1322: Courtney Conley | The Step-by-Step Guide to Living Longer

started a shopping trip.

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And the platform makes me no problem. I have many problems, but the platform is not one of them. I have the feeling that shopping trip will continue to continue. Everything is super simple, integrative and useful. And the time and the money that I can't invest in there is no other way.

For all of you, in WaxTomb. Yet the customer was tested on Shopify.com.com, coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Oh, mother and daughters, they actually can build relationships when they're walking. And like you would have thought, teenage girls are their own little animal. Okay, just come walk with me, just give me five minutes.

I had her walk with me after dinner. We'd be a couple minutes into that walk, and then the floodgates would just open. That doesn't happen when I'm sitting across from her at a dinner table. It doesn't happen when I go up into her room.

“It's when we're outside, and she can just kind of relax a little bit, walking together is so important.”

People need socialization. They need to have community. You cannot lose, especially when you're walking with someone. I say, okay, we got some work to do. Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we'd encode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. In turn, there was them into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life.

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It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit Jordanharbinger.com/start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, walking might be the most powerful health tool you have, and most people are kind of screwing it up. Not you could afford to optimize this a little type of screwing it up, kind of just fundamentally misunderstanding what walking even is. I know that's a little depressing, but hey, walking lowers your risk of death, it improves mental health predicts in a way how long you live,

and we've somehow turned it into this optional choice that your watch nags you about. Today's guest says walking isn't exercise, it's survival, and if you're not doing enough of it, or you're doing it wrong, you're basically running a slow, quiet systems failure on your own body. Now, here we go with Courtney Conley.

“So I'll just ask the most obvious, probably dumbest question first, which is how can we walk wrong?”

I mean, we learn it as a baby. Nothing has changed much for me other than I fall down less, and I don't what the bed as much as I used to. How can I be doing that incorrectly? How can I be doing those basic human movement that I learned through instinct incorrectly? How is that possible? It's a great way to start. Believe it or not, it's probably one of the most common questions I get in my clinic is patients will come in and they'll say to me, you know, I just feel like something's off

or they're having difficulty with efficiency. Now, they don't quite use that term, but us being a biped, so walking on to fate should be something that we do very well, and we should be able to do for very long periods of time. We are endurance walkers, if you will. As we age, if suddenly this becomes difficult, or the efficiency becomes a problem, then people start saying, hey, this seems weird. Why can't I walk normally, if you will? It poses a great question because I don't think that

we were all designed to walk the same. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about watching someone's walking gate. It's a window to their soul, really. You can tell if someone just got a promotion, or just got fired. They kind of wear their emotions with how they walk. It's kind of a foot

printer, a fingerprint, if you will. So when I'm always working with improving someone's walking

gate, it's about making them more efficient, not necessarily making us all look like soldiers. Got it. Yeah, you know, it's years ago a friend of mine was waiting for me in my apartment and I lived on the Hollywood Boulevard, and I was probably like four floors up, and he was looking out at Hollywood Boulevard. And I came in the door and I was like, "Air, and I haven't seen you

“and so long." And he's like, "I saw you walking down the street." And I was like, "Man, you must have”

a really good vision." He goes, "No, you just have a really specific gate." And unfortunately, no, that means it's weird because my dad has this. He walks like he's got a broomstick up his keyster, and I probably have some version of that's, you know, getting worse as I age. I know what

a crowd, even from up above four floors. Like, it's obvious, plain as day. I'll never disappear into a crowd

in a spy movie. They would never pick me for that. If you pay attention, there's a lot of people that have very unique gates to them. People in the military, for example, will often say they'll have a gunslingers gate because the gun will be on one side, so they'll only be swinging one arm. I don't know if you're familiar with the show, "Sons of Anarchy," but the main character. I am, yeah. Charlie Hunter, my belief is his name.

Jack's Teller? Is that her that is? Yes. Jack's Teller. He has like this kind of macho gate. And he was being interviewed once and I thought this is really interesting and they were like, "Did you have to, you know, learn how to walk like that for this show?" And he was like, "No," he's like, "Actually, I just grew up in a rough part of town and you just adopted this,

“don't mess with me gate." And that's what he has now utilized. So I think it's interesting when”

you see people's environments in the gate that they've adopted over the years. Yeah, that is interesting. So he basically was playing some version of himself, right? As many actors do. I always find it so impressive when you see, I remember him having an interview and I was like, "That guy's an Irish accent? Holy moly." That's always so funny and shocking. Or you see somebody who's like really tough and menacing and then you see an interview with them

and they're like a flamboyantly gay man who's really not scary at all and you're like, "Wow,

you're such a good actor." Holy smokes! I would never have thought for one second

that you're this like fun, friendly guy who you'd love to hang out with in a boy like you're a really good villain, man. And yeah, Jack's Teller's same thing with that accent, but I guess it is funny that he didn't need any of that. Just nope, I grew up in a place with a bunch of pipe hitters. And if you didn't walk like that, you got beat up more, so here we are. Tells a story. Yeah, I wonder, is there any sort of connection between the testosterone level

and man has in the way that they walk or anything like that? Has that ever been studying? That has not been studied, but I would be curious to see the results on that one. You've said in your book, "Walking is not an exercise but a biological necessity." That's I think bad news for 99% of us. I timed how much I was sitting because my trainer was telling me, "Hey, the reason you're so stiff here in here is because you sit too much. I was like,

I'll sit that much. I sit eight plus or ten hours a day, depending on how much work I have that day." So the sitting versus walking thing, I assume people used to walk the amount that we now sit. Is that accurate? Yeah, I mean, it is when I was doing the research for this book, it was really shocking to me to see actually how many of us are not doing a necessity

“to allow us to live well and live long. That's why I was so intriguing to write this book,”

because I was like, "We're looking at this all wrong." Walking should is a physiological necessity. It's a core biological input, similar to breathing and sleeping. In these things are necessary for our survival. It's that repetitive, low to moderate intensity motion that stimulates every system in our body. It's very different than your one-hour spin class or your one-hour workout. It's an activity that needs to be trickled in throughout the day to stimulate our system.

And when we have that input, that biological input, and that's working well, and we're sleeping well, and we're breathing well. These are the stacking of behaviors that allow us to really live well and live long. And I'll tell you, it's really hard. It's hard to be alive right now and say yourself, "What am I supposed to be doing? I have to eat all this protein. I have to strength train three times a week." And I have to, and I'm sitting here like going, "We're making this

“really difficult." Yes, these things are important, but if you look at baseline necessity,”

the average stepcount for people is around 4,700 steps per day, which means that there's a lot of us doing less than that. And so when you say, "You don't realize how many steps you're taking or that sitting has become more part of your day." I was pretty shocked to hear that myself.

Now, the first thing I ask my patients when they come into my office, I'm like, "How many steps

a day are you getting?" Yeah, how much are we supposed to get? Because I'm looking at my phone right now, and I'm like, "Okay, some days I have 15,000 or 10,000, but like most of this week, it's been 3,000, 4,300. I mean, I'm 6, so that's part of it, but it's not great." So, any movement is better than nothing. So, in the book, we talk about, you know, meeting people where they are. So, I have plenty of patients that are in chronic pain, and I'm sure we'll

get to foot pain, but that is a big part of it when people can't walk because something hurts. And I will have patients come in where their stepcount is below 2,500 steps a day. That is sedentary. So, at that stage, even adding 500 steps, which is five minutes, a five minute micro walk

those 500 steps make such a huge impact in their health, decreasing all cause mortality. I mean,

that's where the big bang for your buck is when the stepcount is low.

“Because you're getting like a 20, 25% increase in daily stepcount, what do you call it a micro walk?”

A micro walk. So, we define that in the book as five minutes. I wanted to make things digestible for people. So, if we talk about this walking spectrum, these are the people that, you know, are pretty sedentary, whether it's because they've been in pain or they've just engineered their way out of walking or what have you. Whatever their reason may be, adding five minutes to your day, adds 500 steps. That's game-changing. That seems really easy, but we are to your point,

engineering, walking out of our lives. I know people have treadmill, working stations now and said, "Well, actually, what do you think of that?" Because you want people to walk more, but something about that doesn't seem right to me because you're not, you're probably not getting variation in how you strike the ground and you're not getting any fresh air or sun and curious what you think of it. Is it better than nothing or is it just like a silly biohacker thing? I think it's better than

“nothing. A lot of my patients will be like, "I don't sit at my desk, but now I have a standing desk.”

You're still not moving." Gravity is still winning here. So whether you're sitting or you're standing, there's no movement variability happening, and it's that movement variability that our body's crave. So these walking treadmills that people have under their desks, I'm all for it, because especially in environments where it's cold all winter, or someone who's fallen in their hesitant about getting outside, things like that, this can be a safe controlled environment

for people to get movement in their bodies. And in that controlled environment, you can regulate things like speed or incline, which I think also has a positive benefit. Most of the people I know that have these treadmill desks, they're already athletes and it's like, "Okay, you're probably not adding a ton, but my former producer, he was shaking an alcohol addiction and like losing weight because he had a stroke and he got one and he's like this is a

game changer." So I guess the good news is the more sort of sedentary and the less you move,

the more you stand to benefit from something like a simple treadmill or whatever walking pad on your desk. You mentioned before that when you remove walking, you're not getting any of the benefits from walking, yes, there's a calorie burn, but what's happening in your body when you're walking? This sounds simplistic, but other than you're moving, like what happens when we are moving

“that needs to happen, that doesn't happen when we're sitting? I guess that's what I'm asking.”

It's such a great question. I want to touch on one thing before we go there that you had mentioned. When you think of this whole walking treadmill, you got me thinking here. We have so many people that we'll do there one hour workouts in the morning, right? So they'll go like hit it really hard and then they'll go to their job and then sit there for eight to nine hours a day. Okay, that's me. That just because you got your one hour workout and that doesn't negate you from moving

for the rest of the day and this is where the second part of your question comes in.

Let's just take eating, for example, let's take your metabolic system. When we eat, we have a glucose spike. So let's say we eat a meal that has higher carbohydrates or more sugars. You get a lot of glucose that goes into your bloodstream and that level can rise very quickly. And so we have to get that glucose out of our bloodstreams and into ourselves where it can be deutilized. There's two systems that do that, your pancreas and also the contractile motion of your tissues

when you move. So we have the pancreas and we have contraction of tissue. So if I'm eating and I sit after I eat, I'm only taking advantage of one of those systems, the pancreas. We're not taking advantage of the other system, which is movement, which is activity. And so the pancreas doesn't like that too much. And so when you have people that have diabetes, for example, or insulin resistance or pretty much anyone in general, the research is

awesome. It's after you eat, go quickly, go within 30 minutes and go for a 10 to 15 minute walk. It's that walking that will grab the glucose out of the bloodstream, work with the pancreas, and now you have this metabolic system that is working more efficiently. I love that. It's like the lowest hanging fruit. I feel like we should be screaming that from the rooftops. Everybody, when you're done eating, take a 10 to 15 minute walk, you will feel so much better.

That's the metabolic system. But if you were to look at your nervous system, for example, when you look at mental health and walking from mental health, again, the research is astounding. Getting outside and having that repetitive gates, that repetitive motion, we're stimulating neurotransmitters in our brain. We're decreasing cortisol.

very good things, getting to 5,000 steps a day. Decreases the risk, the symptoms of depression.

This is a very, very big thing that I think we need that should be on every prescription pad. That if you have ever suffered from depression or have symptoms of it, this should be the number one thing on the prescription pad. Your goal is 5,000 steps per day. And if you can get to 7,000 steps per day, you're reducing the risk of getting depression. This is like a no-brainer, I think. Yeah, well, I've had some pretty stressful business in life situations, and fortunately,

I live in the nice California, right? So I went outside in February or whenever this sort of last one was several years ago. And I remember walking for like 5 to 6 hours per day for months, or at least weeks, several weeks. And I would be on the phone talking with my friends and family, which sort of coincidentally is one of the best ways to lower cortisol, right? I'm outside, getting some sunlight, getting some exercise and socializing with people, and I felt not as horrible.

As I would have, if I was just in my room, sulking and wondering if I was going to fail at life, I guess you could say, I mean, it just seems like your body kind of knows that. I mean, I couldn't sit in the house. My body wouldn't let me do it. I think we all have personal experience with that somehow.

“Whether we knew that's what it was doing or not, I used to live in Chicago before I moved out”

to Colorado. And you know, it was a rough time in my life personally. And when I moved out to Colorado, I was like, you know what? I'm just going to keep walking up that mountain until I feel better. And it's why this topic is just so passionate for me because it changed my life. It took me from really not having a grasp on things. It was a constant struggle. And if someone were to say to me, you can't walk. It would be a very dark place for me. And so it was really life changing for me.

So we covered that a gestion thing, but what else is going on the cortisol and exercise elements? Is there anything else that's happening? Because I think what I'm trying to get at here is the opposite than what happened when you remove walking from daily life, which most of us have done.

Yeah, I think so if we look at walking is this core biological input that basically stimulates

every system in your body. So we've talked about the metabolic system. We talk about the nervous system. If you go to the muscular skeletal system, for example, walking is considered a mid-range of motion activity. So what that means is, if when I'm walking, I have to push off my foot.

“I get about 40 degrees of range of motion in my big toe. That's what we're looking for there.”

So end range of motion at the toe is about 65 degrees. So it's a mid-range range of motion that happens at the toe. It happens at the ankle. It happens at the hip. So it's a safe activity for people. It puts loads into your system. It puts load into your tissues into your muscles, into your tendons, in an environment that is safe for people. So if you are talking to your endurance athlete or your ultra-athlete, for example, we need to say to them, hey, listen, walking should be

a part of your everyday life because it's a different type of load. It's going to take stress off your system. You need recovery. This is good for you. And then on the other hand, when you have

people that aren't putting enough loads through their system, you basically can coach it in a

different manner saying, hey, if you start walking more, you're going to be putting more loads

“through your tissue. This is good for your system. So that's why everyone, I think, if you're on”

this planet, you fit along the spectrum of why this has to happen for you. And the people like me who are like, I go to the gym, I'm fine. We're missing out on all that because we're not getting most of that most of the time. We're just like you said, going hard and then not doing most of the things we need to be doing for, I don't know, 55 minutes. And that's it. Jordan, if I could say one thing that I would love to get across to people, it is exactly what you just said there.

That regardless if you're an athlete and you're getting your one to two hours of work in a day, and it might be a good workout. You want to get to about seven to eight thousand steps per day. That number right there is your key to maximizing these longevity benefits. And so I think a lot of us, even though we think we're active, if you look at your step count at the end of the day, I know what I'm in my clinic, I'm my man. I haven't sat down today. And then I'll look at my

watch. I'm like, yeah, I'm only at five thousand steps though. And it's a reminder for me that when I get home, I'm going to grab that seven to eight thousand. That doesn't mean I didn't work out in the morning because I did. But it's having that consistent behavior that happens day after day. And that's an important conversation to have for me. It's airports. You take like a five a.m. flight and then

like man, just from going from one gate to the next at an airport like the one in Denver, for example, I'm at nine thousand steps and it's having 30 in the morning. And the rest of it's gravy,

it's actually really incredible. But yeah, another day is not so much. I swear, even when I try to walk,

I still can't walk as much outside as I do randomly in an airport going from Chipotle to wherever whatever gate. I love going to airports. It's a great place for me to watch people walk.

“Well, I think something you said to about hitting that nine thousand steps,”

there is a law of diminishing return. So we talk about this in the book that, you know, when you look at the research, that sweet spot is about seven to eight thousand steps a day. I will have patients who'll come in and they'll say, Dr. Onley, I'm walking 15, 16,000 steps a day, which great, but no, that after about 10 to 12,000 steps, when you look at the research, plattoes from a benefit perspective. And so I will ask them, are you strength training? Are you

doing any type of aerobic activity? And if they say to me or high intensity aerobic activity?

And if they say, well, no, I don't have time because I'm getting 15,000 steps in. This is the perfect time to have that conversation of back-down your step count. Even take it to 10,000, this will free up more time for you to strength train and to do the other activities that are necessary for healthy aging. So I like that conversation, too, that there's this plateau that can also be hit. You mentioned earlier the toes are, I don't know, 40 to 65 degrees. This is

probably possibly only me, but my toes do not bend back like anybody else's toes. I remember when I was doing karate as a kid, he'd be like, move your toes back and my toes would go up like one centimeter off the ground and other people could basically put their toes at 90 degrees. And I stretch and stretch and stretch and it improved, I don't know, 50% or 100% and other people who

never stretched at all can still do five times more. Is that a problem or is it just some people

“are built that way and it's no big deal? I mean, I'm a little biased, I'm a foot person, but I think”

the mobility at the big toe is probably one of the most important joints in the human body. When you're walking in order to have that efficiency that we're talking about, that big toe has to get to 40 to 45 degrees. And there's a reason for that because it sets up, I think people forget that the foot is attached to this body. So when you have a big toe that can't get to that range of motion, you're still going to be able to walk from point A to point B, but you're going to

take down that efficiency. You're going to find a way to compensate. So for example, one way might be to lift your foot up, right? So instead of rolling through the foot, we talk about this in the book, rolling through the foot, you end up, it's like a step gate. This is what my dad does. I mean, he's 83, but like he doesn't roll through the foot. And then people will say, my hip

“flexor hurts because now you're not to creating efficiency, you're picking up your foot,”

interdropping it down. So that range of motion at that toe not only sets up for efficient movement at the foot, but also at the knee at the hip and at the low back, I cannot tell you how many patients of mine that I have treated for low back pain coming from their foot. Yep, I had a massage therapist years ago that said, oh, you have flat feet. Your back's going to be shot by the time you're 40. True or not, because I'm 46 in my back is totally fun.

Yeah, I love the conversation of flat feet. Let's just break this myth right now. Flat feet are not bad. So just because you see a foot that looks flat, there's so many variations to the foot. There's so many different structural variations that just because when you see a foot that is flat, does not mean that is bad. How does it function? A foot needs to be strong. It needs to be mobile, and it needs to be able to adapt to the ground, meaning it needs to be able to change shape.

So when we look at strength training our bodies, for example, which everybody is doing, now more so than 20 years ago, I'm all for it. Don't forget about below the knee because there's a lot of muscles in the foot. There's a lot of tissues that help us create power and strength as we age. And when we forget about them, that is a very, very big problem. So when I see a flat foot, I say, well, can you lift just your big toe? Can you lift your foretoes? Can you do

certain amount of calf raises? How does your power look? And if they start failing these tests, then I say, okay, we got some work to do. Now get off your butt and I don't know walk around and circles while you visit our sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored and part by Dell, Dell PCs with Intel and SID are built for the moments that matter. For the moments you plan and the ones you don't, built for the busy days that turn into all night study sessions,

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Now back to Courtney Conley. Okay I'm quite strong I have really good balance and my mom used

“always joke you should because your big toe is the size of most people's fist right I have this”

like really strong big toe back and balance quite well and probably honestly is because my big toe it's really strong and there's these surgeries where if somebody loses a thumbnail or place it with a big toe and I'm like oh my god if that ever happened to me I'd be such a freak because it's enormous so I do wonder if my flat feet are actually okay because you mentioned the degree is 45 degree I bet I could do that if I was pushing off of something I don't think I can do

it just standing there where I have to lift my toe up on its own so is that different because like if I'm walking I can push my toes in a certain direction I just can't lift them in a vacuum directly upward you know what I'm talking about so passive range emotion can you see Eddie here my foot model so the people who are listening can't but yes there's a fake bony foot that you're holding it I bring up Eddie everywhere passive range emotion would be can you take your big toe

and can you lift it and we should be able to get sixty sixty five some sources would say even more range of motion there now the trick is going to be can I lift my foot this is standing desk this is going to be tricky let's see what happens we'll talk about hamstrings next oh what angle yeah that's not sixty that's not sixty five degrees now so passive you should be able to lift your top so if you're at home in 90 degrees would be up straight up and down you'd want to go to about

sixty sixty five degrees passive range emotion lifting your toe active would be how high can you lift it we want those ranges of motions to be close together so when I'm pushing off in the gate cycle so when I'm walking and I'm pushing off of my foot that big toe has to get to about forty forty five degrees if I was sprinting that's what I want to grab that sixty sixty five degrees

“it's more range of motion but that's why it's so important we have to train movement variability”

because you start decreasing range at joints in the foot and again you will still get from point eight to point B but you're going to pay for it somewhere so what do I do I mean I've stretched this for years not not recently but like when I was younger I stretched for years and I feel like

it barely improved the first conversation you have to have is their pain associated with it

oftentimes when I'll have my patients lift their toe they'll be like it's pinching on the top of the foot no I don't have that that is not what you want you can start to when a joint starts to reduce its range of motion especially at the big toe you can develop arthritis on that joint and so people will be like it feels stiff so I'm just going to keep trying to increase this range if you do that and you irritate the joint you will make things worse so you have to be able to assess

can I lift my toe and is there any pinching pain at the top these are we in the book we have a whole foot assessment chapter so it's can you lift your big toe how do you improve your range of motion it doesn't hurt me at all to do it it's just that if I push hard enough to stretch it

and it's just it doesn't hurt or anything like that well I guess my next question to you would be I'd want to see what your calf raise looks like because calf raises I say this all the time when you go to the gym the busiest machine in the gym should be the seated calf raise machine

and there's never anybody on that thing no people don't realize what happens as we age is we

lose power we lose power faster than we lose strength where do you think you get power from you get

“it from your foot in your calf that's what propels us forward that's what's creates efficient”

walkers as we age those tissues need to be strengthened just like your glute and so when you're doing a calf raise and you'll see people that don't have good range of motion of their big toe when they do their calf raise they load the outside of their foot almost looks like they're going to spring their ankle yeah I've seen that I don't do that because I deliberately don't do that though it's not that I don't want to do that yeah it's that I force my feet to move properly

or Chad yells at me on zoom my trainer because it's like the cheat way right yeah you just especially if you're balancing when you do it you load the other foretoes your feet go out weird

and it's like well low gear push off you want to push through the big toe and the second toe

and you know for people that have had ankle sprains for example that is a very common thing you will see when they do a calf raise because the peronials the muscles on the sides of the leg if those aren't retrained or we don't improve these movement patterns those tissues stabilize the big toe and so you often see people do calf raises that have had ankle sprains and it looks like they're just going to spring their ankle again I have apparently quite strong in that position

I mean I don't have much of a reference but my trainer trains a lot of people and he's like oh no this is like a good calf raise with a decent amount of weight so hopefully that's a good sign because again my toe has very low mobility in fact I almost trade mobility for strength in a lot of different movements legs aside just other things like I can do certain things really heavy or do a lot of pull-ups for example or like do weighted pull-ups but I can't move things

passively even with no weight pass to certain point it just depends on the joint all joints need to have mobility instability that's important to realize that we have to have access to range of motion and we have to be able to control it when we're looking at

training patients we always say you know we want to train into all these various ranges

of motion and that's where we're going to start to train for power and strength where did the 10,000 steps thing come from because you you haven't said that number one single time

“right so 7,000 they said 12,000 and I'm like where's the urban legend I guess where you need to get”

10,000 steps a day it's pretty wild right if you google like how many steps should I take a day you'll find 10,000 somewhere and there's no science based on this number it was a Japanese pedometer that was created during the Tokyo Olympics and it was a company that had created this pedometer and I believe the name is a Mampoke which actually means 10,000 step meter so it was a marketing campaign for this pedometer and that's where the 10,000 steps came from and I was really excited

to read this research because I think when we're talking to people about getting their steps in that number can often seem daunting I got all this stuff to do and now you got to strengthen your big toe Jordan and now you got to get 10,000 steps in you know so it's kind of a daunting number but when you look at the research where we get the most benefit from a longevity perspective that number is digestible and I think that's very reachable for a lot of us in conjunction with

the other training that we're doing and still having a life and still doing the thing you mentioned in the book that walking can reduce the risk of things like dementia and I want to highlight the risk of things not walking will cure your dementia but like tell me about the effect

“on that because I think that's really important I mean this is personal to me my mom is she's”

been diagnosed with Alzheimer's my audience knows that but one of the things she stopped doing because she got depressed about it was going out as much and walking as much and I mean it's too late because she's already been diagnosed with it but I think me personally I don't really want to have to deal with that if I can avoid it it's such an interesting topic when you think about this tool that we have at our hands to help patients like this when we look at walking and

the benefits for mental health we have when you think about this activity we know that it decreases cortisol we know that improves parasympathetic nervous system if you will and we also know that it improves blood circulation to our brains and so there's a lot of things that occur when we are engaging in this motion and when you get to this repetitive step count five thousand steps per day you really start to see these the risks start to drop for patients with dementia and this is

to people if you hit five thousand steps per day that's it this is all you have to do to reduce your

risk of dementia but when you start getting people outside and now they have sunlight and they have movement they start to feel a little bit better and so when you start to feel better you're sleeping better your respiration rate is better maybe now your mom's walking with her friends or you go and take a walk with her the research on relationship walks walking with people it warms my heart it was so great to read so I think that's the conversation when we look at dementia and Alzheimer's

not only what it does to our biological systems what it does to our brain what it does to our cardiovascular system but also what it does to us socially as human beings and I think that's a very big conversation and it's a bigger conversation I think a lot of people in the exercise world especially the online sort of influence or segment of the exercise world they love to lean into more intense as better and I get that I mean it's you don't get attention for

running a normal mile or something like that right you get attention for running a five minute

“mile with one lung functioning while you're bleeding or something like that right you have to”

David Goggins your way into internet fame but I think a lot of people are sort of over indexing on intensity when it comes to physical fitness and maybe under investing in consistency and it sounds like maybe you support that just given what you're telling me about walking because you're not telling me to do kill sprints necessarily it's really interesting for those who know me my background has

always been my nickname is actually max if you can believe that everything I have ever done has

been to max capacity I was a triathlete I always train very hard and it cut up with me it really did and I've had to learn over the last probably decade once I turned 40 that this is not going to be the way I can't just keep pounding the pavement and once I learned how to recover and I still train quite a bit but now there's this component of recovery that I now respect a lot more and I see it a lot with my patients I tell them all the time it is harder to turn tissues off

or to quiet things down than it is to build things up so what I mean by that is when we're looking at improving someone's strength and capacity if they come into my office and they're like more and more and I want to I want to load load load and I can't get their systems to chill out and reset these are the people that continuously you're getting injured because they're running

around in this high sympathetic nervous state it's always more and more and there's no calming

to their system you cannot survive like that you cannot survive in fight or flight mode forever

“and I think especially in our society there's a reason for that it was a survival mechanism you”

know we need to be able to run from a line the problem is is in today's society we don't know for running from a line or running from a deadline so it's this constant state of stress and if you can't dial it down you can't build it back up and that is why I think this conversation of walking is so important especially for those who have been in pain you mentioned earlier that feet can tell you what's going on in part in the rest of your body so how do problems

in the feet show up elsewhere in the body I mean yes okay foot pain knee pain hip pain but I'm talking about maybe above the waist or am I reaching with that the coolest thing about the foot is if you were to look down at your feet it's the only place in the body where you can look at it and see a parent loads right something isn't right do you see a bunion do you see a hammer toe this is my favorite one because the toes should be the widest part of your foot

so when you look down at your foot does your foot look like a shoe so where the toes would be

“tapered or does it look like the toes are displayed and wide because that's what it should”

look like you got me looking at my feet my toes are kind of wider than the rest but they're not displayed per se but they are definitely wider than the rest of my foot you should be able to lift up all your toes spread them and so when you spread your toes you should see daylight between each toe this is ridiculous let me try so I do all day long I can there's very little but I can see between each toe it's not a lot it's not like my fingers I mean there's

gonna be a lot of people listening to this that I guarantee you cannot number one lift up just their big toe for example or lift their foretole I can do that but a lot of people will not be able to display their toes and their foot looks like a shoe huh that is not a stable position for the foot

forefoot that's why most of the injuries in the foot occur at the ball of the foot and that

“ball of the foot better be wide and it better be stable and it better be strong to handle the”

loads of walking which are several times your body weight running those numbers increase significantly so when I see numbers like one out of three people over the age of 45 have foot pain we shouldn't be scratching our head going hmm I wonder why because people don't pay attention to their feet peoples feet are weak the footwear is compromising the function of their feet and this is what we get and I test toe strength in my office with every single patient how strong are your toes there

is a very interesting study looking at some men in Japan they worked at a Toyota factory there were 1400 of them and they looked at the toe strength versus hand grip strength so we know that hand grip strength has been a big tester for longevity like can you grip something and what they found

was actually toe strength diminishes first you will lose toe strength before you start losing hand

“grip strength and that toe strength is actually associated with your glucose levels with your”

exercise activity so it's a marker it can be a marker of your metabolic health and I don't think we ever think about the toes like that and one of the biggest things I deal with my office is getting patients to make sure that they feel confident when they're walking and they're not falling because falls are a problem and one of the predictors of falls as we age is a weakness in our toes I'm very passionate about that because my goal is to keep people walking as much as they want to

as they age and that's going to happen by making sure that their foot is strong. What are the first signs that your feet are dysfunctional you mentioned toe strength but let's say I'm listening to this at home or while I cook dinner I don't necessarily know if I've strong toes is there's something where it's like oh if you have this that's a canary in the coal mine for your foot strength your feet are dysfunctional in some way. If you look at the foot

from a structural perspective so bunions for example there's a bump on the inside of the toe the big toe and you can have a tailor's bunion on the out pinky toe things like hammer toes. If you have a bunion or a hammer toe those two things can increase your risk of falling because it compromises balance. What's a hammer toe? So like the claw toe it looks like a claw almost when the toes are like scrunched. Oh that sounds gnarly how do you get that what is that from?

“So the best way to explain this would be if you were to do a calf raise for example”

and you come up onto the ball of your foot your toes should be soft. They shouldn't be gripping the ground so if you do a calf raise and your toes are gripping the ground you're not using the intrinsic strength of your foot what you're doing is you're clawing to try to stabilize your body when you see toes that claw or grip that should tell you hey why is this person trying to stabilize by gripping the ground? So again that's that conversation quiet things down so

when I start to see hammer toes is it what's called flexor stabilization are they trying to stabilize their bodies by gripping the ground and if so we got work to do we got to strengthen your foot and it's early intervention so when I see hammer toes that are flexible right where they can still move this is a muscle imbalance we're going to work through that you're going to get in the right foot where you're going to exercise your foot but the longer you wait those hammer toes

start to get rigid and then they become very very painful and now the solution is we got to

get in there and surgically start cutting tendons and try to strengthen the toes I will tell you I see people with foot surgeries every single day and there is a time and a place but I want to educate people so much that if you start paying attention to this stuff it will save you so much in the long run because I see people every single day the cannot walk because of foot pain every single day you might throw your back out when you tell your shoes but you can support our sponsors

injury free we'll be right back this episode is also sponsored in part by better help I've been with better help for years now and therapy has become non-negotiable for me it's helped me stay grounded get out of my own head generally become a much senior person which if you know me is really saying something I recommended to pretty much everyone and better help is now accepting insurance in many states with average copays around 23 bucks so if you've ever considered therapy

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response or you can't find a code email somebody over here Jordan at Jordan harbinger dot com we're happy to dig these up for you it's that important that you support those who support the show now back to Courtney Conley i just did a little calf raise as you anybody watching on youtube it's gonna be like what is he doing because i keep doing things with my feet here i'm just resting kind of them the ball of my foot and then the toes are keeping me balanced from falling forward

but they're not like 10 step or anything and if i was doing a calf raise and i was holding onto something or i had the shoulder pads like on the machine i wouldn't even need to flex my toes at all because i would be using that for balance yeah you're using your foot you're using your calf that's good right yes okay thank god i'm not used to getting good news about my body i'm this show you know another like you mentioned like test the people can do if you were to stand up

it's actually called an anterior fall envelope most falls occur at the initiation of gate so if i was going to walk towards you this is when a lot of these falls occur and there's a reason for that because if we lose strength in our toes this is one of the things that helps us feel the ground so if you were to stand up near a wall and your feet are flat on the floor and you lean into the wall straight body as far as you can what you'll feel is your toes pressing

into the floor your toes are what's stopping you from your head smacking up against the wall that distance we measure in my office it should be about i look for about four and a half inches

“so you should be able to lean forward about four and a half inches in control your fall”

and if you can't do that toe strength we need to focus on that and here's the other unfortunate event that happens as we age sarcopenia is a very real thing right we know we lose muscle mass as we age people need to start realizing that we lose that also at our foot but the other thing that happens with our feet is we have all these beautiful sensory receptors on the bottoms of our feet think of the foot as a sensory organ and so it tells us where we are in space how are we

moving it's gathering sensory information driving it to our brains and telling us hey you need to be upright you need to be balanced when you walk so you start screwing around in diminishing that sensory information you're going to have a problem but when you turn 50 years old it takes 25 percent more pressure to stimulate those same receptors in your foot and when you turn 80 it takes

75 percent more pressure so we lose sensitivity to these receptors as we age we lose strength

in the foot as we age and do you know what improves all of that exercise so exercise increase the

and are up at these things like that exercising the foot helps it's such an important conversation

“to be had I think a lot of people are going to listen to this and be like wow you know you can tell”

toes predict longevity and the foot strength of this but I want to hear your opinion on things like a reflexology because my family's Chinese right might wipe out of the family my mother in law book

this foot reflexology appointment for me and basically this woman from Tibet or whatever is

rubbing my feet and she's like oh you have knee pain and I was like nope and then she's like ah but you get headaches and I was like nope and she's like ah hip pain and I was like look you're just guessing at this point no not at all and then she gave me this dirty look and was like you said you're 45 and I was like yeah and then she just kept massaging my feet and she was like go home you're fine I thought that was interesting because to me it seemed a little bit like you ever

go to a fair and there's a psychic fair and they're like you have someone certainty in your life and I'm like yeah you're guessing until I nod and then you're going to go down that road I felt like

“that's what she was doing but with my foot I've been doing this long enough my background with all”

of this is kinesiology with exercise looking at what happens with loads to the system science science yes I also have realized that there's a lot of modalities out there that claim to do something and I think as a clinician we need to educate our patients and say listen if this is what you're going to do you also have to understand what happens to tissues when you don't load them if they want to use absent salts and rub their

foot with whatever if that makes them feel better by all means rub your foot with whatever you want but understand this if you want to continue to load your foot and walk in age and have efficiency we're also going to have the end conversation which is you can do this and you have to strengthen your foot and you have to mobilize your foot so it's such a difficult conversation because I don't have the background in those fields my background I have to stay in my scope and what I know

is that tissues need load when I teach my courses we talk about a killies tendon opathy a lot so when you have pain at the a killies tendon and if you were to ask 10 people what they do for the a killies tendon pain it's pretty interesting I've heard to rub lemon grass on your tendon I've heard to wear a boot to use a scooter all of these things and we know from science

“that tendons need load that you have to load the tendon so that's where I come at from all”

of this is looking at it from we need to get your foot on the ground we need to start loading your foot that's where I come from yeah that's a good diplomatic answer I guess for me I was just wondering if this reflexology thing was bullshit but we're not going to get that from you and that's okay I'm not going to hold your feet to the fire and that one no put intended I am the fastest walker of anybody that I know and I think I got it when I started living in New York and I basically

never slowed down because I don't want to get for you I've heard you talk about walking speed

being a good vital sign so if walking speed is a good vital sign I'm the equivalent of the guy who runs it I'm like forest gum by run everywhere you're passing all the tests here Jordan you're really crushing it today is really even though I can't move my toes I'm still that would be getting it I'll write you a little program on how to increase your tomability when we're done here please but I do I walk really fast and it's I think one of the reasons I married my wife was

she was like I like how fast you walk and I was like thank god because if I date someone and they don't walk fast I'm like this is just isn't going to work out I can't wait for you all that like you're driving me crazy I can't do it I love this conversation so we talk about in the book how walking speed is the sixth vital sign so when you go to the doctor for example they check some vital signs they check your temperature they check your blood pressure they check your oxygen saturation

and the reason they do that is because if something is a ride there it's an indicator of hey let's pay attention to this something is not right and when they looked at this research of making walking speed a sixth vital sign one of the reasons for that is it is a predictor of something going wrong so for example we've talked about dementia a slower cadence so walking in a slow speed

can be a predictor of dementia up to seven years in advance this is amazing to me that if we start

time out and say hey what's going on here is further testing required are they walking slower

because it's a musculoskeletal concern could this be a predictor of falls do they have weakness in their foot do they have weakness in their calves but that walking speed is a predictor of dementia that's a big one and we need to pay attention to that there is a certain clip we should walk at a lot of the research when you look at the benefits of walking they will refer to a brisk paste walk so if you were to assess that it's how many steps you're taking per minute when we look at the

reduction of certain types of cancers like breast and colon cancer which walking does again stacking behaviors right we talked about that brisk paste walking 135 so about 130 to 135 steps

per minute as if you were on a treadmill 3.5 maybe 4.0 miles per hour now I don't know if any of you

have done that recently but that is not slow no it's not I live in Colorado and so I live on the side of a mountain so walking at 3.5 miles per hour or trying to get 135 steps per minute is a very very fast clip you got to move you have a shortened stride your heart rate is getting up there into zone 2 zone 3 depending upon your fitness levels into maintain that for 30 minutes is what the research will tell you this is not a walk in the park if you will and that I think is a another great conversation

to have for those of us who are like oh why do we got a why walk when I can run it's like hey walk for 30 minutes at a brisk paste on one of your recovery days when you're not running

“and if you're not a runner try to shoot for 30 minutes at a brisk paste you need to really”

have some good endurance and good strength to be able to do that what about rocking you know if

that is I love it but people they'll be like that's bad for you you've weighed on your back and other people are like oh it's the best exercise you could possibly do bar none and then other people are like oh it's too much weight on your knees and your feet and as someone who's actually qualified to talk about this I'd love to hear what you think so in the book where there's three different programs right so the base program is for people that are below 2500 steps then we

have a build program which gets you into that sweet spot which is 7 to 8000 the boost program is when we talk about rocking or weighted walking I think the weighted walking conversation is a little softer I think when people think rocking it's like this I got to be in the military and I got to have like 50 pounds on my back weighted walking can be something is adding 5 to 10% of your body weight so lower weight it can be very beneficial it can increase calorie burn for example it can put more

loads through our tissue remember we talked about that increased loads are not bad they're just bad if you go zero to 100 so when you add a small amount of weight with small amount of time so

“less duration that can be a very good way to add loads into the system I think we're a lot of people”

get all excited and go crazy as they'll put a 40 pound pack on their backs yeah I wear 60 but I'm almost 200 pounds so there's that and then they go too fast too soon I mean that's really the conversation with everything it's tissues need progressive loads so I think it can be very beneficial I don't think everybody needs to do it there's a time in a place but if that's a way for you to increase loads into your system go for it go with small amount of weight in

small duration to start wait it took me almost a year to get there yeah when I started I couldn't walk two miles with no weight before I was like oh this is tiring my back hurts and now it's 60 pounds with a special pack on get the right equipment 5 to 10 miles tens of stretch but I'll do usually 5 to 7 miles yeah I think it can be very beneficial for people I was curious because of course a lot of folks like that's not good for you to carry weight

like that and I'm like is that not good for you that that's like a bold statement to say it's not good for you to carry weight I don't understand that if you were to talk to some very well

“respected researchers in our field they would tell you that that's what we're missing is carrying loads”

that's what I'm saying is like I may not evolve to literally do this I mean if you look at you want to get into like hunter gatherer conversation it wasn't just walking it was walking and carrying that's what I'm saying like farmers carry except now I got up cushy backpack it's not even that my arms aren't even getting anything from it really okay that's good news I appreciate that what sort of everyday habit do you think is quietly destroying people's bodies I mean

lack of walking yes but is it just sitting down at every opportunity or what do you think? I think it's lack of continued motion throughout the day in the book we have what we call movement snacks in my patient files when I write them their emails after each visit I give them what

and I'll give them one or two things that I want them to do to break up their day because it's

that continuous like they get into their project and they're sitting for three hours at a time that's what I want to change is these little snacks of movement that people can take that could be as easy as standing up and doing 10 squats it could be doing 20 cabrases it could be taking a five-minute walk preferably outside but you would be surprised at a productivity perspective getting creative with your job calming down your nervous system throughout your day when if you were to say to your team

or to your staff you guys are all taking two to three five-minute walks every day everybody would be

“very happy about that and I think that's important one of my friends walks everywhere barefoot”

yes even airports until they make input shoes on which it to me is disgusting but are you a big proponent of like don't wear shoes anywhere I know a lot of people are kind of like this is

whole movement of like you should never have shoes on yeah you know I'm talking about I do the footwear

conversation is a big one our foot is very very well designed to handle the loads of walking and running for example even flat feet because again that's what I've been told that I'm like a design to sit down and not do anything even flat feet okay good when you look at footwear the biggest thing I talk about with my patients is the footwear has to respect the anatomy of your foot number one if the widest part of your foot should be your toes then the widest part of the shoe

you're the toe box and the shoe should also be wide it shouldn't be tapered I was on my flight

“here and I was on the train in Colorado and of course I'm like staring at everybody's feet”

and I'm looking at everyone's shoes and this man had on a pair of leather business casual shoes and you literally could see his bunion the bump on the outside of his foot trying to protrude through the leather because the shoe was so tapered it was so pointed and I'm sitting there going oh my gosh this is not a hard conversation like just where a shoe that allows your toes to display so that's my kind of number one is get a wide toe box shoe the next thing you want to

look at is the heel to toe drop in the shoe so that is the heel in the toe if you were to stand barefoot the foot would be on the ground most shoes that we put on that is not the case the heel is elevated above the toes so this is called a heel to toe drop even men shoes because I'm thinking like my shoes are pretty flat but they also get beat flat

“because I got these flat ass feet so when I say flat feet I know people like oh my feet are”

flat too my every part of my foot touches the ground to the point where my friends used to make fun to me as a kid because they would be like damn you have literally no arch like there is no part of your foot that does not touch the ground completely flat so I beat my shoes down like you can look in there there's just like that footprint on the insol or whatever that is completely flat with no gap most athletic shoes out there even if you were to look at any type of running shoe

eight millimeters is common 10 millimeters of heel to toe drop so if you were to go on to any website and you google the model of the shoe and then say what is the heel to toe drop it will give you a number and so a lot of these shoes are 8 millimeters 10 millimeters that means your heel is sitting above your toe and we want zero pretty much and an ideal world you want zero because that is where the foot is flat on the ground but again most shoes do not have that

and so I thought it was really interesting when COVID happened and everybody was inside and then all these articles started coming out where it was like don't walk barefoot at home because everybody is getting planner fasciaitis and everybody's getting heel pain and everybody's getting foot pain because they're walking barefoot and I'm like they're missing the boat here

that isn't the problem the problem is that for so many years people have been wearing shoes

that have prevented the proper function of the foot people haven't paid attention to the strength of their foot and now they actually are using their foot because they're walking at home barefoot it's not the fact that they were barefoot it's the fact that they went from an environment that was weakening the system to an environment where now they did not have that crutch anymore I definitely went through this not during COVID but I married several years ago I married an

an agent lady who was like you cannot wear your shoes in the house that is disgusting and she's absolutely right it is when you think about it's absolutely vile but I grew up that way where your muddy ass Michigan winter boots in the house and then wonder why your carpets filthy so I started taking my shoes off and then I started working from home and I realized that my feet

the ball of straight down to the heel was just like a knife that was just wiggling around in

“there every step I took it was terrible and I was like it can't be because I'm walking barefoot”

because this is like how you're supposed to be so I just let it take care of itself by walking without shoes in the house and it went away on its own and it sounds like what you're saying is I had that because I spent my life in shoes and then I was like hey foot do this thing you were

supposed to be doing for the first 35 years and never got a chance to do it's like if you never

squatted before and then you were like I'm gonna go into the gym and squat 200 pounds yeah you're sore you would be sore so instead of saying hey you're not gonna squat anymore we're gonna say hey you're gonna squat but you're gonna use 10 pounds so you're gonna go barefoot but you're gonna go for five minutes and you're gonna do these strength exercises and then the next day you're gonna go for 10 minutes and then we're going to slowly progressively add load but what happened was

people would experience pain and then they'd say oh I better go hurry up and put my shoe back on and so we never got to the solution it was I feel pain I don't like to be uncomfortable and so now I'm gonna go put that shoe back on and I'm not saying Jordan by any means that people

have to go run around barefoot all over the place that is not what I'm saying there is a time

in a place we live in a concrete world so you do need to have shoes at times where you have something underneath your foot this is this cushion or their sack height but when you have the opportunity at home just let your foot feel the ground start with five minutes you know there's a lot of benefit with small introductions of things like this the way they by the way recommended I solve the problem with the foot pain because I went to the store where they have the expert

marathon runner person and they tried mill in the store and they were like you got to wear oh foes oh I think I'm proud right now it's in that run you know I'm talking about those oh foot like a recovery sandal they're so comfy but also am I supposed to be walking on clouds all the time or do I want some hard ground underneath my feet well

let me ask you this that shoe is considered a recovery sandal so if you break that down

when would someone want to wear a recovery sandal because they need to recover from something so if I just ran a marathon and I'm tired in my feet or sore I'm going to go into a sandal that's going to have what's called a toast spring on it it almost looks like a boat so when you step on it it rockers you through the foot and people put that on and they're like man this feels awesome I can like roll my way forward and I say to them nobody gets a free lunch so when you think something is that

easy someone's going to pay the price and the person or the thing that is paying the price are your foot muscles because they're not working so a recovery sandal there's a time in a place

“when you need to recover but you cannot wear a recovery sandal all the time it doesn't make any”

sense like that and so that's the conversation there forget I'm going for a walk maybe you should too wooby right back the legendary landscape with shopping fine and business and it's about to be satisfied with the checkout with the world because the best conversation is really good the checkout with the world the best conversation the legendary checkout from shopping fine just the shop on your website it's a bit too social media and everything is over there that's a music for your orn videos also

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companion to the show Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news is where you can find it now for the rest of my conversation with Courtney Conley people on the show know that I'm not a very like woo woo kind of guy but I do default to the idea that our bodies are pretty well designed for a lot of

“stuff especially things that you have to do every day like walking on the ground I'm not saying”

that that's true for absolutely everything especially in modern society but like walking on the ground seems like a thing that I would be dead by now if I wasn't pretty good at already by nature so I'm glad to hear this is it also I can mix my recovery sandal budget for the year because I do prefer to be barefoot but again I was afraid because it was like oh you're gonna get planar fasciitis and then your back's gonna hurt because you're forty six years old and you're not supposed

to be walking on hard things anymore I guess should be dead by now I don't know that whole like planar fasciitis planar fasciopathy conversation I mean we wouldn't treat any other diagnosis in our body like if you were to google what do I do if I have planar fasciitis and you'll see ice

so when something is initially bothering you so there's an acute thing happening

yes we want to modify load you want to take load away but if you take away load forever the system is going to weaken if you had low back pain and I said you're gonna wear this low back brace forever you would look at me like I was in pain you'd be like I'm not doing that because you know you're like that doesn't make sense right should I just strengthen my back should I just strengthen I'll do core muscles core strength I'll strengthen my glutes that's the conversation

we need to be having at the foot yes foot orthosis can be very beneficial for patients who have heel pain initially but you can't be wearing a foot orthosis for ten years it has to be the and conversation where this foot orthosis and strengthen your feet because we're going to have an exit strategy we're going to have a strategy to get you out of that thing so that you can put your foot on the ground in regain strength and regain power so that I can keep you walking

“for as long as you want this is it's funny because you have to as a western sort of”

guy I had to wrap my mind around this first I thought my trainer was kind of nuts and I actually

asked my friend who hooked me up with him I was like hey man are you sure this guy's qualified because I told him that my back was hurting and he has me working out my legs and I told him I had knee pain and hip pain and he has me working out my legs and I'm like is this one of those like who raw go for it kind of guys because I don't want to get injured he's like no this guy's really really good he is he's like trained Olympians and things like that I just didn't know that I didn't

understand that and then my knee pain and hip pain went away after a few months and I was like hey chat how come working out got rid of the thing that hurt shouldn't have made the thing that hurts worse and he's like no it's being you're hurting because the muscles that you use to do this which you shouldn't be doing all day long don't have any opposition so we strengthen the the opposing muscles and the musculature around all this and dot dot your back doesn't hurt your

hip doesn't hurt your knee doesn't hurt so I'm actually in the better shape now at 46 then I was at 36 by a lot I feel that the exact same way I'm gonna turn 50 this year and I feel better than I have

“ever and so I think that's really encouraging for people especially as they age that you can age well”

and you can age and feel good and we just have to mix it up a little bit like my training looks a lot different now than it did 10 years ago this one surprised me you say that walking actually improves relationships tell me about relationship walks this was some of my favorite research I did for the book I have a 14 year old daughter and it's tough teenage girls are they're

own little animal and she comes home some days and I can always tell by how she's walking

what I'm in store for is it a good day was it bad day and I used to wait and I'd be like how is your day and then we'd sit there and I try to talk to her and she'd be like fine can we go to Starbucks fine and I'm like okay Addy just come walk with me and it would be like I was asking her to climb Mount Everest I'm like just give me five minutes that's it and so we would start walking and I had her walk with me after dinner we'd be a couple minutes into that walk and then the

floodgates would just open this is what happened was so and so and this is what happened with and she would just start talking to me and brings me the tears because it's been so special for her and I because that doesn't happen when I'm sitting across from her at a dinner table it doesn't happen when I go up into her room it's when she's outside and she can just kind of relax a little bit and then I found the research that was like oh mother and daughters they actually can build

relationships when they're walking and like you would have thought and then you look at relationships walks with spouses and how that can also improve communication especially the aging population that social community that is built when you have people walking together is so important and that kind of brings us full circle back to that dementia conversation people need socialization

“they need to have community and I think that walking really is an opportunity for us to take advantage”

of that you cannot lose especially when you're walking with someone why do people open up more when walking versus sitting do we know why that happens that's a good question I think it's a combination of you know number one just kind of letting your guard down you know neurologically distracted if you well you're getting increased blood flow to your prefrontal cortex and I think all of those things just start to put the guard down it reminds me of a story whenever I'm watching someone walk in my

office you know you can tell that I'm watching them so their gate gets stiff and I had this one guy

those guys that you know was slightly socially awkward so I start watching him walk and he was so stiff

and I said can you just start naming states so I wanted to neurologically distract him and he starts walking he's like fear anxiety depression you know where his head's at at least you know

“that neurological distraction is a thing and that's why one of the chapters one of my favorite”

chapters in the book is the chapter on pain and it's such a complicated topic but the movement snacks in that chapter one of the things we talk about is kind of a sensory walk so if you are walking outside you pay attention to five things that you can see four things that you can hear three things that you can smell so you're engaging in the environment and for someone who's been in pain this distraction if you will can be very beneficial for them to get time on their feet and I think that was

really fun to research and I do that a lot with my patients people are afraid to put one foot in

front of the other if they've been in pain for a while is there anything that you do bear foot that most people don't like are you in the gym bear foot or are you like in your office bear foot or is it a common to my office you would see me with my toe spacers on bear foot okay so that's what I was wondering what about walking backwards I have a friend who walks backwards as much as possible as you can tell for this podcast I have a lot of slightly mentally you know friends I don't know

my kind of friends they would hang out here is he onto something or not really yes I kind of running joke where I live in Colorado is if you see people walking backwards they're one of Dr. County's patients okay I love the concept of walking backwards number one if you look at it from a research perspective there is tons of research on walking backwards for example in reducing me osteo the pain associated with the me osteo arthritis so patients who have knee pain walking

backwards with that toe to heel pushoff it is activating different tissue it's going to get more

“quadricep strength and we know that's very important quad load for patients who have knee pain”

for example so that's one way that we will do it the other reason I love it is again that conversation of neurological distraction I have many patients who walking forward they'll be like oh my toe is going to hurt at pushoff and I'll say I want your five minute micro walk let's say you're two minutes in and you start feeling the pain at your toe just start walking backwards walk backwards for 30 seconds and then you can walk forward again so I'll use it in that manner too walking backwards on a

treadmill too again not easy and so we'll have our patients five to ten minutes a day especially if they have knee pain on a treadmill and it's also different visual stimulus right yeah so when I'm moving backwards I have different visual inputs which again very important for movement variability this is so stupid but I don't care I lived in Europe for a while and I would tour all these castles and when you walk up you're so wrecked because you're walking up this humongous ramp are like

a thousand stairs or whatever so going down you're walking down this deep decline and it's really really tough so I started to on my I don't know hundredth castle or whatever I was like what if I just walked down backwards so I started doing that much to the entertainment of everybody else walking up and I was like try it on your way down and it would make it so that your quads and hips and knees didn't hurt afterwards hey mix it up to this day whenever I have to go down a deep line I was

trying to do it backwards even if I'm like at the airport and I have to go down instead of the escalator I'll take the stairs I try to go down backwards it depends how much luggage I have but I get a lot of funny looks doing that but I feel like this is almost the same thing it's like you change up the load and where it goes on your foot I think I should start walking around the house since I'm barefoot anyway I must start doing it backwards I know where everything is in the

“house I might step on a few more legas but maybe it's worth it yeah you have to mix things up”

a lot of people as they age will say I don't like to hike anymore I don't want to walk down stairs because I don't like coming down and so this is actually in the book I had a patient that came in and she had knee pain and she went to see her physician and they told her she needs to sell

her house and buy a ranch because she was having pain going up and downstairs now there was always

a time and a place for that conversation but this was not the time or the place for this woman to be hearing that and rather than say to her hey why don't we train you to walk up and downstairs rather than eliminating that movement that is not what you want to say to somebody it's not what you can't do it's how can we modify these behaviors so we can figure out what you can do walking down a stair should not be something that we say to people you cannot do you cannot squat that means you

can't sit on a toilet that means you can't sit on a couch so in my office everybody's squatting to some capacity everybody is learning to squat you're definitely learning how to walk down a

eccentric strength or a lengthening strength to go down a stair you have to have good ankle

dorsiflexion which we lose as we age these are all things that can be retrained and so those are conversations that we need to have it's not what you cannot do if we start taking movement options away from people then you're right people aren't going to be walking we're going to see step counts diminish we're going to see rates of diabetes and dementia and all these things continue to rise because we're taking away people's options to move so let's land this if someone

listening forgets everything else from this conversation what are three things they should actually

“do starting today seven thousand steps is one of them yeah I think first identifying where you are”

I think figure out what your daily step count is take a week and figure out what that is and see how you can improve that if you sit on the lower side if you're under three thousand steps start with just adding 500 steps that's a five minute micro walk if you're close to that range that's seven to eight thousand steps that's an optimal range for the benefits of movement longevity I had a conversation with my father this morning actually he said what is this differ if he's 80

depending upon your age for someone who's 80 if you can get to five thousand steps per day you have a lot of benefit there like we talked about dementia and things like that so that would

be figure out which your baseline step count is and see where you can improve the second would be

please pay attention to your feet look at them can you move your toes can you display your toes and if not start to work on things to improve the strength of your foot maybe you start by walking five minutes at home barefoot start with very very small doses but allow your foot to feel the ground and then third would be assess your footwear your footwear should it be functional you shouldn't be in a shoe that doesn't look like a foot all day long I'm not saying go through all of your

“shoes away we talk about having a shoe clock if you have to wear a certain type of shoe to work”

for example then when you get home wear a shoe that's more functional that respects the anatomy of your foot if you do just those things you'll probably stay out of my office it doesn't have to be hard what something people pay money for that actually makes their foot health worse high heels Jimmy choose that was probably too easy I should have put that one earlier what something people pay money for that they think is actually helping them that instead makes their health worse

how's that there's a lot of passive modalities out there the people like to use for the quick fix

this will make my bunion straighter I'm just gonna have to wear this brace at night I always

encourage people to have the AND conversation one of my favorite tools is toe spacers I wear them every single day what's going on with that why do you do that I was a dancer when I was younger and I

“that's what got me into this I had very poor feet I had pain in my foot bunions neuroma stress fractures”

and I wore foot orthosis all the time and it was just a disaster and it wasn't until I started strengthening my feet that things started to get better all around and my feet developed bunions on both sides and so these toe spacers align my toes they keep my toes in this position now I also have the AND conversation I strengthen my foot I walk around barefoot I wear the right shoes so with these tools that people can buy that I think are very helpful you got to put the workin

you know you have to put the workin for anything that's worth doing toe spacers wonderful in conjunction with the right footwear and strengthening your foot when you think of a lot of these one of my dreams and life Jordan is when I walk into a grocery store you know when you go to the foot section it's all products for symptoms buy a heel cup if you have heel pain buy a pad for your toe if you have a hammer toe these are symptoms these are products that take care of symptoms

I went there to be products up there that it's like strengthen your foot don't just wear a cushion underneath your heel and think that's gonna solve the problem because you're taking care of a symptom you're not going after the cause so that's the conversation the maximal cushion footwear it's like the alien invasion of footwear I don't know what's happening with all of that we're getting further and further away from the function of the foot the least amount of cushion necessary

to complete the task what do you think about those vibrant five-finger like the toe shoes that we're in with biohackers maybe they still are I don't know but what do you think about those because besides looking ridiculous I can get past that if they're really good for you the conversation of minimal footwear or footwear that allows your foot to function is not new you know the vibrant five fingers came out I believe in 2007 and that's when it was like hey what's happening this is a

tendons and through your ligaments that is not a bad thing that's an environment where your foot gets stronger do it too fast if someone's listening to this podcast and they were in a very aggressive shoe with an orthotic and they said I'm gonna go buy the vibrant five fingers because what she said made sense and you go and wear that every day you're gonna be in my office because you're gonna be like my foot hurts yeah I definitely miss myself up with those trying to be like I'm

gonna go jogging now which I've never done in my life with these on you're gonna have a bad time after

about a week of that some people can run in those shoes more power to you go for it some people will never run in that shoe and that's also okay wouldn't sandals do the same thing though or is it

“you have to have each toe independent and that's the benefit like a running sandal well okay my”

buddy Allen who's a little bit of a hippie to be kind of guy will be hiking in louse literally like an mountain and he's wearing basically flip flops that are really thin that you could get anywhere and obviously the guy has super strong feet and I asked him if he got the toe shoes he's he's got really like him I'm curious if it's important to have that individual toes separation or if he's just got those super strong feet because he's wearing sandals and that's good enough

yeah I mean if he if you have the ability to display your feet you're fine so if he's in a

sandal where his toes can display and yeah in function the thing I always caution people with a flip

flop is when you wear a flip flop you have to actually curl your toes to keep it on during the swing face and that's not what you want he's wearing flip flops I should have clarified he's wearing flip flops not like a teva sandal like he's wearing a fricking flip flop on a mountain

“because he's crazy yeah the sandals with the back straps that you can like or a little more”

you don't end up gripping your toes so much I see okay you have a shoe list somewhere I'll link in the show notes is that still up yes yeah okay I guess that's a good point to bring up is there's a difference between functional footwear and minimal footwear so functional is the white toe box low heel to toe drop right so six millimeters or less and then variations on the cushion or the stack height so that's a nice transition shoe for people are in footwear

that is not the shape of their foot one step down would be minimal footwear white toe box zero drop so the heel and toe are on the same plane in thin and flexible sole it's that thin sole that people have a tough time with because that's a you know if you're on concrete all the time you know that's a tough conversation but that functional and minimal footwear there's so many shoe companies out there now that are respecting the function of the foot and I'm very very happy to see

that it is my mission in life to see more people wearing the right footwear. We'll link to that in the show notes. Dr. Courtney Conley thank you very much. Thank you so much. Yourologist Dr. Justin Human reveals why fertility testosterone and erections can be your earliest warning signs of heart and metabolic disease and why most men miss the signal. Our testosterone will start to decline starting at the age of 30 we say one to two percent every year

the reproductive health is a snapshot of overall health so if you do have low sperm counts it's kind of a wake up call a fix your overall health picture. I try to keep it simple what's good for your heart is good for your testicles it's good for your sperm so life styles one of them within that and talk about diet exercise sleep and stress optimize your diet minimize your process foods vegetables lean proteins exercise wise combination cardio heavy weight lifting that's

good for your hormonal health we know you need good testosterone levels within the testicle in order to have good sperm health testosterone placement therapy that shuts down you to testosterone there's genetic aspect to sperm health there's not much you could do from a genetic standpoint and then supplements is something a lot of guys talk about so there's certain supplements

“within the fertility category that can help that's how you optimize there's no question about it”

we're unhealthy right we're less healthy now than we were 20 years ago four years ago 50 years ago were you more processed foods if we wake up or seeing it a desk all day coming back watching Netflix all day and rinse and repeat that's the whole thing it's unhealthy living really it's

four food poor exercise we're consumed by screens and all of that just ultimately leads to unhealthy

life men really aren't engaging the healthcare system but at the end of the day it's not so objective as your cardiovascular health we've been reproducing for however long as humans all you really got to do is what's good for your heart health your overall health is good for your reproductive health whether you're in your 20s or 40s or facing infertility episode 1254 of the Jordan Harbinger Show could change how you think about men's health interesting if not slightly alarming conversation

walking is not exercise it's just maintenance and most people myself included are running way below the minimum you don't need a new program you don't need a new supplement you don't need some extreme routine you probably just need to move more and move consistently because this is not

show notes on the website advertisers deals discount codes ways to support the show all at

“Jordanharbinger.com/deals please consider supporting those who support the show don't forget about”

six minute networking as well over at six minute networking.com I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram I'm also on LinkedIn if you're over there hanging out this show is created an

association with podcast one my team is Jen Harbinger Jace Sanderson Robert Fogrety Tautis of

“Alaska's Ian Baird Gabriel Muzrahi remember we rise by lifting others the fee for the show is you”

share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting in fact the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about if you know somebody who loves walking or needs to do more of it definitely share this episode with them in the meantime I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time taking a quick break to tell you about my friends new book I told you so this one's for anyone

who's ever wondered why the smartest person in the room is sometimes the one that everybody ignores author Matt Kaplan who's been a science correspondent at the economist for two decades he looks at the history of scientific breakthroughs that were obvious in hindsight but threatening at the time and when an idea threatens people's careers reputations funding or world view things can get pretty ugly pretty fast scientists who pushed ideas we now take for granted were

mocked sideline pushed out before anyone finally said okay maybe they were right handwashing

before surgery sterilizing instruments these were once controversial enough to ruin reputations which sounds completely insane now but Matt shows this still happens today with funding

“politics peer reviewed gatekeeping fraud ego and fear of career retaliation that's what makes”

I told you so quite fascinating it's not just a book about science it's a book about human nature status fear group think how hard it is to admit somebody else saw the truth before you did so check out I told you so by Matt Kaplan the book is linked in the show notes