Welcome to Fitness Friday. I'm Nathan Crane with Crane Factor where we bring you leading edge information products and training on living a healthy, fit and inspired life. And today I want to talk about the benefits of wearing barefoot shoes. Now you're probably seeing the five finger shoes, right, or even super thin shoes. Have a super thin sole. There's a zero millimeter. They have a super thin sole. There's a zero millimeter heel to toe drop meaning that it's just flat. You don't get that raised heel in the back like most athletic shoes give you. Let me show you here real quick what I'm wearing. I'm wearing the Vibrom five fingers right and gives you the space for your toes. Now should you really wear these? What's the benefit? Why should you wear them? Where they gonna do for your body? Can you wear them training? Can you wear them weightlifting? Can you wear them running? Can you wear them just every day? Now let me answer all those questions as quick as I possibly can. The answer to all of them is yes you can wear them for everything. And you also have to be careful about how quickly you wear them and how often you wear them. So I'll get into that in a minute. As first talk about the benefits of being totally barefoot or wearing barefoot shoes. One is it helps your feet to get into their more natural state. If you look at my feet and most kind of athletic people's feet, people who grew up in sports or athletics a lot of times especially if their parents did as well and their grandparents did then the jeans get spread down through epigenetics through each generation and the feet rather than the toes coming out perfectly straight they start to curve in. Now if you take an athletic shoe, a cleat, a cowboy boot, anything that you know us or our parents or our grandparents wore then you'll see their shape like this right exactly like this that come to a point and your feet are shaped exactly like that. Well that's not how our feet are supposed to be designed. They get shaped into the shape of the shoe. Now what that does is that can later start to cause some issues with joint pain, knee pain, back pain, things like that. It also causes issues with the arch. The arch becoming more flat footed right because you a lot of these shoes have arch support. I remember when I was in football soccer things like that the podiatrist, I always recommend hey you need extra arch support. What was that do? That prevents your foot from creating its own arch right and so then you take that out and then you have real problems with your heels. I had major problems with my heels as a kid, major problems with quads, with knees, things like that and still dealing with some of those issues today that I'm having to correct. One of the things that will correct on is wearing barefoot shoes. Why? It allows your feet to build their own natural arch. It allows your toes to start forming in that straight open design that they're supposed to be and that's how they're supposed to be and we lose that by the time the shoes we wear. You should definitely be wearing barefoot shoes in your life or even just flat sandals or earth runners or any kind of shoe that assimilates a barefoot style of shoe. It's going to help your body over the long term. You're not going to see benefits in a few days but in a few years you'll start seeing a big difference. One thing you've got to be really careful with though transitioning barefoot shoes is that especially if you're an athlete or you do any kind of running or weightlifting or cross-fit or things like that, you want to ease into it because like what happened to me, I started wearing them when I was running and training for an ultra marathon and the first time I wore them I went out and ran like a regular seven or eight mile training run. About five, four to five miles in, I tore a tendon between my toes. Then I had to run the rest of the three miles or whatever it was on that torn tendon to get back home and that sucked. I couldn't run for months after that and it was just because my feet just weren't used to it. So what I recommend to start with is you start wearing them just walking around you know a few hours a day. If you just go to work or you go to the gym or you go out to grow or store whatever you're doing, just start wearing them naturally walking as much as you can. Do that for a few weeks before you actually start training in them and then we start training in them, you start running in them or working out in them, you know, do it really slowly. So if you normally run, say maybe a couple miles, only run half of that right, run a mile or a half a mile, first start doing that a few days a week, start working up to it because then when you do, you're going to notice a huge difference in your posture. There is a huge difference over time in the arch of your feet. Your feet will actually become stronger. The tendons, the ligaments in your feet become stronger. This is all scientifically proven which ultimately helps your knees, helps your hips, helps your back. So over time the more and more you wear them, the more and more you bring them into your training. The more and more you can just wear them around every day and running them, training them, the more it's going to help your body long term to get healthy, more fit, more strong, more agile, everything. So the shoe are amazing to add into your life. Ultimately just going barefoot as much as you can walking around the house. Like I almost never wear shoes or socks or anything inside the house or when I'm walking around outside, I go barefoot as much as I possibly can. Just that alone will help you as well and then add these in for your every day. You're going to make a huge difference. So yes, the science concludes, our ancestry concludes, the epigenax concludes. Wearing barefoot shoes is going to help your body in the long run. So start adding them in today. So that's it for today's fitness Friday. Feel free to leave me your thoughts, comments below. We will respond to any questions you might have. If you got some good tips from this, give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button. If you're not subscribed yet, we put out new videos every single week. So thanks so much. We'll talk to you next time.