There's some things that we do so instinctively that they're just like the neural pathways are

like a highway.

It's like you automatically do them, right?

It's just you have no like conscious control over it, you just do it, right?

Whereas the neural pathway from your mind to your bum on that side is like a goat track. Yeah. Welcome to the Trailhead of Trail Runner Nation. Each week we go on trail runs, virtual trail runs because we don't want to be breathing hard into the mic, but we invite you to join us and we have a guest today

that is going to help us become better runners and as we become better runners, hopefully that makes us kinder and better human beings. Your rights got on today's podcast. We're going to rethink how we move and how that relates to the trail. Trailrunners how many packs have almost worked, but bounced around, couldn't hold your gear, or just didn't fit right. That's why John G created the Revy Pack, the most technical and versatile day pack yet designed to take you farther. It's bounce proof thanks to a four point adjustable system and stoleable elastic waist belt. The Revy has pockets for everything too. It can haul over 20 pounds without flinching. Its weather-resistant materials, high contrast citrus lining, and John G's signature sustainable design makes this pack the one you'll reach for again and again. And here's a kicker. It's built with blue design approved. What does that mean?

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You can make them unique to all other people on the trail. You'll be you with the Tofosi Optics sunglasses. High quality lenses and they have a very fair price. You'll be surprised at how fair they are. Check out Tofosioptics.com and grab your next favorite pair. Score 20% off with the code TRN20 at tofosyoptics.com. Let's just call it. Shocks makes the ultimate running headphones period. Nothing else comes close. Seriously, we've been rocking the shocks for over a decade and they've only gotten better. They were the first ones to bring bone conduction technology to runners. And now their new Open Run Pro 2 is hands down the best open ear headphones period. The sound is crisp and clear but here's the magic. You can still hear what's going on around you. Car, cyclist, rattlesnakes, bears, fellow runners yelling on your left. And if you haven't tried shocks yet, just ask someone on the trails. Chances are they've got a pair and you'll swear by them. And shocks isn't just for the trails. I've been using their open dots one every day. These are also open here. They're a clip on earbud that are ultra light, crazy comfortable, and they give you Dolby audio with 40 hours of battery life in the case. Use the code TRN10 at checkout to save 10% at shocks.com. Go here the difference. Welcome to another edition of Trail Rear Nation. My name is Don Freeman, and I'm Scott War. What if this is a big what if pay attention Freeman ready? What if the secret to becoming a stronger injury-free runner Isn't pushing any harder but actually moving smarter Today, we're joined by Samuel Stowe. He's an ultra marathoner and a movement coach behind Pop running and we're gonna talk talk about what that is and why you should know about it. He also has a degree in aerospace engineering which I assume gives him the analytical perspective on how things move. Sam's method helps runners and walkers alike reconnect with their core, activate their gl, and find flow through biomechanics, breath, and mindfulness. Boy, all of those just struck a chord with me. We'll explore why pain-free, efficient movement is more about awareness than intensity and how simple changes in our posture and our breathing can unlock a whole new experience on the trail. Samuel, thank you for joining us from the land down under he he's from Brisbane, Australia, and he got up really early to join us on this episode. I'm curious after I've done some reading of some of the material that you sent over, you say that running shouldn't feel hard, but most of us wear our suffering. I mean, all of us, that's one of the badges we wear as ultra runners is we suffer, right? But what made you question that and said, instead of wearing the badge of suffering or no pain, no gain, and start following this flow state instead of the fatigue state, what made you think about that and analyze that? I guess I've always been a pretty relaxed kind of guy, and the more I got into Ultra Running. So I started Ultra Running in 2017. And the first Ultra I did was the North Face 50 in San Francisco. Oh yeah. Great race. And yeah, my coach Megan Roach at the time. And she, that was her first 50 mile. And she smashed it and she passed me and yeah I think like the first time that I did an ultra and you know when I got into trail racing I was just like this is actually really really hard and I wasn't really like enamored with how hard it was and I guess as I've gotten more and more experienced with it I've learned to kind of relax more and I've found that you know from as I as you mentioned like with my sort of background I like to optimize things so the more I've been able to optimize my movement the less pain I have and the more I can be relaxed and you know with the breathing and so on then you know the the whole thing becomes. And then that's obviously a good outcome. Boy, Samuel, I hope that you have a week here with us because I could talk to you that long about this topic. I love it. Yeah, awesome. You know, at what point kind of compare and contrast the day that 50 mile that North Face 50, the hardness in that mindset to a spot that you started working towards flow and it became a little easier. Comparing contrast, those two runs. Yeah, for sure. That's a really good one. Okay, the best run that I've had recently that really sort of put everything together for me was a hundred K in the mountains here in Australia. And that was a really good experience. But in terms of contrasting them, the first one, the 50 mile, I went out quite hard and obviously was quite bullish. You know, I was pretty fit. And that's a very competitive race. So there's lots of people to race race against and I got carried away with everybody and hadn't run that far before and it was about What about 25 miles or so in you get to the top of that drop into as it's stintsons beach I think yeah that long descent that's on the theipsy Trail, and I just could have completely blown up by that point. And I couldn't run anymore, and I got passed by the lead females, including Megan. And I got into Stinson's Beach, and I was like, shh, this is hard. What are I going to do now? But fortunately for me so it's just like hobbling and I didn't really have very good nutrition But fortunately a friend picked me up at Stinson's Beach and he kind of you know got me to eat and we just walked for a bit and You know I'd had to still a positive mindset, but it was just like a very much like a low point, you know and and eventually came back, you know? But then comparing that to more recently, so it was called the Buffalo Stampede, 100K, and it runs from a mountain town called Bright Up to the top of a mountain called Mount Buffalo, and it's, you get 5,500 meters of total gain across the thing, So that's like nearly 17,000 feet or so. And yeah, like the whole thing, like I was just obviously like running with some guys for a while and just having a great time with them. And then I sort of got to a point where we were climbing the mountain that one of the guys I was with just ran away. I couldn't keep up with him and I was like, okay, I just need to chill here. And yeah, just once I got to the top, well, there's a plateau and running across the Alpine. I was just like really loving the environment. I'd obviously worked a lot on my movement, my breathing and everything. And just was able to really enjoy the whole thing from start to finish and feel really strong all the way through. So yeah. So Sam, I'd have one follow up and then I'll acknowledge that I do have a co-host on here and I should let him ask questions too. So take all the knowledge that you had at this Buffalo stampede, take that brain in that mindset and bring it back into that first timer at the 50 mile run here in San Francisco, the North of the face. Do you think with that brain today, you could have navigated that naive runner with that fitness level success, successfully through that run? Yeah, I think if like me now had to coach me back then, then I would have like one got me moving better so that I was stronger and more resilient, two learned how to kind of keep myself calm. And then I think one thing that would have been hard to take out is the young ego and like wanting to chase everybody. So I think the experience piece of like not chasing everyone at the start and getting that nutrition, I think I would have been able to help him with the nutrition. I would have made a big difference but not necessarily fixed everything, you know. Yeah, so that's what we did with this brain transplant and I think we get we all can do that, you know, looking back in our younger days or our future days and kind of move that brain, move that body around a little bit and to see how would that performance would have improved. Maybe it wasn't my fitness as much as my decisions. Yeah, that's a bit of everything, I think. Yeah, Scott. You know, I'm curious, Samuel, so you did this North Face 50 and like all of us, you know, There's that can go wrong and typically do go wrong in the first few races that we go out there with. What made you, I mean, there's nutrition, there's fitness, there's the mental side. What made you focus your career and now with pop running, what made you focus on movement and correct movement patterns? Why did you think that was important for us versus all the other things that could go wrong? Yeah, well, I guess it's foundational, you know? If you don't get this bit right, then nothing else is possible for many people. You know, like a lot of people, they want to get into running and it's just painful and they're like, well, why would I do that? It's not fun in any way, you know, so they don't get to the next step literally. So I think, and for me, I'd seen the difference it had made for me because I have improved my running from almost the beginning. Like 2009, I found Qi running. I'm sure you're aware of Qi running. Yeah, uh-huh. Daniel Dreyer. And that made a big difference to me. Like I improved my running significantly. So I'd always had this awareness and having that biomechanical sort of analytical mindset. I'd always kind of wanted to optimize myself more and more.

And, you know, even back in 2017, I did another Qi running workshop. But I kind of like plateaued.

And I was like, well, I seem to have hit a wall here. I can't go any faster.

And it wasn't because of injury, it was like, I want to go faster. But my legs aren't kind of propelling me enough.

So that's when I went back to the drawing board a little bit and I got into barefoot running and I've always just kind of like wanting to bit more and more out of myself. Given time constraints like obviously pro runners can go and run 200 plus kilometers a week and get better that way, but I didn't have that luxury. And I'm also, you know, I'm always more of a shareer. Like I, as soon as I learn these things, I wanted to teach other people and show them that it's a better way. And I'd always got really positive feedback from people about the impact of that. So yeah, just naturally progress that way. What are some of the biggest ahas or changes that you've made in your running movement, whether it was with Qi running or barefoot running, what have been some of the biggest changes that you've made that have been a positive, had a positive effect on your running? Yeah, well, starting with Qi running was, Qi running does talk a lot about posture and a about like the lean and improving your cadence. So I did all that and that was what made the difference for a long time. And so that was really positive and got a lot out of that. And then when I got into barefoot running, I literally started barefoot running on, there's a Stevens Creek Trail near where I was working, which nice like light dust of gravel which isn't obviously what you would optimally go for for barefoot running but one thing I found was that when I was running on it if I didn't land in a good way I'd get blisters on my feet so it taught me how to run with like less friction on my feet so that was a really good outcome from the barefoot running. But then it was like, there's a guy called Keith Bateman and I talked about him on other podcasts too. He's got a thing called Aldiette Faster. And he looked, he's got a book and I was reading his book and he'd had a Facebook group and he's looking at me. He's like, you're not using your back side. You're not getting that power. And he'd had world records for a master's age group for running and he has a bit for runner as well. And so I kind of worked on that. And then I had a bit of an aha moment in 2019. After failing at the Boston Marathon with a bit of a foot injury, like what do you call it, a muscle strain in my foot. And I was like, I can't keep doing this. I've got to fix this. And I had an aha, I found my glutes and I found the power and everything sort of went dramatically up from there. Let's talk about the glutes. Because they are a major power source for our propulsion to move forward and you've discovered and researched and thought about it and speak about it. So let's talk about the butt. And I will tell you, Samuel, I hear it a lot. Don and I are running and he goes, war, use your butt, use your butt. You got a big butt, use it. So I don't know if I go that bad. I still don't know what he means by that. So, educators, what do you mean by glute activation and why is that important? Yeah, I think, you know, I've been talking to people and one of the things I'm trying to highlight to people is like the human body and the human skeletal and musculoskeletal system and all the tendons and fascia and everything that we've got that kind of puts us together. We've come to where we are to move in a certain way that's like efficient and the whole body is working as a unit, right? we many of us don't have the ability to actually use that system correctly. Because of the patterns that we kind of live in right. There's a lot of you know I'm sure Don knows a lot about this being a chiropractor but there's a lot of patterns that we develop where we're like forward flexed and we've got no core engagement. We develop gluteal amnesia where we completely forget we even have butt muscles, right? So many people I work with don't have the ability to powerfully activate their butt muscles or they have one side better than the other, which is very common. The whole idea is that if you think about like,

from the side perspective, you've got like your foot angle, your knee angle, the angle of your thigh, and then the torso, like that whole thing, if you get the angles right and you've got your muscles all activating, it's a spring system, do you know? Like all the tendons and the fascia from your, all the way up through your body, all act in a lelastic manner. So you can actually kind of like use that whole thing as a synergistic, like energy transfer. And so really it's about like getting all of those muscles to work in the right sequence and with that sort of elastic component to make running easy. Sorry for the technical responses. No, no, I like it. And I think we talked about it with Dr. Mark Cucazzella along the way he's back. Talk about the free energy, the elastic with the cadence, the 180 steps per minute, you're able to capture some of that stretch of those those ligaments intending and then as a snapback, you're able to use that to move forward. So it's available to us just like engaging the glutes. All of that stuff is available if we put it to use or if we're sloppy with our mechanics, we can lose it. So being able to just to dial in to efficient movement patterns is a real gift if we study it and learn it. And that's what you've done. It looks like with your running, your pop running. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And especially like this year, I've been teaching a lot of people online. And I realized getting feedback, I was doing case study and I signed a whole bunch of people up and taught them all Running and I was getting feedback that they're like I just feel stronger and better day-to-day And I'm walking around like stronger and I was like oh well, that's an unintended side effect I wasn't expecting you know and and then my dad's like, when are you going to develop a course for like 70-year-old hikers? And I was like, let me think about that. And then my dad, my dad pulled a calf muscle, I actually tore a calf muscle, trying to push his boat, because he's a sailor and he's trying to push his boat and had no core or glute activation. So he's pushing pushing with his calf and tourist calf muscle. And so then I was like, okay, let's do something here.

And I tried to get him to do some basic squats and stuff and he couldn't because he had no

glue to wear this.

And I'm like, okay, we're going to go back a couple steps and then I taught him how to

get his glutes to work and he spent some time fixing that and then he did. And then I got him to do the squats and the lunges and now I've got him to walk like with a lot more coordination, good posture, more power and core engagement. And so that's when I've gone, oh well I can think I can teach people more than just running now. You know, yeah. So you know, I'm thinking pop running. Why did you name it pop running? Not because your dad's your pop and not that you're acting as a pop, but tell us the origin of that name. Yeah, well, the pop running that I created that in like 2019 when I was first starting to teach and I wanted to share it. And I think it comes from, you know, the idea of pop is that it's like that explosive recoil kind of like, you know, you land on the ground and if you've got that power and explosiveness, you pop back off the ground, you know. So that's the idea is it's that pop which is that explosive recoil component that I'm aiming at. Yeah. So the opposite might be third running. You thought you you hit the ground. Yeah, like slap. Well, you know something bad. So Samuel, I'm really interested because now you got me worried that maybe I'm not activating my glutes. Okay. If I was one of your clients, and that's one of the advantages of having a podcast is I can be a client without paying you. What would you suggest? Where would I start to try to improve my glute activation and using them more for what they're made to be used for instead of just sitting on my butt. Yeah, well, I can send you my glute activation workshop, but basically, I would get you to, firstly, see if you can isolate your glutes, right? So if you're, it's probably harder to do sitting, but you can try. If you sit nice and straight, like nice and upright, think about trying to suck your belly into your spine. Like lift your pelvis up a little bit and then see if you can like tense one butt muscle. Can you do it? One side on just one side. I think I can. Nice. And then the other side. That one's a little more difficult. Yeah that's not uncommon. I think I'm left glute dominant.

How are you guys? That's that's I often find that people have a lazy left glute. So you you're different to most people. I'm a South Park blue. Yeah, exactly. But but you know, Samuel, people get into habits of taking their first step up a stair with one or the other, the other leg. We become into a pattern like that. So no surprise, one side might be a little bit stronger. Somebody'd right-handed, they'd use their right hand all the time, and they're stronger on that side. So these patterns seem to fit not only with running, but doing just daily activities with their upper extremities, too. Yeah, and I often find when I'm working with people, they're like, I always get injured on one side and then I'm assessing their glutes and they're like, I can't get that one to do anything, you know? So it's like they're very closely related. Let's let you glute on one side. It's not working. That's where you're going to get all your injuries. I was watching some kind of coverage on Tiger Woods and they said, what's going on right

now?

Tiger is one of his kind of his downspills and he said, I can't get my glutes activated. And that stayed with me. Said, comment has stayed with me that long, but I have really haven't never started it out and paying attention like Tiger knew about his glute activation. And Samuels coming onto the show to talk about glute activation. That's great. You held onto that bit of data for this long? It's still there. It's bothering me. So, you know, without giving out, you know, all of your IP for free, I'm sitting here with my left glute activated and I can't activate my right one quite as well. Why is that? And what's a simple exercise that I can do to improve that right glute? Do I need to get into the gym and do dead lifts or squats or? No, and that's the thing is like, the things that everyone loves to do, and not necessarily the first thing that you should do, you know, is like if you went and started to try and do your Bulgarian split squats and you reverse dead live. Right. And, you know, even just a, you know, goblets squat or whatever. And your glutes not working. It's not going to make any difference, you know? You're just going to like enhance like your existing conversations. So you actually need to go back to the beginning and fix the movement in its first instance,

which is just getting that bloute to work by itself. Before you can build it into all these different functional movement patterns. It comes from two things. One is your hips could be a little bit twisted up. What often happens is because you've not used to using that muscle, you get tighter in the front, and so then it's harder for you to use it. So it's like a vicious cycle. So you kind of need to untwist them a little bit, a little bit of mass, I get into them and like really try and like release the hip flexors and like all the things that are pulling your pelvis into forward position Which makes it harder for you to use your glutes So one is like a little bit of stretching and Fascial release there, but the other thing is like that just the awareness, you know Is like oh, I'm not using that muscle. I need to start using it right and do it putting yourself in position where you can isolate that muscle and focus on that building that connection. I often, you know, use the analogy, you've probably heard before, like, about the neural pathways. It's like, there's some things that we do so instinctively that they're just like the neural pathways are like a highway. It's like, you automatically do them, right? It's just you have no conscious control over it, you just do it, right? Whereas the neural pathway from your mind to your bum on that side is like a goat track. There's nothing there and you've got to really work at it, like hack away all the weeds and start building it out into like a more of a road And some of those weeds might be there from old injuries Scarch issue that's built up in that spot. That's possibility Learned bad habits no doubt that could be it right but but it also leads to more injuries You want balance on each side and if you have one side that's tight You've got another side that's working harder, that symmetry that balances the key to an efficient system. If you've got one side of the system not working right, it's going to be hard to find that running efficiency too. So I like where you're going with this. Yeah. And it's like, with this, it's like just developing that whole function, you know. But secondly, it's actually about learning to use it, right? Because I think sometimes people can get to the point where they're glued to fully functional, but then they still don't use them, do you know? And I've seen that many times, like I've worked with dancers, boxers, you know, all types of people with various like physical professions and they're very fit and strong and yet they still run like very poorly and very painfully, you know, so it's learning how to then actually translate that into efficient movement as a second step. When you're out on the trail, Samuel, think of, uh, share or do you check in. Do you mind, mindfully look at your own gate and think about where your footfall is or what your posture is? What kind of things do you do to be that are cues to make sure you're in the zone? Yeah, well, I think I've built the highways up pretty strong. So, you know, because I've been training people doing this, it's kind of like what I think about and do most of the time. So it's kind of instinctual for me. But, you know, rhythm is my main thing, like just finding a good rhythm, just keeping that rhythm because that's the difference. So, like, you know, when it's elastic, it's like rhythmic, right? But when you don't have any elasticness elasticity, then you just like thud, thud, thud, thud, there's no rhythm and it's just that, you know? So keeping a good rhythm, I love listening to kind of just rhythmic music, sometimes not always.

And then, you know, just staying relaxed.

I focus on my breathing a lot.

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