Footwear Innovation from the Salomon Sports Science Laboratory | Koopcast Episode 60

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and this podcast is all about footwear innovation in the trail and ultra running space on the podcast today i have sebastian pavler and marlene giadinole of the solomon sports science laboratory out of annesse france we discuss how research done in the lab actually lands on your feet and how you benefit from some of the research being done out of solomon's lab i've always appreciated how seb marlene and other scientists like them take a solutions oriented approach to research and it shows up in solomon's wide range of products which are some of the most heralded in the marketplace today as with all of my podcasts there are no financial conflicts of interest between me or solomon i just appreciate what they do so i hope you enjoy this one as we peel back the curtain on how your shoes come to be let's get right into it here's my conversation with sebastian and marlene over at solomon right on the onset mentioned that things were weird and we have that experience here too i mean we have a physiology lab at our home office in colorado springs colorado and we've been going back and forth

between do we open it up for physiological testing and we just do you know standard graded exercise tests and things like that it's not it's not a biomechanics lab um it's it's very much more of a what i would call kind of a performance laboratory and endurance performance laboratory but we've gone back and forth between do we open it up do we do it with these restrictions is it worth opening back up and things it thinks like that so is your lab actually open now are you like bringing athletes in for testing and things like that what is this what is the state of it so we are still we are still open and we still have the opportunity to run some some testing uh while respecting all the um how can i say that restrictions the restriction rules and so on yeah so but it's it's pretty rare we try to do only the um the the tests that are um how can i say that that are really useful for for projects and uh and yeah so we try to minimize basically our activity uh in the lab and only do what is absolutely necessary for for a development project so we do some some biomechanical testings and some sensory analysis and so on but uh yeah so explain to me the setup because um a lot of the listeners once again we have a pretty we have a lay audience they know running they know testing and things like that

but try to like like describe visually what the lab is like how big is it what kind of equipment do you have what athletes are coming into the lab and things like that just so we can start to paint this picture since this is going to be a big part of the whole conversation i can start with this one so we have this kind of big room you know it's around 150 square meter so it's kind of big um and it's equipped with um let's say two types two types of uh measurement device some of them are fixed in the lab so we have free force platforms we have also eight cameras around them the cameras are not that fixed because we could dismount them and take them outside to do some measurements but basically you know the lab is set up with you with those eight cameras and so it's pretty convenient to to let them in place and so this is the basic setup you know we we can have people and athletes come into the lab just run or walk to this kind of uh of pathway you know where the force platforms are and we can do this kind of conventional analysis where we can measure forces and the 3d movement as well and then calculate some metrics based on those measurements and the other devices that we have are some portable ones that that we're able to take outside the lab so pressure insoles uh inertial units accelerometers uh so we have emg sensors that are kind of uh you know they are mostly used in the lab but we can can

take them outside and so the idea is to be able to have this kind of standardized setup in the lab but also be able to get some of the devices outside to have some real world measurement especially in trail running for example it's difficult to replicate trail running in a lab setup so that's why we have those two types of device no if you want that yeah we we really strive since we are working on outdoor activities we really strive to have uh devices that we can bring outside the lab it's very important for us and especially in trail running as zev just mentioned and uh yeah just to have something uh we also recently received um gas analyzer so we try also to do more um physiological measurements to have a direct measurement evaluation of performance and we also have a nice uh outside track just uh going from inside the lab to outside the lab to to analyze um to do some routine tests about cushioning about right really to have a standardized track to do our less original measurements let's say and the the whole setup of the the whole setup of the lab is it part of aimer sports like all of the different like the whole portfolio of companies that are underneath aimer sports do they have access to the lab at various points or is it just solomon so i'd say it's it's just solomon and officially it

would be just footwear actually because all the devices and the and the place was set up as by the footwear department and financed as well by the footwear department so that doesn't mean that we do not share our toys you know with the other departments so if the if the winter sports department needs to do some tests it's it's more than possible you know but officially it's a footwear dedicated lab and uh and as far as aimer sports is concerned so what what you need to know is that for footwear um the solomon headquarters here in annecy is identified as a let's say competitivity uh a pole you know for footwear development so meaning that we're not only working on solomon shoes but also wilson uh you know tennis shoes and arcterics for hiking uh mountaineering shoes so meaning uh this footwear lab could be intended for testing tennis shoes or arcteric shoes and actually i worked for wilson for my i don't know the the three first years of my career where dedicated to uh to work in wilson shoes and uh as far as the other you know brands of the aimer group i are concerned some of them had some facilities in there i had headquarters to do some sports science as well but uh for us it's basically around that and something also i think that it's still in that is interesting also to have in mind is that when we arrived uh with seb in solomon it was

eight years ago eight years ago yeah the lab was a kind of uh 40 meter squares kind of cave in the basement with no windows we've just won't very cold treadmill that we still have actually and just plantar pressure insurgents and something like this and so now and how yeah and hurt belt and now we have this uh so it's not the nike lab but we have a a pretty nice lab with very sophisticated devices and so on and uh the team is also uh you know so growing up and so it i think that this is a life really that over the past few years armor sports uh put a lot of um investments on the sports sciences basically especially for running footwear and this is kind of what i wanted to get at is a it didn't start out that way just like anything else it's not like it appeared magically out of the ground or anything like that this has been an ongoing project and i'm glad i heard you to describe it because i've asked athletes that have been there and they haven't been able to quite like paint the pictures as well as you have because you guys have a more intimate sports science knowledge of it but you have a lab that is on par or better than a lot of the major universities here in the united states both in terms of like the sheer the quality of the equipment that you have but also the

sheer range of things that you can do that you pointed out i mean you've got biomechanics stuff you've got things that you can measure emg so we're looking at the muscles you've got metabolic capabilities you can go indoors outdoors to kind of rep to kind of uh try to get a better representation of what's actually going on in the field which i think is lost in a lot of sports science since we try to kind of control those things in the lab and i've always been rather impressed with that array even when i've heard it described from an athlete so you guys have all these really cool toys right and at the end of the day at the end of the day the information that you glean from all these toys goes into footwear how does that how does that process actually happen because you have a huge you have a huge line of footwear mainly trail running but i think that you have done a good job of having kind of like specialty shoes you've got a shoe for mud you've got a shoe for you know high traction situations you've got a shoe that drains really well you've got a shoe that's kind of more of an all-purpose shoe a road to trail shoes and thing like that how how do you guys take this research and actually put it into a product so it basically well what i used to say is that it basically starts with uh with some questions we are we are you know question answerer answerers and um and so could be you know we want to improve downhill performance in trail running for

example we want to improve running economy for road running for example and nike did that pretty well in the last years we want to improve stability in uh in hiking could be those kind of questions and for for any of those questions you have a fundamental part to address let's say i take i want to improve stability in hiking i need to really define what stability is and what um what are the key biomechanical indicators of this um of this um parameter i'd say so this is this starts with this very fundamental question and so we have some testing to answer this question and say okay this is what stability is and answering this question we gather a lot of knowledge into what is the hiking movement uh how we can measure that how the body interacts with the shoe and the ground and can can give us some ideas to transfer that into shoe concepts and then the loop is looped let's say and and we can test the different concepts that we that we have imagined and uh and see if the metrics that we identify in the first phase are you know uh optimized by the concept that we that we have imagined in the second phase basically yeah basically to to add something on that um i think that as sports scientists in salomon we have uh i would say three missions

um the first one has a self-sale is really fundamental is really close at what we can do in a in a research lab in a university lab and in this first step in this first mission what we want to know is basically what are for example the main criteria of performance in trail running for example of uh let's say what do we have to focus on to to to have better performance in uh in trail running so we can identify that downhill section as as are very important for performance or we can identify that i don't know uphill um um uphill uh speed speed in uphill section are also important and so the goal here is really to understand what are the performance criteria of a given activity and to really have a description of of this the performance and then in the second time our second mission i think if i have to explain explain it would be what we call here innovation and this is mostly done by all the collaboration that we're going to have with the designers with the developers and so on so here we will try to to go from an excel excel file to let's say a really product design and how to apply the knowledge to the product basically and then we have a third mission i would say it's more validation of said state and here we will try to to uh to quantify the benefits of of the new technology of the concept or whatever and i would say that

i think that today 80 percent of our time is on is on research and exploration wow we are what we do uh mostly that's that's absolutely unbelievable for a company that has to produce products right that you're spending 80 percent of your time just doing their background research and the innovative side of it because that means very little of that actually makes it to the consumer yeah and basically what we try to do is really to understand the needs of the consumer and so over the past few years we focused a lot on biomechanics but today we also focus on physiology on sensory preferences and so on so we have we try to have a 36 degrees of description of the consumer let's say of the of the user of the runner of the hiker or whatever here's what i can appreciate about that approach is you guys are letting science kind of lead the way right you're looking at what dictates performance from a scientific perspective and you're designing footwear products around that and all too often that first step gets missed and we've seen this and you guys have seen this in the footwear side of things where all the all runners are injured they've been injured since we started running right we just it's just a huge huge huge problem in running well somebody at some point in time decided that the reason that we were all getting injured is because our shoes were too cushioned and then they removed all the cushioning from the shoes we saw this huge barefoot running movement kind of take over the world born

to run definitely facilitated that but there was no data at the time to show that running barefoot actually decreased running injuries and then as a reaction to the barefoot movement the over cushioned shoe movement especially in trail running started to take over as well and said oh well we need more cushioning to prevent injury and improve performance and i'm not knocking on virum or hoka they've got to produce products i totally get it not like hoka shoes i run i run it of a lot but both of those had the same flaws in that they were just guessing at the answer to the problem which was what improves performance or what prevents injury and they produce products kind of like putting in a way that they were putting the cart before the horse right before the science actually kind of came along you guys are taking the opposite approach is where you're looking at the landscape of the science and saying okay this is where it actually makes sense to put cushioning to put traction to put stability and things like that am i understanding that correctly yeah and just to add something again is that i think that the paradigm that we we we are that we embrace today is that those criteria of performance and so the needs that are related to those criteria are highly runner specific i mean you you do not have the same needs that i have and sebastian also has

different needs and so we are all different and so our needs and the solutions he is different as well actually yeah and i've always thought that companies that produce companies like solomon that has to produce products there's this fine line of following the science versus being on the leading edge of it because you can't ever get kind of like hot behind the trends because then you know four or five companies have kind of like outpaced you at the time i want to know how that how that aspect of blending innovation and then keeping your products in a science-based efficacious way how you just internally blend those two and i know that's a really hard question to answer but i'm sure as thoughtful as you are on the research side of things you guys have thought about that as well yeah it's actually a current topic for me you know on the on the project that i work on and the idea is to what's the right balance between pushing some concepts and some new technologies and then and pulling some needs from the market and from the running and like you said it's it's kind of a touchy question and um so how we address that is pretty let's say pretty empirical is that you know we have some ideas and and some of the people in the in the company have some ideas and push some of the technologies and some of the concepts that and then uh we're trying that seeing if it works in a way in the lab or you know in field testing

or with uh some some research about the uh the literature and stuff like that see if it makes sense and try to find the right customers and the customers could be uh end users runners or could be internally as well because sometimes you know uh we we just work on some uh on some process or some something that can that can simplify the the the the life of um of our colleagues and so trying to you know make the link between this uh this id this concept that was pushed uh with some id and with the need of the end user is kind of it's kind of the uh of the of the of the link between the the r and the d basically uh in in every r and the process but it's kind of empirical and uh and i think we don't have the we don't have the the the most precise entry yet yeah it's it's always a tough balance with companies and i've gotten around to like you name it nike under armor and everybody kind of struggles with that with that yin and yang that push and pull of putting innovative products out there and at the same time having some sort of uh research base efficacy to kind of lean on and my opinion is some companies get that out of balance where they're pushing things out there too quickly and sometimes they're right they get the guess right that whatever technology or whatever they're kind of pushing ends up actually

working when they just had really preliminary data that would and oftentimes they just get it wrong and what ends up happening is they get so entrenched in the product that they've just developed that they keep pushing out nonsense that you know that that that has been proven to uh otherwise not have actually any sort of efficacy so it's it's always i've i always appreciate when companies can kind of strike that uh strike that balance and i think you guys have a really thoughtful process uh with it um related to that how much stuff gets gets put on the cutting room floor because if you're constantly like innovating and trying to put products out there inevitably some of them like don't make the cut and i know it's hard to say well it's exactly this percentage but i think the listeners would appreciate how many things actually end up on the shelves of their local running store versus the things that are in youtube's closet or in some other solomon employees closet that might get like one or two uses regarding exposure i don't know in terms of products really but i would say in terms of exploration projects so really at a microscopic level i would say that each year i think that we we may stop half of the project that we start in january i think that in december half of them are stopped because it's not the the right path or i don't know at the exploration level i would say that it's something like this at

least half is that what you said marlene i just want to clarify that you said at least half get stopped by the end of the year the half yeah regarding the exploration projects then i i don't know but maybe i would say that yeah if i yeah over this year but it's uh it's uh yeah it's uh it's not really it's it's a tricky one because it's it's difficult and uh and and precise numbers i think we don't have them and and we won't have the right to tell them but uh what's what we can say is that for any event uh research project and where we have to where we have to do prototypes and then how many what we can say is about how many prototypes we we have on the cutting cutting table before any product uh is released and i have an example uh for a tennis shoe that i worked on when i was at the at the beginning of my career and uh we did more than 150 prototypes uh before getting the shoe to work and well to play because it was a tennis shoe so it's kind of a lot and we have some you know there are some thoughts to to say okay how can we simulate some of the prototypes at the beginning of the process to try to reduce this number because you know you you can't you can't build 200 shoes uh to sell one at the end of the day so right that's that's the that's that are basically the numbers you know 100 prototype for any project is

something kind of usual for a research project and i think i think a lot of a lot of runners will find that astounding because when they get running shoes they still will find something to bitch and moan about right they'll still they'll still find something that like oh i just don't like this i don't like that which speaks more to the individual nature of our feet and how we use shoes versus the rigorous nature that you put into actually trying to figure out what's going to work and what's not to i mean the fact that you're going through i mean even 50 right different prototypes to achieve one would be a really high number but you're telling me it's 100 or 150 to one it's just incredible um so what what might we see coming out of solomon in the next few years i know you guys have a like a long timeline to do rnd and actually kind of come out with a product and i don't want to like spoil you know any anything for you guys because i know you guys like to launch it and you know create a big buzz around it and things like that but if you can like generally style some of the things that the consumers might actually see coming out of solomon and out of your lab i think it would be uh interesting for everybody i i i think you guys are searching through your uh non-disclosure agreement memory banks right now to find out an example which is totally fine and i'm more than i'm more than happy to take any of this out afterwards if you have to consult with your legal team so feel free to feel free to feel free to tell me anything and we can retract it later i think we can talk about uh two of our uh you know

you know innovation priorities that would be um i would say that like lifestyle products let's say you know there are some ranges that are on this on this area sneaker sneaker shoe more than performance shoe so it's it's kind of a hot topic um and so if uh if uh running satelman fan uh like to wear shoes you know just to go uh just to go in the city and go outside there are some ranges uh on the go uh i think a second priority and you could talk more than my than myself is uh is road running shoes new new road running shoes because we we launched some some road running shoe ranges a few years ago i think it was three years ago for the first one and some new products are going to come and i can comment on something on my side i the innovation project i'm involved in is about uh you know having um having nice and accurate shoe recommendations and so how we can take some data on the customer on the runner and address him with the right shoe for his right usage for his foot shape for his biomechanics so we're working on this kind of process so we hope that we will come up in i don't know one you want two years from now with some nice solutions to do that either in store or in a distant remote perspective i think that that's the

next layer of footwear is somehow a user being able to scan their foot with their phone or something something that they can do in a shoe store and then have have the company of their choice make a shoe that fits their foot specifically and then they can say i want this type of traction i want this type of cushioning i want this type of upper i mean and shoe companies are you guys know more than i do they're really close to that you guys might be close to that just not leading on to it too much but i i think that that's the future you know because once again everybody wants their shoe a little bit different than when it comes off the shelf i want the toe box a little bit wider i want the heel cup a little bit more narrow i want the lugs a little bit longer i want a vibram outsole instead of something else and if a user can actually put all of those things together in a customized way which i don't think we're that far away from i think that that's the next step yeah and actually you know not so it was like two three three years ago we had this kind of project of customized shoe it was called salomon mesh yes i do remember it was yeah you know it was the really first steps into customize you because uh we basically invented a new way to build the shoes and simplified and simplified greatly the process and so the the customer was able to choose his components and it was uh it was easier to do that the project was stopped because

because it was not mature but uh i i think you're right it's it's it's it's just there it's not that far to um to be able to do that uh more precisely and more more customized actually i think that one one outcome of this mesh mesh project something that i think we we have learned is that runners do not necessarily need a shoe that is just customized to to themselves but something that we should be better at it's to to be more uh runner specific in the way we build the shoe meaning that to have a more let's say how can i say that to to to address needs for given functional groups and not for try to have a shoe for everybody but to to to to be more specific to a target to a Reynolds group for example and uh yeah so this is something that we work on that we are working on a lot also to to try to to address the needs of the of a small group of the population whoever's i'm trying to address uh to have the best shoe for everybody everybody because i think that is just it's just impossible because we are too different regarding our biomechanics our anatomy our needs our preferences where we run and so on so i think that it's it's hard from one side it's hard to have a single solution for every single runners but it's also uh i think it's also

somehow wrong also to try to have one solution for all the runners so we try to be more specific also at that at this level yeah it's it's like i said i think the future of it is fascinating and if anything the covid pandemic has kind of accentuated this right because we can't we don't have the same type of access to go into our local running store and get fitted by somebody that's there and try on 10 pairs of shoes which a lot of people do right and then finally kind of like walk out with the one that like feels best to them and so companies like yourself and other footwear companies have tried to they they try different strategies to get users into the right footwear without that hands-on type of experience which is incredibly inordinately difficult absolutely and i think that more and more brands are working on this uh so we are working on this and uh yeah over brands are also deeply working on this like groups um so yeah i think that's just one key uh uh key part of innovation that is not directly related to the product itself but but that is still very very important because i as i often say there is no um bad footwear solution minimalism uh can be good for some kind of people and maximalism can be good for all kinds of people but the thing is that who should wear what basically and who needs what and i think that this is

uh one of the golden question for the next years well because you have you know millions of ends of one right that all need like slightly different variations of cushioning stability traction depending upon the situation and things like that so that point that point is really well uh taken marlene um i want to discuss a particular aspect of your lab that i find fascinating is you find examples in the research literature um that have emanated from your lab or at least in part or in whole and it seems to at least be able to be able to serve a dual purpose of where you can use your lab to internally help innovate and come up with products and do it more like internal type of documentation this is how our footwear is going to look in two or three years but you can also push that research out into the space where everybody gets access to it and i want to explore the interface of that uh a little bit because it's some of the research that i actually come into contact with when i'm using it in my in my coaching practice and one of the pieces one of the pieces of uh research that marlene you're actually the lead author on is the title of it is is fatigue associated with prolonged graded running that was out of the european journal of applied physiology and i think it came out in 2016 i have that correct i'm testing everybody's memory banks

i was thinking about the review the review or no it was original we did write also a review uh literature review about the effect of graded running on on fatigue and fear so it's more about the downhill downhill running yep and i've got i've got that one pulled up actually in front of me as well my from my thesis work i would say yeah well the the i'll link both of those in the show notes but the the question really didn't have anything to do with the specific research but it's more i wanted to i wanted to get your take on how you take like specific outcomes of a piece of research okay we're looking at graded running and we know that the joint torques are different at the ankle and the knee and the hip in an uphill and a downhill condition and things like that i don't want to get caught in the weeds there because that's a that's three other podcasts that we can kind of talk about but i want to i want to kind of explore some like practical examples of how the outcomes of those research of that research actually ends up in a shoe like how do you take that and say okay this is how we're going to design a shoe we're going to make it flexible over here more traction over there like you've done the research and then you've provided the input to the people who actually produce the shoes like how do you actually go through and do that yeah so basically regarding uh regarding my my thesis work uh which was mainly about um down here running so what we what

we what we what we figured out from this work is basically that there is no um good running strike pattern to minimize muscle fatigue uh after a downhill section and so that basically the best option was to try to switch in between different running style running techniques in order to minimize the load that that is put on a given muscle group right so this is basically the fundamental outcome of of this uh this research and then this helped us to decide basically knowing that the drop of the shoe for example affects the running technique this help us to say okay for our next generation of uh trail running should we should um we should design a shoe with the drop of eight millimeters in order to allow runners to strike the ground with their forefoot first but also with their heel first and so this is one example of how we can go from uh from the lab to the to the shell let me let me follow that all the way through because this is awesome so you produced a piece of research this is your PhD thesis and i'm very familiar with this because once again we've used a lot and the the the summary version i hate to do this with people who have actually produced the research because it over trivializes the amount of work and effort that you have put into it yeah it's okay but but the but the the high this is something that is very important also also and i think it's worth mentioning that we have to be very straight to the point when we want to

explain something complicated otherwise we we lose everybody we lose designers we lose marketing we lose developers so we need to be straight to the point so i can appreciate your struggle because i have to be on both sides of that i have to understand the underlying nuance but then i also have to produce the twitter version so we're going to glad you're not offended by me producing the twitter version on this so the twitter version of it is that you can stave off some type of muscular and or neuromuscular fatigue by switching from a heel strike to a midfoot strike to a forefoot strike during down during downhill running you took that into the footwear side and said okay we were going to produce a shoe that is conducive to doing that just from the drop perspective and that drop that you guys determined was an eight millimeter drop so an athlete can go down a downhill and the drop isn't so big that they couldn't switch from one foot strike pattern to the other and it's not so narrow that they were forced into another type of foot strike pattern i take that from a coaching standpoint and i look at that piece of research so kudos to you because it's directly impacted the way that i prescribe and counsel people and i say okay we're going to teach runners how to do this especially in an ultra marathon situation because we have a lot of runners that are stuck and cannot move out of a certain foot strike pattern so if i have a runner that is training for an ultra marathon that for some reason i feel that it's advantageous for them to delay some sort of muscular neuromuscular fatigue

because of the cumulative downhills part of the training prescription becomes okay let's learn how to heal strike how to forefoot strike how to midfoot strike based on the situation and potentially that can prevent fatigue so it's like full circle right i mean you get products out of it i get coaching out of it it's brilliant i think that's something regarding this specific topic something also that is somehow uh related to this and i think it's a study that i love i don't know if you if you know the study is a study that i've been done by um a university lab in luxembourg it's uh malisu the author and basically what they observe is pretty pretty close at what we observe from a fatigue perspective they basically observe that if you went over it was a study over i think uh three years long no no it was just 22 weeks i think if i will remember pretty precise right so it was it was a prospective study over i think 20 weeks or something like this and what they observe is super interesting is that people that were less injured were those either who use very different type of footwear so traditional minimalist maximalist footwear and so on or who try also to to practice very different kind of activities and what this tells us basically and i think it's somehow related to what we observe also in downhill is that by either switching your footwear or your practice you you avoid

overloading certain joints and certain muscle groups and so on so it's a very interesting uh solution to try to um avoid overloading uh your your body basically and i think that's what is very interesting in trade and what is important in trade is to to try to to use this kind of uh let's say um plasticity variability in your running strike in order to overloading a given joint or a given muscle group and so on so so so i think that switching switching the stimuli is very interesting to reduce fatigue but also to reduce maybe the risk of injuries uh over a long term yeah so this aspect this aspect of like changing things up whether it's a foot strike or whatever has become really fascinating in trail and ultra running our mutual colleague you guys will find this hilarious this is the second time in two days that i've recorded a podcast where i've mentioned mentioned this this person i don't know the order that this is going to come out but it's just funny so our mutual colleague uh jackson brill who was an intern uh for us about a year ago uh he is fascinated with the uphill run to walk transition and one of the things that we consistently go back and forth forth about is yeah we can always measure the metabolic cost and what's more uh what's more economical to do what form of locomotion is more economical to do at what speed and what grade but it's harder to

account for the localized fatigue that's going on at the muscular level and the neuromuscular level to determine what you know what you should be doing at any kind of one point in time and this aspect of changing your foot strike either to prevent injury or to delay fatigue has similar has a similar vibe to it right where it's not just an economy thing because we know when runners switch foot strikes initially their economy is worse they're used to being a heel striker they switch to a forefoot striker at least initially the economy's worth but worse but that doesn't tell the whole story nor does that tell you what direction you should be counseling the athlete on from a performance or an injury prevention uh type of standpoint so it's interesting to see those themes kind of getting woven throughout everything especially in trail running because it's just everything right running walking uphill downhill flats technical fast slow poles which is a completely different thing it's like a little bit of everything trail running is a very nice way and easy way to develop this plasticity because you do that without thinking about it i mean you have to change your running strike most of the time because the surface is changing because uh the slope is changing or whatever so it's a very easy and interesting way to develop this plasticity this biomechanical plasticity i think it's uh yeah 100 so i asked you guys earlier about what potentially could come out and i understand that you guys got to keep a lid on certain things

totally get that but i'm going to ask you another question where you can let your imagination just completely run wild what do you want to come out like if you could have an unlimited budget and wave your magic wand and just do anything you can have any toys you can have any type of research you want to try to find like any answer what would what would you actually want to apply those resources to um um i can start yeah sure so i don't think i don't think that there is a perfect shoe i'm confident that we can do all the innovation that we want there is no perfect shoe but i think that if i would have a magic stick to do that i would spend it to um to put the right person in the right shoe and in just like one one click on your way on the website or whatever you can say okay i need this shoe and i will be less injured or more performant or i will i would be more comfortable with this shoe and in just one click you have the answer because i think that most of the people i think that they are totally lost in a shoe shelf and uh yeah i would spend all my energy to say you have to choose this shoe i would buy that and i love your phrase of they're stuck in their shoe shelf i've never heard that before but that's so relatable marlene i love that all right sebastian you get you get you get you have to follow that up now yeah you know i i heard a few a few time ago about the technology that is called i guess it's called

protocell and it's something you know it's it's kind of a biological uh fabric that is three printed and it has the capacity to basically adapt actively to any constraint or any stress that you apply to it and if i had um well it's not it's not maybe it's not a magic one because the technology is existing but uh if i had a lot of money i would invest on this technology and say how we can may make a shoe based on this technology so that so that the shoe you you only you only have one right you put this at your feet and then whatever you do wherever you do uh it adapts to the situation you know if you start running it's going to start increasing in stack and giving giving you the right amount of cushioning if you start running uphill it's going to you know um lose some weight and help you to be more efficient in the in the uphill situation if you slow down and you start walking it's going to adapt as well then you just go back and you go to the city and you start walking on the on the asphalt it can adapt as well so it's kind of doping it's it's like it's a little doping but it could be it could be that it does not enhance your performance but just adapts to the situation you know you you you you're you're walking uh you're running in the mud there are some lugs that are appearing right on what what we could call the outsole because i don't know if we could uh if

we would name this the spare parts the same uh the same way but if i had some uh some high budget to allocate to something i would say let's go into that well it's almost an extension i'm going to use an analogy from another sport it's it's like a more robust version of a dropper post in mountain biking so for those of those of the listeners that aren't familiar a dropper post in mountain biking just allows you to lower your seat automatically with the flick of a switch at your handlebars so if you're climbing and you need to sit on the seat you've got it in the up position but then if you hit some gnarly piece of downhill and you want the seat kind of out of the way for better maneuverability you can hit this thing and it'll actually kind of drop down you're talking about that on the shoe version from a lot of different levels and thinking like the even even down to the tightness of the laces right which boa kind of has that but it's a manual process right now i mean where you can switch that from a really technical tight situation to more loose if that's what the situation dictates i'd buy both of those concepts just for the record so i would encourage you to find the budget to to do that you'd have at least one consumer in me for both of those if you have a few bucks please be free i don't know if i could come up with the funding that's not that's my limiting factor um all right you guys i really appreciate the time that you spent with me today this was extremely fun entertaining um where can the listeners find out a little bit more about

either you two as individuals or like what you guys do for solomon uh so for my part um um well so i have a i have a scientific background into biomechanics uh i uh i i graduated from my master's degree it was eight years ago and uh and my PhD was defended i defended my PhD in 2016 and but i started working for solomon in 2012 uh so meaning that my PhD project was in the in the same time as my first years uh as a as a salmon uh you know biomechanist and um and so my main missions and my job evolved from testing products basically in the lab and mostly on this validation part that we talked earlier you know taking concept and saying okay is it working or not to more uh managing some scientific projects into different areas uh work on the on the ultra trail shoe i work on this uh i work on this customized project and uh right now i work on this innovation project about uh uh recommending some shoes like we said before and um and yeah that's basically it is more it's a more global uh uh position you know i'm um i'm not working uh 100 percent of my time in the lab i'm more on the on the on the

project managing uh part let's say on this innovation project and yeah i guess that's it for my part marlene same as said almost i yeah i uh i arrived uh i arrived in solomon i think one month after said also yeah something like this so uh he's my brother let's say and uh and yeah so i did a PhD in biomechanics and neurosciences uh and the application of this is mainly on in trail running as i said during the the podcast and uh yeah same as said at the beginning i was really um involved in um in product development and also in the research part of this product development and especially on um on in trail running and in uh in road running and today my main uh my main focus is to try to better understand the users and this um through a very sport sciences approach so using biomechanics using physiology and so on but also using um sensory analysis and uh behavioral sciences this kind of stuff in order to really understand to have a very um complete description of the users and not just his biomechanics uh i'm um i'm getting away from the validation process and uh yeah this is my main mission today so it's

still a lot of and more and more research again uh i'm um i'm getting away from the validation part so yeah my main uh my main focus is really on uh to better understand uh who is our users in order to to address his or her specific needs and using very different kind of methodologies like biomechanics physiology uh sensory analysis and so on well i appreciate what both of you guys do as i mentioned in the earlier part of the podcast um i think you guys do it right where you let the science lead and you put a lot of thought and uh careful attention to detail into the products that uh that you uh that you produce so it's appreciated by me as a coach and i know that your athletes appreciate it as well um i'm gonna have to visit you guys's lab next time i drive uh from geneva to uh chamonix for utmp because every time every time i go up that highway and i see the anse turn off i'm like i gotta go to the solomon lab just to like go and check it out so if you guys will indulge me i'd be very much appreciated of it you're welcome more than welcome thank you for that and there you have it there you go much thanks to sebastian and marlene over at solomon for their time today that was a really intriguing conversation i'm always curious to know how research done in the laboratory and out in the field actually ends up on our feet and on our persons hope you guys

enjoyed the conversation if you did head on over to apple podcast and give this podcast a rating or a review that helps the podcast out tremendously and also means a lot to me personally all right that's it for today you guys as always we will see you out on the trails you