Chong Xie, a certified corrective exercise specialist and performance coach, has spent over a decade working with some of the world’s most elite athletes. In a recent conversation on the Before Skool podcast, he opened up about his work with UFC world champion Zhang Weili and decathlon world champion Gabriel Emmanuel.
“In the last 10 years, we have helped produce two world champions,” Xie explained. “One in the UFC, Zhang Weili, and another one in Decathlon, junior champion, world champion, Gabriel Emmanuel from the Netherlands.”
Xie’s work centers on understanding how elite athleticism develops independently of large muscle mass.
He stated, “The goal is to understand how are they able to do this? Because physically you need a medium, you need something. You cannot just answer it with the umbrella term such as talent.”
His research led him to a common thread among all athletes who reach the highest level of sport: the structure of the foot and its fascial connections.
“There is something that drives elite level athletes from the foot, from the fascia,” he said. “This sign that I’m talking about is a common sign in all athletes who reach the highest level of sport. They have what we call the fascial driven elite natural signs and fascial structure of the foot, which means they have a very strong prominent anterior tibial tendon, which is that big tendon in the front of the shin that goes directly to the arch.”
Central to his argument is the role of the foot as a sensory organ. “The foot contains over 200,000 nerve endings on the bottom. It’s extremely sensitive,” he said. “It’s like one of those antennas that constantly detecting and sending signals to the body.”
When shoes are worn continuously from a young age, he argues, that sensory function is suppressed. “When you wear the shoe, everything is dampened. Everything is disregarded. You don’t have this sensory organ anymore.”
Xie pointed to countries like Brazil as evidence of what barefoot development can produce.
He noted, “If you look at the countries who are really good in football, in soccer, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Spain. A lot of these areas, especially Brazil, they have this culture of playing barefooted soccer since very young age, everyone is playing even on concrete in a lot of cases. However, what they develop is natural athleticism, the natural way that the body is supposed to get strong.”
The fascia itself, Xie explained, has long been misunderstood and dismissed. “Previously in dissection, people would throw out the fascia because they think it’s just a buffer material,” he said. “Now the content they toss out actually accounts to 20% of your body in weight. So it’s anywhere between 31 to 37 lbs (14 to 17 kilos) to 48 lbs (22 kilos) worth of material depending on how big you are.”
That missing 20%, he says, explains why so many chronic injuries go unresolved. He stated, “If you understand this missing 20% of the body, you can understand there is a piece of tissue that goes from your head to toe that helps you manage inflammation, manage healing, manage recovery, and also it’s a scaffold where all these other tissues grow on. Your muscles actually atrophy if your fascia tissue is damaged or disorganized.”
