Strong Feet, Strong Life: Why Your Foundation Matters - The Truth About Foot Pain and Modern Footwear with Podiatrist Thien Trinh

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What if everything you’ve been told about foot pain, footwear, and insoles is wrong?
In this episode of The True Form Podcast, Jack sits down with podiatrist and biomechanics specialist Thien Trinh to unpack the messy truth about foot pain, plantar fasciitis, barefoot shoes, and why the footwear and medical industries keep getting it wrong.

Thien is not your typical podiatrist. From growing up in a refugee family to appearing on Shark Tank, he’s built a mission-driven business around one core idea: if you fix the foundation, you change the whole system. That means rethinking the way we walk, the shoes we wear, the insoles we’re sold, and how chronic foot pain is treated across the board.

We cover everything from gait retraining and chronic pain to integrity in business, copycat products, and why he’s betting everything on designing a new kind of shoe for the modern world.

If you care about long-term health, movement, and actually being able to walk pain-free as you age, this episode will change the way you think about your feet.

In This Episode, We Discuss:
- Why feet are the most neglected part of modern health
- How walking is a skill most of us were never taught
- Why the “soft cushioning fixes pain” story is deeply flawed
- The truth about plantar fasciitis and chronic foot pain
- Barefoot vs cushioning: what the barefoot movement gets right (and wrong)
- Why most orthotics are over-rigid, expensive, and misused
- How cork-based insoles can support natural mechanics instead of splinting the foot
- Thien’s family story: refugee roots, integrity, and entrepreneurship
- What Shark Tank changed about his life, confidence, and mission
- The problem with copycat products and surface-level marketing
- Why he doesn’t charge for follow-ups and still reads every review

His upcoming footwear line and how he’s designing shoes for real human movement on modern surfaces

About Thien Trinh

Thien Trinh is an Australian podiatrist and biomechanics specialist who has spent almost two decades treating chronic foot pain in-clinic. Frustrated by the failure of conventional orthotics and footwear to address root causes, he began hand-building his own cork-based insoles and ultimately took his solution to Shark Tank. Today, he creates education, products, and soon footwear, all built around one aim: helping people walk, move, and live without being controlled by foot pain.

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