The Truth about Your Shoes with Steven Sashen | How to Improve Your Step

06/28/23 • 92 min

Born to be Barefoot | From Science to Life

Today we talk to Steven Sashen who is the co-founder and CEO of Xero Shoes www.XeroShoes.com. Steven and his wife, Lena Phoenix, started the company after discovering the comfort, benefits, and fun of natural movement, by getting out of thick, padded, motion-controlled shoes. Steven got back into running later in his life and was having all kinds of issues and injuries until someone suggested he try running barefoot to better understand his form in running. He was then able to see clearly that his form was wrong, which naturally corrected itself as he paid attention to this, and then he stopped getting injured and became a better runner.

Xero Shoes 1:30
Steven’s main sports and training 9:00
The Nordic hamstring curl and exercises 11:35
What shoe he runs in 13:55
His backstory before entering this adventure 30:00
Advice for someone coming to a shoe like Xero Shoe 45:00
Helping women with arthritis 57:10
Static position doesn’t help build strength 61:35
Foot coffins 71:10

“The way our product line developed is from people saying like you said, ‘I can’t wear anything else, but now I need a shoe for this thing that you don’t currently do.’ That’s how we’ve developed a product line is based on people saying ‘What am I gonna do if I have to go to work and I need a leather shoe?’ OK well we just made a leather casual shoe for you.” 27:05
@xeroshoesxeroshoes.com

Xero Shoes 1:30
Steven’s main sports and training 9:00
The Nordic hamstring curl and exercises 11:35
What shoe he runs in 13:55
His backstory before entering this adventure 30:00
Advice for someone coming to a shoe like Xero Shoe 45:00
Helping women with arthritis 57:10
Static position doesn’t help build strength 61:35
Foot coffins 71:10

Previous Episode

An Honest Conversation about Running with Kelly Roberts | Let’s Take a Different Approach

Katie and Stuart sit down with Kelly Roberts who is the Founder of Badass Lady Gang, a running community created by women for women. This foundation was created to help women find joy in the struggle, providing women of all athletic levels a safe space to have fun and belong. There are some crazy health fads out there and ideas that pop up and grow popular on social media, such as the one where people were pushing the idea that you don’t need much sleep and can be more productive because you’ll have more time, but people weren’t realizing the bad health consequences one can experience when neglecting sleep. Kelly explains bluntly that running is hard and often just isn’t fun, but it’s OK to acknowledge this and just keep moving forward. She has a love/hate relationship with running, but she keeps doing it because she needs it and it gives her fuel for success in her life.

About Kelly 1:20
The challenges that she often sees 8:30
Dating and sports bras 18:00
Running an iron man 22:25
What’s hard about the running 36:50

“You’re never going to get away from that feeling of extreme discomfort and pain, and fear when you’re trying to run as fast as you can in 26.2 miles. That’s just the way it is when you’re doing something like that, but you can change your attitude around it.” 32:17
@badassladygangwww.badassladygang.com

Next Episode

Mountain Running with Grayson Murphy | Developing Athletic Talent

Grayson Murphy is astonishing. She is a current world champion in mountain running, which is a new sport to us, but we’re excited to talk to her about it. She got a bronze this year in the vertical climb for mountain running, and she tells us all about her experience going through the championships. She’s now training and has even recently qualified for going to the Olympics, but has also dealt with some injuries and nerve issues that prevented her from competing and it took a long process of trial and error, but eventually she was able to figure it out and continue training.

A bit about Grayson’s experience 1:15
How she got into this sport 4:50
Moving to running from soccer 14:30
Aiming for the olympics 24:10
Her boyfriend also shooting high 26:40
Self treatment and injury 29:10
Mental health and her training logs 34:55
Getting a variety of skill sets 43:20

“I figured out I had choked out a nerve and so I couldn’t feel a lot of things and I couldn’t get the muscles to turn on, so that’s why it felt dead. It took 4 months of kind of trying to figure out what was wrong, and then once I figured it out it only took 4 weeks to get it up and running again, but it was a long process of trial and error.” 30:36
@racin__grayson