Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Bare Feet with Sole(s) - Quick Review of Dopie Sandals by Terra Plana

Recently i wrote about the benefit to our nervous systems and therefore general well being in freeing our feet and going barefoot as often as possible. I've learned the philosophy of the Twist Test: if you can't grab your shoe and the heel and toe and twist it around the middle, it's too stiff for decent foot bone mobility. Another test is: can you bend them just behind where the ball of the foot is, and are they heel-less? It's incredible how high tech trainers do not pass the twist or bend tests, and many shoes that pass the twist/bend test, ruin it by having heels. So since going through these multiple lessons on footwear failure, i've been looking for shoes that pass the Heel-less Twist Test and support barefootedness as much as possilbe.

So far, i've been disappointed in the mixed up sizing of the otherwise brilliant Vivo Barefoot boots for women (scroll down this article to "vivo" for why), and have been keenly waiting my next trip to the states to try out the much celebrated Vibram Five Fingers - ask RKCs Doug Nepodal (aka the kilted one) and Ronaldo Garcia (aka the elvis one) what they think of these flexible wonders (update nov08: see article on experience with how to fit FiveFingers).

Sandals Special Additional Factor: toe clutch One of the biggest challenges has been to find sandals to replace the venerable, but untwistable/unbendable birkenstocks, or even Reef flipflops. Two problems: don't twist, and many many flip flops require toes to remain pretty much in flexion (clenching or bending the toes) to hold the shoe on while moving. Guess what? that constant flexion, well that's not natural: when walking the toes should be able to do many other things than hold on a sandal.

The solution for now seems to be another product from the Terra Plana shop: the oddly named Dopies. The Dopies are, yes, flip flops BUT the toe clawing effect induced by the raw flip flop is both reduced by the weird toe holder that rather hooks over two toes; the clawing is even further mitigated by using the optional strap - even if that strap is really loose.

The cool thing about this sandal is that the sole is very thin. in this way, the shoe is effectively very close to being barefoot - with a wee protective sole on the foot.

There's quite the design development discussion on the sandal's web site. I'm not that persuaded by footware designed by artists rather than people who know foot mechanics, but in this case i have a simple test: does it twist? yes. does it cause toe flexion? not when the strap is attached. After that, is it comfy? yes. Is it fun? oh very.

COST Is Dopie cheap. oh no - or that depends. If you visit the Dopie site at Terra Plana, you'll see that the sandals sell for thirty quid in the UK. That's more or less 60 USD - granted that includes 17.5% vat. That's 24.75 without VAT, so 50 USD. 50USD for foam rubber molded sandals. According to Terra Plana they sell quite alot at that price, so they were not interested in price matching with other online dealers. If you look around, you can find them for less - at least right now before new stock comes in in February. In the UK, i've found them from 10 quid to 19, pending on availability of size. In the US, amazon has 'em from 19 to yes 49 bucks. And sadly now, for us in the EU where this company is founded, in looking at the US version of, they're 30USD. Please explain how a product that comes from china is double the cost in the EU from what it is in the US.

Value: i only have my feet to go by, but they look interesting and feel fine. Walking on sidewalks and grass has been equally zippy. The thing between the toes is less noticeable, it seems, the more one walks. I've only tried them briefly without the strap, and as suspected they really do flip/flop - rather loudly.

I may experiment with that further, but was less inclined to do so due to the toe flexion thing. Without the strap - they really do look naked. The one disadvantage compared with birks for instance is that they're going to require ninja tabby toed sox if they'll be worn in the winter. That aside, unlike birks, these have the advantage of being highly wash and wearable.

Overall: Freeing Your Feet The tag line of the Dopie is "naked shoes for naked people." When naked footed people need a little sole protection, Dopies pass the twist test, and seem to pass the sandle toe flexion test. They're comfy and fun. While it's warm enough not to wear gloves, it may well be likely warm enough to go as barefoot as these Dopies afford


Update, a month later
I've been wearing these sandals pretty much daily for the past month, both in the UK, and in the US. The longest walk has been about 3km. The average daily extended walk is 1km up and down hill, all on pavement, plus walking around in an office environ at work. I've worn them on 11hour flights and in the rain.

I like 'em. I like being able to kick them off to stretch my toes (even more), or put my feet up on a chair. My downhill heel strike seems to be softening in the gait too.

What i don't like: two things about fit
One Bug: On both feet the strap across the top of the foot has worn away the skin in a way that looks like a stigmata pattern on both feet. While one foot has recovered i'm still bandaiting the other. Another solution perhaps would be to put some moleskin on the strap that rubs.

Another Bug: The other issue, and one that others have noticed who have tried these on is that the toe peice can make a toe feel like it's suffering from an ingrown toe nail a bit when you put the shoe on. this feeling sort of goes away when you're walking, but i don't quite understand what's up with this. It's only happened to me on one side.

In each case, my feet have adapted, but can ya reasonably expect people to stick with a product that wounds them in the first moment of putting them on?

The pluses are such with the shoe that i'm going to experiment with these further until the weather turns colder: i figure when i start needing mitts, i'll start needing sox again.

What's been weird is that putting on sox and shoes the other night for a doo felt utterly horrible, even in nike frees. Perhaps this is something beech dwellers go through annually? But here's to foot freeing.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Peace One Day - Rannoch is More Profound

Over the summer i wrote a piece about Rannoch Donald, RKC, whose perspective on life and practice just zen's me out. He also makes great t-shirt designs.

So i dropped by his site today, and there was a new badge for Peace One Day. The global uber effort is to connect actions across the planet with peaceful actions for one day a year. The project has been operating since 1999. 

Part of participating is to make a commitment for one day to do something, well, peaceful. Here's where Rannoch just keeps getting deeper. His commitment? "I will look at everyone and ask what can i do for you?" I wish i'd thought of that. What a powerful commitment
 that is. 

Way to go Rannoch. And thanks for pointing me, among others, to another cool place/state of mind. Way to help change the world.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008




And now, back to your article:
zhealth movement rehab package



















toe pull targets and alternative position from R-Phase instructional


R-Phase Follow Along goes through mutliple movements for each joint










Why Z?


Lighter, faster, stronger.



update march 2009:

update June 2009:
what's I-phase?

updated July 2009:
when add I-Phase to R-Phase

Review 2009:
S-Phase: The Complete Athlete, Vol 1.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Why Attend the Minnesota ZHealth Workshop: move better, feel better - really (a workshop preview)

Want to last longer, move better, reduce pain? At the end of october - in fact, that's halloween (Oct. 31) to Nov 2 - Dragon Door is hosting a Z-Health workshop called " Z-Health
The Essential Secrets of Elite Performance" for Athletes. Athletes is a term defined broadly: if you move, and want to improve your movement - your athletic effort - you're an athlete.
Why would you want to attend this workshop? There's a couple of big reasons:
(1) If you're an athlete who suffers from any kind of ache, tweak or out and out pain, and have repeatedly hit the manual therapists' offices - whether chiro, massage or similar, the approach presented in ZHealth (or Z-Health or Z Health) will help. That's a bold claim. It's true and i'll come back to it.
(2) If you're an athlete who's hit a plateau, you'll learn skills that will help you tune your performance in what are likely very new ways - unless you're already working with a trainer certified in the Z approach that will help you move past your plateau.
(3) if you're an athlete who needs good hand/eye coordination for your sport, believe it or not, you'll improve it.
(4) If you're an athlete learning a new sport or have been playing a particular sport for awhile, the workshop will help you move with more efficiency. More efficiency means more power, speed - more of what's good for your game. The same goes for whether you're a powerlifter, kettlebell'er or hockey player.
You may say, ok, those sound like incremental improvements. So what?
On the one hand, the answer might be well, increments are what it's all about in sport: in the recent olympics, the difference between a world and olympic record in the 200m men's sprint was 2/10ths of a second. it took almost a generation to beat that record, too. You may say well you're not competing at that kind of elite level; those kind of increments don't mean much to you.
OK. If getting better measurable gains in your activity is not important to you, that's fine. For instance, you mayn't care that you can walk your circuit faster; you just want to keep doing it.
So therefore, on the other hand, that's the other rationale for improving efficiency: improving function while reducing wear and tear on the body. If we move with more efficiency, we're using our bodies more effectively. That means less energy is put into that movement, which means we have more energy for other things. Likewise, that efficiency means better use of our limited resource - ourselves - which means fewer problems over the long haul.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
One of the things we learn about in human physiology is that we're internally extremely well connected - a tweak that starts in the foot can effect the knee, can effect the hip, can trigger the back, can bug the shoulder, can screw up the jaw, can hurt the head. The cumulative effect of these little things can mean at the least less effective, efficient movement and at the worst means a whole host of pain, and a set up for problems like injuries in the movements to come.

The z approach takes this science of our wiring and shows us how to tune our movement to create the clearest path, the freest signal through that wiring so that we can work as effectively as possible. That efficiency means better performance, reduced pain. It's freaky how these things connect, and how quickly the effect can be demonstrated.
The Missing Manual
One of the biggest drags about us is that we don't come with The Manual.

I used to work a lot on motorcycles - this was necessary as i could only afford ones that were made a decade or more before the period in which i was riding them, and so, that telling you something about my finances, i had to be able to maintain them. One of the best resources for this up keep was (a) canadian tire, home of many parts that could be jury-rigged into working and (b) clymer manuals on how these things fit together - both the mechanicals and the all-important electrics. Without these manuals, hacking around the bike to try to tune it was just guess work. If it worked, it was often more luck than knowledge.
We don't come with Clymers. Netter's Anatomy and Guyton and Hall's Physiology while great texts on body parts and discrete physical systems, ain't great when it comes to seeing how, to put it loosely, the mechanical interacts with the electrics.
Without such a manual, what we often do in our own training, especially those of us who do not have coaches, is our best guess hacks. We read the articles, maybe follow some forums, watch friends, and try to put together an effective approach to get results, from getting the right gear to applying "correct" form. But how do we know what we're doing *is* actually right? is actually good for us? We're extremely complex, highly adaptive systems. We take tons of abuse, from poor eating to high heel shoes and keep functioning. So sometimes it's hard to tell if what we're doing is wrong - especially if we seem to be making progress. But at what cost progress? Perhaps if you're making loads of gains and are completely pain-free (either during or apart from your activity), you've lucked out and are operating optimally. Way to go. For the rest of us, well, there's this tension we get in the neck, or the back kinda aches, or sometimes when we walk our knee hurts. Pavel has this comment on his seminar with Charles Staley "Put up your hands anyone who's had a shoulder injury. Anyone who hasn't put up their hands, can't"
Anyone who's been in pain, and been helped out of it knows how much better their activities or daily lives are. For some of us, we go to manual therapies, and feel great for a time once we're off the table. For some, that treatment's enough. For many of us, we have to keep going back to get that release.
For all of us in such tweaked categories, getting a manual to deal with these tweaks proactively can make a world of difference to our performance - on and off the field; in and out of the gym.
Demystifying Movement
In the Z approach, athletes get a broader view of movement than muscle. After all, we have bones, muscles, nerves, but we also have sensory and perceptual functions or various systems that maintain those bones muscles and nerves in space. Without these we couldn't stay upright, little own move. The Z approach takes each of these components into account when talking about tuning movement.

Some folks think that Z is about joint mobility: that its thing is just to focus on moving the bendy bits instead of manipulating muscles, like other folks do.
In my experience of Z the answer is yes and no. Yes, the initial approach (Day 1 of the workshop, R Phase focus) is HUGE on getting full range of motion around joints, but the focus on joints is there as a powerful means to an end. The real meat and potatoes of the this initial phase is about what's happening around those joints with our nervous system, particularly with mechanoreceptors. Joints have more of these awareness detectors than any other part of the body. If one part of the body is having issues with its reception, the ENTIRE rest of the body responds. You'll see a demo that shows a problem with a thumb - no pain, but a less than fully mobile joint - will substantially, hugely shut down the ability of the hamstrings to generate force, but how freeing up that thumb joint will bring that strength back. That improvement in strength had nothing to do with building mass; it had to do with improving the signal path from a seemingly unrelated joint back to the brain - to give the all clear for that joint.
Bottom line of R: decreased joint mobility (a joint that cannot move through full range of motion), decreased strength; increased mobility, increased strength.
In Day 2 with I phase, the focus moves from the joints' relation to movement into how our visual and vestibular systems - balance, eye tracking and so on effect movement.
The S part of the workshop begins to put these components together into movement practice for coordinated benefit.
The workshop promo uses terms like "massive" development of power and "immediate" strength gains. These sound very much too good to be true, don't they? And (to me, unfortunately) the workshop also talks about "revealing secrets" to making these gains.
For the Less Trained. The thing is, if you haven't worked with a coach before ANY good coach will help you improve your performance - likely immediately. And if you haven't worked with a coach before, they may even break your current personal best in one session. So i'm not too moved by such claims. So on the grossest level, if you take this seminar you will definitely learn stuff to improve your performance, and you will see benefits right away. But what differentiates this approach from perhaps others is the longer haul: there are many many carry over effects of the whole Z approach that go beyond sport specific training.
If you learn how to squat right, for instance, you learn how to do this one activity well. If, however, you learn how to stand in balance on your bones, using as little energy as possible to hold a "long" spine, you have a foundation for effective powerful movement in any movement/activity (on day 3, if you're a kettlebeller, ask about "femur snap rather than hip snap" in the swing/snatch).
For the More Coached/Trained. If you have worked with coaches before, or do so right now, then you know how precious any gains can be. If your coaching/training has focused on mainly muscle work, it doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to get that if you can bring on board the other systems of the body like proprioception, like the vestibular and visual systems, that you're going to do better, harmonizing more of what the body has to offer to improve performance. Check out Mike T Nelson's posts about deadlift improvements with Z approaches for more.

For Those With Pain or Injury. If you've had an injury or are coping with one now, you'll know how valuable it can be to get out of pain so you can get back to your training. You may see a specialist to treat your ills and feel great while that happens. But have you asked yourself why do you have to keep going back to feel well? Do you believe that you will have to keep going to feel well? Would you like to explore the options of how you could take care of yourself such that you could get out of the treatment cycle?
If you are in pain, and would like that attended, may i recommend booking an appointment during the weekend with Dr. Cobb who will be delivering the workshop? He can assess and point you to a proactive plan for your own well being. It's worth it.
If you are keen to make your body last as long as possible pain free, running effectively, and efficiently, and if you want to improve your athletic performance, the skills you'll learn over these three days will literally last a life time.

Note for Instructors: if you're a trainer and want to learn how to provide these kinds of techniques for your clients, as well as how to do assessments of performance, you may want to consider taking in a Z-Health certification course rather than this workshop (here's a review of my experience with the first z-health cert, r-phase).


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