited by 80 to 95% of all recreational runners per Dr. Lieberman at Harvard, you don’t realize that you are inflaming and creating microtraumas in your in your arch, your plantar fascia, your achilles, your calf, your knee, your hip, your lower back. So that is how important ground feel is. You need to feel what’s going on underneath your feet so that your brain can make the correct adjustment and operate complex kinetic chain activity in the most graceful and efficient manner. Um, there’s also this, uh, wonderful concept that I talk about on one of the Peluva YouTube channel videos about how to run with correct form. Now, to get this, if you were to immediately remove your footwear and take off running down a very hard surface like a sidewalk or an indoor hardwood gym or a hard hallway or something, if I asked you to do that, what would happen in the first couple of strides is you would immediately exhibit perfect form.

Brad (27:06):
Why? Because the penalty for the slightest imperfection in your stride pattern is in incredibly jarring impact, right? So if you have this heel striking, shuffling, breaking, overriding pattern that most runners exhibit, and you tried to do that in bare feet, you would be slamming onto your heel bone and it would hurt like crap. So what happens when you take off your shoes and take off running down a hard surface is you exhibit this beautiful, graceful midfoot landing, all of a sudden you look like a deer gracefully prancing down the sidewalk or the gym floor. Now, can you go and do your five-mile run barefoot? Absolutely not. Of course, your feet are super, uh, ill adapted for that, and you would start to feel soreness and pain a mile down the road, uh, because that’s all your feet got in them since they’ve been in encased and cushioned their whole life.

Brad (27:57):
But the concept is really important to grasp. And you can go and try this in a safe venue yourself, and you will notice how good it feels and how graceful and natural it feels to take off running on a hard surface with bare feet. Barefoot Ted McDonald himself, the founder of Luna Sandals, he used to do this with our, our guests at our Primal Con seminar, our weekend retreat. Uh, he’d have a, you know, a little class of 20 people or something, and the first thing he’d do is lead him over to a sidewalk and say, okay, everyone take your shoes off. And people are looking at him like, what are we doing? And, immediately they would get into this rhythm where they, you know, could run gracefully more so than ever before when they were wearing shoes, destroying that ground feel and that proprioception.

Brad (28:43):
I talked, I’m going on to the next bullet now as we kind of drift through these. But, um, the, the best part about wearing the most barefoot inspired shoe that you can is that your feet achieve their full range of motion and full functionality so they can work as intended. And the bare feet, the exercise physiologists and the biomechanists know this, there are some amazing attributes of the foot that make it ideally suited to actually absorb impact, uh, balance moving body weight and generate forward propulsion. Just e examining. And you can watch YouTube videos about this or read about it. You know, what happens during the human gait pattern when your toes when your midfoot strikes the ground and the toes splay out sideways, and then the arch flattens and tightens in order to absorb impact at the same time harness kinetic engine energy for a powerful takeoff.

Brad (29:39):
So this flattening and tightening of the arch, it’s called, it’s part of pronation but the flattening and tightening of the arch is called the windlass mechanism. Windlass mechanism. That’s a sailing term. And it’s describes the tightening of the sail to generate energy from the wind, right? So the wind lasts mechanism also occurs on your arch. And when your arch flattens and tightens during the stride pattern, it helps you absorb impact in incredibly so vast, in a vastly superior manner to any cushion shoe. In fact, the research on, uh, how shoes work and all the, all the BS and the flawed marketing messaging that we’ve endured from shoe manufacturers talking about how shoes are for motion control or impact absorption or lessening impact load are completely untrue. And there’s been no research ever published, ever to reveal or to prove that shoes lessen impact trauma, nor that they even control pronation.

Brad (30:46):
So I mentioned on the hiking trail, when I took all those missteps inside the elevated cushion shoe, and I could feel my foot being traumatized inside the shoe. In other words, it did not, it did not prevent my foot from feeling the, uh, the consequences of, uh, for example, stepping on the small rock right in the middle of my midfoot. And so if the shoe does not control pronation, all that’s happening is you’re interfering with natural healthy pronation with this clunky shoe. And so it’s not working as intended to prevent injury. And what do you mean shoes don’t, uh, help lessen impact? In fact, Dr. Lieberman’s research suggests that shoes generate seven times more impact trauma than running barefoot on the hard surface, like I described. How do they do that? Because they enable poor form. They don’t cause poor form.

Brad (31:46):
A shoe is an inanimate object, right? It’s not going to cause you to run with poor form. The reason that people run with poor form is because of poor overall fitness competency. So we have this, uh, one attribute that the researchers contend is the single most revealing aspect of poor form and increased injury risk, and it’s called contralateral pelvic drop, also known as hip drop. And that is a poorly adapted person that when they land on the ground their hip kind of collapses because they don’t have the core strength or the lower back strength, or the, there’s also, you know, tightness and weakness in the hip flexor, hip flexors. There’s also dysfunctional glutes that are not firing appropriately.

Brad (32:33):
One of the main reasons is because the big toe is encased in a single box rather than being independent, because, did you know this, the big toe, the dorsiflexion of the big toe, initiating the takeoff portion of the stride is the key trigger for glute activation in the body. The big toe needs to dorsiflex and powerfully launch off the ground, and when it does so the glutes fire. So when your glutes are deadened by many hours of life, sitting <laugh> at a desk and disengaging them, and then where running in elevated cushioned shoes where your big toe is not really engaged as it should be in the stride pattern, you get weak dysfunctional glutes. And that is one of the driving forces of poor running form where you look like a shuffler rather than the people that you see on television in the Olympics that run with that beautiful, powerful explosive midfoot landing over a balanced center of gravity. And when it all comes down to the physics of the matter running speed is essentially determined by vertical force production per stride. Every time you impact the ground, how much force are you imparting into the ground?

Brad (33:49):
And by doing so, that is what launches you forward at whatever speed. So they measured Usain Bolt in his prime, and he generated around 1000 pounds of impact force on every stride. That is why his stride at full speed running world record in the a hundred meters, 9.58 seconds still holds from 2009. That’s why he’s running, uh, 27, 28 miles an hour, and his stride was eight feet long. So, go and envision that, or imagine that every step being eight foot forward in the air, uh, that is just absolutely mind-boggling. But it’s a product of generating maximum force production per stride. So when you land with a nice midfoot landing over a balance center of gravity, your muscles and joints and connective tissue can all work together to harness that kinetic energy, have the wind last mechanism occur with your arch, have the Achilles tendon achieve its full range of motion and coil, and allow you to spring off the ground with beautiful power and force.

Brad (34:57):
And gracefulness and gee, are these things important? Did you know that primatologists contend that the human development of the achilles tendon is the key distinguishing feature that helped the humans branch out, or that that reveal the humans branching out from their ape cousins because the gorillas and the chimps don’t have an Achilles tendon and therefore they’re vastly inferior runners, uh, then humans. So, you know, this stuff like sitting in an elevated cushion shoe and not allowing your Achilles to achieve its full range of motion is basically denying your humanity <laugh> not to be too melodramatic here, but it is the truth. So when you’re wearing a Peluva five toe shoe with zero drop and a flat sole rather than an elevated heel, you allow your feet to be feet and nothing beats the feet for any feet you’re trying to complete.

Brad (35:55):
Okay? The big toe articulation, I talked about that a lot already. That’s number six on the list here, the primary trigger for glute activation. Also, your entire body weight is balanced over the single joint on every stride. So the big toe needs to operate independently through multiple planes of motion. And you can kind of tell if you wanna do a little test and bare feet right now. Put your feet flat on the ground, point your feet forward, and then try to lift your big toe off the ground while keeping your other toes on the ground. And if you have dexterity with these little foot tests, and then you can try to do the opposite, like keep your big toe planted on the ground and lift the other four toes off the ground and, and so forth trying to wiggle your toes or independently flow your toes like you’re doing the wave.

Brad (36:47):
Most people have real trouble with that, and that’s because the feet have been compressed and squeezed together for most of your life. Wearing shoes. We wanna return that big toe to full functionality and power, and the ability to dorsiflex powerfully on every stride. We also have on the list the natural foot strengthening effect from simply walking around and wearing Peluvas all day. So there is great research showing that if you do six weeks or 12 weeks of foot exercises every day, uh, foot circles, calf raises, uh, toes, strengthening towel scrunching, have you ever received that? Physical therapy protocol, if you’ve ever had a foot injury, they want you to put a towel out in front of you and then gradually, uh, squeeze it with your toes, scrunch your toes, and try to get the whole towel, uh, bunched up from going, starting from flat into a bunch.

Brad (37:44):
So all those foot exercises are wonderful, but there’s research that, uh, simply wearing a five toe shoe has a similar strengthening effect to doing devoted sets of foot strengthening exercises on a daily basis. Of course, it’s the same as wearing your toe spacers, so that’s really cool. You can save a little money on your, on your kit of toe spacers. And I have some, they cost like $35 for the really good ones, which is kind of funny. And of course there’s a place for those when you want to just lounge around and get, you know, even more of a, a toe spacing effect, but wearing the shoes is the same. So that is a really cool feature. We’re gonna call it a natural strengthening effect simply by wearing the appropriate shoes. And then finally, as I mentioned a bit earlier the Peluva is designed to be versatile and fashionable so that you can wear it all day long for doing a variety of things.

Brad (38:48):
So they don’t look like a crazy freaky, barefoot gym freak or hippie hiking person wearing these funky shoes. Uh, they look fine at the grocery store or out to dinner. And of course, the fashion models like the all leather Napa and, and the fun stuff that we’ve made, the Desert Boot, these can definitely go in as Mark Sisson says, to weddings, funerals, and all other things that you attend in daily life. So the goal is to get more people doing more things in a barefoot inspired manner. And I really want you to try a pair. Of course, we have a no risk guarantee that you’re gonna absolutely love them, and make sure that your size is right. So if you check out Peluva.com, that means foot glove in Portuguese, and I have the Brad Podcast discount code for you.

Brad (39:40):
Get yourself going with a pair of strands or the strand, ATR, which came out in late 2024, and is a more buffed up version, uh, that’s really suitable for, uh, rugged activities like hiking or challenging gym classes or things of that nature. So there’s different models that will really work great for you, and I think you’re gonna love it. And you can also download a free, uh, very comprehensive ebook called The Definitive Guide to a Barefoot and Minimalist Shoe Lifestyle. And in the guide we describe very carefully how to transition without that injury risk or that risk of traumatizing or overdoing it. But, you know, sneak preview here, if you buy a pair of exciting new Peluva shoes and you walk five miles the first day and the next day your calves are kind of tight and your arches are sore, that’s great.

Brad (40:30):
That’s a sign that you really challenged your muscles and your joints and your connective tissue. But that’s also a sign that you want to back off and proceed with caution to strengthen your feet gradually over time. So we describe how to do that in detail step by step, and what activities are appropriate for Peluvas and how to even, leak in a more minimalist shoe influence into your running scene. Of course, we don’t recommend running in Peluvas, perhaps never, but you do wanna strive to have the most minimal shoe experience possible. So that might mean rotating in a pair of not super cushioned shoes, but maybe medium cushioned if you’re always wearing the super cushioned shoes, and just trying to gain, regain that foot functionality that’s been lost from a lifetime in elevated restrictive cushion shoes. Thanks a lot for listening.

Brad (41:25):
I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions, comments, and I would love to engage. You can email podcast@bradventures.com and we’ll keep hitting this topic hard because foot functionality’s so important and so forgotten here in the age of the ultra high tech super cushioned shoe where we think that technology is going to solve problems more so than the magnificent human foot, which Leonardo Da Vinci said is a master of engineering and a work of art. What a quote. Thank you so much for listening, watching learn more at Peluva.com and use my Code Brad podcast and download that free wonderful PDF guide to help you transition to a more barefoot and minimalist shoe inspired lifestyle.

Brad (42:12):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email, podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.