Barefoot walking and running your way to health

Tags

bare feet, barefoot running, chlamydia pneumoniae, kitlaughlin.com, Mt Arrawang, pronation, Stan Kelly, Vibram Five Fingers

One of my students from many years ago, James from Albuquerque, has been insisting for years in the various exchanges we have had on the old Discussion Boards that shoes are the cause of all, or most modern ills.  And those of you who have read these exchanges will know that I have asked James to offer some evidence to support these claims, because (among many other things) we all know people who wear shoes, have no back or neck pain, and are “healthy” in the Western medical sense (free of disease).  And (although I have not written about this) our family grew up in a place called “Putty” in NSW, and when we moved to our new property (I was 10), there was an Aboriginal family living there already (sounds like a smaller version of a familiar story).

Anyhow, I became great friends with the son (Stan) and Stan senior, the father, and my father also became friends and colleagues, because Stan senior was a great horseman.   And Stan senior had never worn shoes and never did the whole time I knew him. When we went mustering (in very rough country, the Mellong Ranges) older Stan often walked with us (I cannot recall why he did not ride on those occasions) barefoot all the way there and back—over 45 miles in the old measure. Can anyone imagine that? And when he rode, no riding boots could be seen—just these amazing brown feet gripping the stirrips.  I mention all this because Stan had no special flexibility, as I recall—but then I never saw him touching his toes to stretch his hamstrings, either!

Some here know that I was very ill and spent 10 days in hospital about seven years ago. I caught a mystery virus, and then chlamydia pneumoniae on top of that, probably while in hospital. And when I was released, I had lost 20Kg.  I lay flat on my back for almost six months, and had to get up to do the rewrite of Overcome neck & back pain. When I felt that I had recovered sufficiently, I went have to the Heavy Weights Room at the ANU, and stepped under the empty Olympic bar—and did four repetitions of the full back squat. That was it, and I was back in bed, prettty much, for a week.

Within a year, I had recovered fully, in a strength sense, had put on more than 20Kg, and did my best-ever front and back squats.  And in the process, I had got fat! I decided that I needed to include some aerobic activity, to fully repair my lungs, and to help get rid of some of this new weight. I decided to walk, as my new home is at the base of “Mt.” Arrawang (inverted commas because the ACT is already at 700m altitude, and the top of Mt Arrawang is only 200m higher!). Now, returning to James’s claims, I feel that there is at least some substance to them, because I found myself wanting to do at least some of this walking in bare feet. This has been a revelation.  I will expand on this in the next episode. Interested readers might like to look at the barefoot running sites, too. Best place to start is HERE.  More later.

The amazing Vibram Five Fingers

Tags

activation, foot placement, kitlaughlin.com, knee tracking, Vibram Five Fingers

On Mt Arrawang last week, a fellow walker looked at me in amazement and asked, “What’re those things?”

All toes spread, the ground gripped—these are weird and beautiful!

I replied: “The future of footware, in my view.” And so they are. The first time I wore these (I bought two pairs from a store in Vancouver on my last trip, in 2005, from memory) I walked up, and ran down, Mt Burnaby, a round trip of maybe 6km. Some of the walk/run was on concrete and asphalt; the rest on the kind of deep humus and rocks you find on forest trails in Canada. When I came back, I told my host (the famous Dr Wenzel) that “my body was singing; that every cell felt alive.” This is an amazing feeling.

This is the image you will leave in mud. Note the other users of the path!

I then walked in the second pair all around Vancouver’s downtown area—the whole day on concrete and asphalt. Amazingly, my body and feet did not feel tired at all. Usually, walking around a city for a whole day is really tiring, and my leg-length difference leaves my lower back feeling tight. Not this day.

Closeup of the toe pockets; You can see where I hit a rock with the big toe.

Update: I have now walked and run well over 2,000km in these ‘shoes’. I have done all my weight training and other exercising in them, too. And I have worn them around the urban environment. Simply, these are the most amazing shoes/foot gloves/’gecko grips’ that I have ever worn. I want to try to explain why.

A comparison between these shoes and no shoes tells us a lot about what these things are so good; why the experience of wearing them is so pleasurable and—frankly—exciting.

As an adult, when you try walking barefoot (assuming that, ordinarily, you wear shoes when walking or running) the first thing you feel is that the ground is sharp—a lot sharper than you are used to. If I can caricature for a moment, the way a novice barefoot walker or runner moves is like a cartoon character walking across hot coals: every part of the body is doing its best to pull weight away from the sole of the feet. You walk gingerly, because the soles of the feet are so sensitive. “Gingerly” means that ALL stabilisers are working, too.

The toes do much more work than you will be used to (unless you are used to running barefoot)

Foot placement is much more deliberate; it has to be. The body becomes acutely aware of the vulnerability of the feet, and uses them accordingly. In particular, watching the knees as you walk is very instructive: if, for example, you step on something pointed that is outside the midline of the foot, then the arch lifts and the adductors pull the knee across the midline to unweight that part of the sole. If the pointed object is on the inside of the midline of the foot, then the external hip rotators pull the knee to the outside of the midline of the body, again unweighting that part of the foot. This is ‘meso scale’ reaction.

In the foot itself, though, somewhat independent actions are happening (and this is why only the toes of the FFs show any wear): wherever a sharp object is felt, toes on either side of it press into the earth—the net effect is that this particular part of the sole that experiences the stimulation has the weight that the body would otherwise be pressing it it relieved. This happens rapidly, in concert with the knee movement mentioned above, and the ‘macro’ scale efforts of the body to dynamically reduce the weight on the soles. This includes rapid contractions of trapezius (momentarily reducing the weight of the arms), and larger spinal flexions that have similar effects with respect to the weight/momentum of the trunk and arms. All together, a simply amazing improvement to how the body generally uses itself when running or walking in shoes.

The sense in the body is that the whole body becomes involved in the action. The movement over/in the environment becomes distinctly animal-like.

Closeup of the razor sipes: these give phenomenal grip on rocks—or bricks, concrete or wet surfaces

Finally, I want to briefly mention why walking or running in the FFs changes the way the body uses the key gait muscles, gluteus maximus, quadriceps, and the hamstring group. The first thing any new wearer notices is that the knee is never straight, or even close to straight—in this way, the quads become the shock absorbers that I believe they are designed to be. Walking down steep steps like the Grouse Grind (google this; it is an amazing “walk” in Vancouver) you notice that the foot you are stepping down from passes with under the body, and the quads lower you (or, more correctly) slow your ‘falling’); the feet and legs become expert at doing this, and I noticed in the week I was walking up and running down the Grind, my quads got noticeably thicker, especially around the knees.

In climbing, you can feel the glutes working hard to extend the femur with respect to the trunk, and on flatter ground, the glutes and hamstrings ‘pull’ you forward. It is a completely different sensation to wearing either boots or shoes. And the most spectacular change to the body though I have saved for last: speaking as an ex-weight trainer, I have been amazed to see the change in size and definition of soleus; the net effect has been to push gastrocnemius further off the lower leg, making them look bigger, too. And the feet have changed the most: at least a half size bigger, due to a change in the circumference around both the arch and the forefoot. When walking on rough terrain, you can literally feel the feet ‘searching’ for the best purchase and placement.

Amazingly to me, though, is that the skin on the soles has not “toughened” the way most people assume must be the case when they see me run in these ‘feet gloves’; the skin is actually softer, and all callousing has disappeared. My experience is not that the feet toughen, at all—it is that the body learns how to use and place the feet (eventually, without you thinking about it), to the net result that the feet are not hurt by the surface you are walking or running on. And in this process, the feet have become more muscular (I will add shots of the bare feet when I get back to Canberra) and when walking on stones and rock, they mould to these surfaces effortlessly. I am a total convert. Try them (I wish I had shares in the company); you will love them.

Finally, have a look at this Daily Mail compendium of research into running shoes, HERE.

I believe the key to what happens in the body when you walk or run in FFs or bare feet is simply that the proprioceptors in the feet are woken from their slumber (their usual state is to be insulated from their environment, and they become ‘deskilled’ as a result, and similarly all the reflexes that depend on them being ‘awake’). In my view, the injuries that runners experience can all be alleviated by some or all walking/running being done in FFs or bare feet, the changes being achieved through the re-awakening and re-patterning of dysfuctional neural patterns that result from a sedentary lifestyle, and from insulating yourself from the environmental stimulation that the body requires.

The last thing I want to show you is how these ‘shoes’ wear; none of your conventional running shoes ever wear out the little toes part of the sole first; have a look at this:

Almost all the extra rubber on the toes has worn away

I have worn nothing else over the last six years or so; more to come.

The new 13″ MacBook Air, two softwares, and DropBox: on-the-road perfection

Tags

1Password, anti-glare screen coating, ChronoSync, DropBox, kitlaughlin.com, MacBook Air, photography, SSD vs. ordinary HDD, synchronise bi-directional, syncing two computers

Background (skip this if you just want the main story; see Main Story, below)

I change my computers annually, usually. I like to use the best technology, for aesthetic and efficiency reasons and, because so much of my working life revolves around airports and being away from home, I have specific needs for computing hardware and softwares.

I am a photographer, so need colour-accurate screens; I make all our YouTube clips, so need real number-crunching power (high definition video, at 25 or 50 frames a second, when being output, uses most any CPU capacity you can throw at it and Final Cut Studio takes over the machine as it does these intensive tasks), and then there’s the much lesser demands of writing and emailing, which can be done on a machine of any power or size, especially now in the cloud era. Weight, transportability, and screen legibility are essential on the travel machine, but it must be able to do the ‘heavy lifting’ while on the road: this means it must run Final Cut Studio and Aperture, as well as the Microsoft Office Suite, Ultra Edit, Photoshop, and Transmit, among others.

Speaking now about the latest advances in the Apple ecology, I have found that the high-resolution screens of the newest Apple computers have reached the ‘diminishing returns’ point: the latest Retina display 15″ MacBook Pro (MBP), for example, did not move me enough to buy it, simply because the 15″ MBP I already had features the matte, higher-resolution screen (a special order, for the photographic work)—and when I did a side-by-side comparison, I just did not see the Retina screen advantage any significant improvement for my needs; the CPU speed increase was negligible; and my present 15″ MBP has a DVD player/burner as well which has been dropped from the Retina 15″, to decrease thickness and weight.

Last year’s 15″ MBP features quad-core processing and that, too, is approaching the diminishing returns point (assuming a fast SSD is fitted, which mine has, and better technology that Apple’s, and maximum RAM). This last point is significant: if the SSD is fast, it can be used as virtual memory when necessary; the differences in opening another app and in saving are very significant over any speed Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Up until now, I have run a 13″ MBP alongside the 15″ MBP, both fitted with the same Mercury SSDs; using both means I can keep working while the bigger machine crunches the most recent 1,000 image shoot, or is rendering and sending a HD video out to a FireWire drive, for uploading to YT. This dual-machine system has worked very well for a year or so. I did not keep these machines synced; I simply copied the ‘main’ machine’s Documents folder over onto the 13″ MBP from time to time. More on this below.

Coincidentally, when the latest MacBook Air 13″ surfaced, the 13″ MBP started developing possibly terminal hardware problems (faulty logic board, we think), so I went off to the Apple store near the Uni (thanks Tristan!) to check the new Air out. I have owned earlier iterations of both the 11″ and 13″ MBAs, but sold them both and replaced them with the now-ailing 13″ MBP: the earlier Airs were, I felt, too compromised on the performance side) while definitely ticking the portability box), and the Solid State Drives they incorporated were not the best; are not able to be changed by the owner and, the worst aspect, the glass screens were virtually unusable in any airports: reflection city. The 13″ MBP, on the other hand, has no such limitations (apart from its shiny glass screen), and I had fitted a Mercury SSD that was both less expensive and a faster, longer-lived, performer (anyone wanting to know more about this performance aspect over time, check out the term load-leveling).

And looking at the latest MBA’s glass screen in the Apple store, I realised that my #1 complaint about the earlier MBAs was moot: the new model has an extremely effective coating that reduces reflections to a completely tolerable level; not quite as effective as the made-to-order matte screen on the 15″ MBP, but very close. Further, using Geekbench, the new top spec MBA (with the i7 chip), max. RAM and a 256GB SSD, scored 7,500; and despite the extra cores, my quad-core 15″ MBP scored only 10,300—the Air’s real-world performance that is definitely  in the same ‘ball park’. No DVD SuperDrive, but I do have the external version for the MPA, for when needed.

Main story

If one runs two computers, instantly a major potential problem arises: how do you (or do you?), keep them in sync? And, if so, are we talking softwares and data (documents) or does the on-the-road machine have a lighter software suite, but with the same documents? I decided the latter, but the problem of how to keep the documents synced remained: one’s memory is just not reliable enough to recall which articles/notes spreadsheets one wrote or updated while away. Copying 15GB of Document folder back over the other machine takes quite a while, too. So, I started to investigate the software options.

Before I begin this thread, though, I should mention that I am running Mountain Lion on both machines, so Contacts, Mail, Bookmarks in Safari and so on are all synced automatically. When I say “documents” I am talking everything you can priduce on a computer, from a new YT clip to edited images in Aperture to written (word processed) documents and spreadsheets—I need these to be the same on both machines, and for this to be a simple easy process, because I used to sometimes take the bigger machine on the road if I anticipated a lot of editing (and the bigger screen makes this a little easier, too) but I always resented the weight.

ChronoSync won me over (you can trial, for a month, the full version; you need to really test a software before buying, in my view, and it has to be a full version at that—why don’t more software developers understand this?). Anyhow, I had been working on the MBA, and wanted to update the Documents folder on the 15″ MBP, using the MBA as the source. So, using the nifty Thunderbolt–FW800 connecter, I fired up the 15″ machine in Target mode, and ChronoSync went to work. It blazed away (it seems to have very clever algorithms that know whether a file is changed, or is new) and within five or six minutes, the sync was complete. Much faster than brute copying the whole folder. Most of that time was spent actually copying, too; excellent software design. Checking revealed a large number of files I had forgotten I had changed or created were now, in fact, identical on the MBP. I used the “Synchronise Bi-Directional” mode (there are many others) because its use achieves two identical versions on the two machines, including deletions (after the first sync); it operates in both directions across both machines, and thus automatically makes a faithful backup as a consequence as well. I do run TimeMachine on both computers, too (but you can’t be too careful in this regard).

One final part of the puzzle remained: wanting better security for internet passwords (my natural nervousness in this regard having been moved to DEFCON 5 by THIS article on Ars Technica), how could I implement better passwords and usernames and keep these in sync over both machines—because only the nature of the day’s work determines which machine I choose to take out the door?

I tried all the options suggested in the Ars Technica article, and settled on 1Password: an elegant interface that not only has the best security the industry can offer presently, it also has a random password that can be configured (length, number of number characters, etc. to better fit any password restrictions on particular sites), all the usual potential problems about needing to enter a current password while generating/changing to a new one have been anticipated and solved; and the “Vault” (the super-secure place all this info is kept) has one other unexpected and wonderful other feature, the “Wallet”.

This is where you keep all credit card details: and, identically to the “Logins” window, you can copy and paste from there to a shop site easily. No more miss-types of 13+ account numbers: do it once properly, and you are good to go. I spent an afternoon one day, and a morning the next, and not only was all the info. entered, I had re-checked it, all is now accurate AND all my usual logins feature 20-character versions, randomly generated, including some numerical characters.

One last problem remained: how to have the Vault on both machines? I went back to the 1Password’s on-line user’s manual, and found that DropBox is perfectly integrated with it, and I had installed DropBox on both machines already. All I needed to do was to go in to 1Password’s preferences and tell it to use DropBox—and immediately it began syncing the plist file that contains all the Vault’s encrypted data with its cloud.

I loaded up 1Password on to the 15″ MBP (I bought the Family Pack so Olivia’s passwords can be made more secure), and Dropbox loaded the data file into the second machine’s version of 1Password as soon as the software was started. I then spent the morning on the second machine, still a bit worried about whether all the new passwords I was generating on the 15″ machine would sync back to the MBS, but the worry was needless. As soon as I opened the MBA, Dropbox went to work and synced the 1Password date file back the other way—and opening the Vault revealed the morning’s work. I was impressed, frankly.

So: the upshot? I take whatever machine I want out the door, either to a photo job or to the airport, and I know that any new passwords that I might need to create will sync automatically, as soon as the other machine is connected to a network. And all I need to do to sync documents and videos (more on this below) is to do the Bi-Directional sync using ChronoSync when I get back home.

The final note I want to sound here is that, against expectations, the MBA with a USB3 drive attached is perfectly capable of editing 720p HD video. A MacBook Air: small and light enough to fit in an envelope! Before I edited the most recent YT clip, I did not think this would be possible (first, because I did not know if USB3 would work for HD and Final cut Studio; it’s a fickle beast in this regard), and because the Thunderbolt port is needed to run the 30″ Cinema HD display in my setup in the studio, meaning that I could not run the usual FW800 external HDDs via this port). But now I can say this tiny system works perfectly: I have a high-def video editing suite that weighs practically nothing.

I will write another blog on the other part of the video-creation on-the-road puzzle: what to shoot the video with? Stay tuned.