 Question is from Tanner Sorals. How important are the types of shoes you wear when lifting? What effect do flat soles, arch support, elevated heels, et cetera have? You know, you know, had you asked me this question years ago, I would have been like, eh, it doesn't matter. Just do your workout. Then I got myself a pair of squat shoes. And you know, this is, you know, CrossFit was getting real popular early on. I would see lifters using squat shoes. I thought it was silly. Now you're onto the new balanced dad shoes. Yeah. Just because, you know, you want to be awesome. Yeah. Exactly. It's my sex repellent. But no, I, yeah. No, but I would see people use squat shoes. I used to think that's so dumb. Who cares? What's the big deal? Whatever. Then I put some on and I was able to squat like 20 more pounds right away. And the reason why is because the way squat shoes work is they elevate the heels are very stable and they, they require less ankle mobility. So I now don't have to have as much ankle mobility to be able to squat as low with as much strength or whatever. So shoes make a very, very big difference. Now here's the thing. Ideally you have feet that are strong, stable, that you can articulate. And ideally you'd work out in flat shoes or shoes that have no support so that your foot is constantly stabilizing and being connected to the floor. That's the best possible way to generally work out. Now here's the problem. 99.9% of you listening right now are not that person. Most of your feet aren't ready for that. No. And if you go work out with flat, you know, no support shoes or whatever, you'll actually increase your risk of injury. So if you always work out with lots of support, but you want to move towards working out with less support, do it very, very slowly and work on things like foot and ankle mobility. Otherwise, if you don't care about all that stuff and you're like, I don't care about my foot and ankle mobility, which is too bad. Cause I think it's something you should, but if you don't, I'd say put the shoes on that help you lift the most comfortably. Um, and then you're set. Well, you were, you were actually the person that turned me on to squat shoes and never squatted. I do turn people on. Yeah. Uh, I had never used a squat shoes in my life before, um, until like it was like the first, very first year that mine pump was getting started and, uh, you know, salad said, Hey man, you're going to try these squat shoes that I just got. I think it'll, it'll really help your squat. And you were raving about how much it helped and it felt better to squat in them. And I thought, okay, well, let me, let me try them. And I tried them and felt the same thing too. Now, what I, what I loved about that whole situation in, in my fitness journey, cause this is 15 years and later in my career, I'm very aware of the importance of hip mobility, ankle mobility, all that stuff. I'm not naive to any of that. I have all my certifications that helped me teach all that shit. But yet ironically, I did not realize how what a limiting factor it was in my squat. And until those shoes, until I felt, wow, my squat feels so much better. And all they are doing is they are, they are crutching my lack of ankle mobility. And now because I have something that is assisting that, all of a sudden my squat felt so much better. So what it really did for me was, and that was right before I went in my hardcore mobility kick is it really opened my eyes of how much I lacked that. And never in my career had I really dedicated like, okay, I'm going to improve my ankle mobility. I'm really going to get after this and see if I can make a difference there. And I tell you it is the single best thing that I have done for my squat is to improve my, and I think that's exaggerated for someone like me because I'm six foot three and I have long limbs. So I think somebody who has really long limbs and is tall, this is exceptionally or exceptionally important for them because you in order for a big six foot three tall person to get into a really deep squat, you have to have good ankle mobility unless you have these odd weird short legs and limbs on your lower body, but not your upper body. And that's how you're six three. That would be a really weird looking person. Most people that are above six foot tall are going to have relatively long limbs and that in order to get yourself all the way down into a deep squat, it just requires so much more ankle mobility. And I mean, I've, I remember when I first started, I did the combat stretch, which is where the video I did on YouTube where you push your knee over and I could get maybe comfortably a quarter of an inch, you know, beyond my toes. And because as a trainer, we were taught to teach people. Yeah, never go past your toes. Never go past your toes for safety reasons, right? All the certifications taught, you know, your knees should be right above your toes. Too much stress and ligaments. Right. And we didn't want to stress the patella and this was dangerous to do that. So I coached that way forever. I most certainly train that way forever. Yet when you look at like some of the best squatters in the world, your Olympic lifters and stuff like that, you look at their knees and their knees are like a half a foot beyond their toes. And so I began to pursue this. Can I get my knees, you know, several inches beyond my toes? And that is that's where the squat and scroll came from. That's where this ability for me to go ass to grass. But it was all the work and effort that was put into that. The shoes was what helped me, though, to see that and then to work towards that. Yeah, it was interesting. I used to always wear like running shoes or like Nike shoes or like supported shoes, like forever working out because I thought that we had to have that, you know, we had to have that support constantly. And I was in this gym and this is like when the whole like five finger shoes started to kind of take off the minimalist kind of stuff. And there was lots of trainers actually in there with their clients in Chucks. And I was like making fun of them. I'm just like, what are you doing? Like they're in Chucks. We're working out here. Like what's happening? And then I started to realize too. I gave it a try and was just kind of like gradually like trying to get like more of a minimalist type shoe and immediately found like the functionality there too as well doing lunges or things like that where I could, you know, get on my forefoot a lot easier. I had that flexibility there in my shoe to where it allowed, you know, more of the natural sort of ways of stabilizing with my feet to occur. And so I started to kind of bring that in with my clients and sort of play with that, but it was very much like not, not, I didn't want to jump from these moon shoes down to like nothing, you know, supporting that because there was issues of that where people get really aggressive with now I could just do everything like barefoot almost, but I haven't built up that support system. Oh, that when that whole movement happened, a lot of people got hurt. There was a movement there for a second in the running. There was a lawsuit too. Yeah. Where there were runners who were talking. It was a book. I don't remember what it was. It was a book that came out. It talked about born to run. That's, is that it right there? And I guess the, I don't read the book, but I believe the author went around the world and watched people run around the world from cultures where and tribes, for example, where they've been running since they were children and he noticed he would photograph them running. And he noticed with that when people run barefoot, especially people who've been running barefoot for a long time, that they hit the ground differently than when you run with big running shoes. And he said, oh, we're running totally wrong. And everything that he says that I know that he said so far, again, I read the book is totally true. It's a hundred percent correct. The problem is if you grew up in a modern Western society, you've probably worn shoes since the second you could walk. In fact, if you look at little kids shoes that are really stiff on the bottom and they say, oh, this is good to support your kids feet or whatever. And as an adult, you walk in heels or tennis shoes or whatever. And it just look at your foot, take your foot out, take, take your sock off, look down at your foot, then Google a picture of a hunter gatherer's foot. Besides the calluses and all that stuff. Look at their toes. Yeah, look at how they can articulate them just like fingers. Yeah, their toes are spread out. Their feet are muscular. You look at our toes, our toes are all crunched together. If you have really big feet, your toes are really fucked up. Look at the pictures of NBA players feet. Yeah, LeBron James. Scary because their feet were so big. I'm sure they wore shoes that didn't fit them. And so our feet and everything kind of formed to the shoes that we wore, the fact that we have all the support. And so if you go from where you're at now to going barefoot, you're going to totally hurt yourself. You're going to cause yourself problems. So it's a very slow process. And look, inserts, shoe inserts and, you know, art support and stuff like that can be huge helps for a lot of people. You know, some people have back problems and ankle issues and knee issues and they wear inserts and their feet, their joints feel a lot better. And that's because they're, it's like a crutch. It's, it's causing better movement, but you can train your feet and your ankles to get stronger so that you don't need some of the stuff, but they respond properly. Again, it's a very long process though. I used to actually take my clients and it was a new thing that I'd introduce of just walking with their barefoot before we even get started training and just to see, you know, how they were like loading their foot in like what kind of patterns that, you know, they were falling upon like walking down and back and you could see all that as a trainer very visibly. Oh, it's crazy because the bottom of your foot is got, you know, tons and tons of nerve endings. You can articulate. We're supposed to be able to articulate our toes quite well. Obviously not like our hands, but if you guys close, but have you guys ever seen videos of people with no hands? Yeah. And they can write with their feet, they can eat cereal. Yeah, with spoons and stuff. So the capability is there and think of all the brain networks that are connected to that, that are totally atrophied because we wear these casts essentially on our feet, you know, 24 seven. And so when ends up happening, you grow up this way, you're an adult, you're like, I want to reverse this. I want to have, you know, you're going to make progress, but you'll never unfortunately be able to get that same ability that you had that potential because, you know, you grew up most of your life wearing shoes, so be very careful. I definitely, I mean, I highly recommend, and when I say training, I mean like weight training, not running, because I think running is what's more risky barefoot than way more skill and weight training. I think I think getting a client or myself once, once a week, for sure, when I'm training, even when my frequency is low, I will get for sure a workout in barefoot. I love to do walking lunges, barefoot. I love to do tippy toe squats, barefoot deadlift. Yeah, I love to do my mobility drills barefoot. So I'll start off before I even get into my way training, I kick the shoes off, do all my 90-90 combat drills and, you know, lizard with rotation, and I'm doing that all barefoot, I definitely think there was a, I mean, what, two, three years ago on the show, I was sharing a lot on my Instagram of barefoot walking. I would try and take a 10-minute walk every day. Now, what if you go to a gym and they say you can't go barefoot? So then how do you guys feel about the five-finger shoes? I mean, there's value in it for that. I think it's going to kill your sex life, but I mean, if you're if you're that's your only way to do it. I mean, here's the thing, I would take that same person who goes to that gym. OK, because I at the time that I was doing this, I had the same gym. So I was going to a gym that I couldn't take my shoes off with that. So every day I took a 10-minute walk barefoot with my dog. So I would personally, that's me. I'm not a big five-finger shoe guy. I just I think they are like ridiculous and ugly. And that's not a reason not to do them. If you really care about building your foot strength and you want to work towards it, I think there's value in walking around. And those are the thing is just putting those on isn't going to help a lot of people because they still have their bad movement patterns. They still have their muscle imbalances. So all that's going to happen is they're going to hurt themselves. Like my I'll give you an example. My aunt was having some issues and her I recommended that she start walking around at home barefoot because she's always in heels for work. First way to do it. Well, the problem was she overdid it and had caused plantar fasciitis. And it's because her foot was so used to being in heels. You got to do it very, very slowly. And the best thing you can do is this. Look, if you if you really want to work on ankle and foot strength and mobility, which I'm not lying, will make a tremendous impact on all of your standing lifts and just how you feel. It makes that big of a difference. It's a it's a part of your body that's not developed. So imagine if it becomes developed, it'll impact everything, right? Maps Prime Pro Maps Prime Pro has an ankle and foot section and you need to do those exercises to two to three times a day, five to ten minutes at a time every single day. And do those specific exercise before you decide to go. Just just put on five finger toe shoes or go walk around barefoot.