Training

Training Zone: Barefoot Running

April 30, 2010
By Alex Hutchinson

We were born to run - barefoot. That’s the buzz these days, spurred in part by last year’s bestseller by Christopher McDougall, Born to Run. The shoes-are-evil theme hit the headlines again a few months ago, thanks to a pair of studies that - by some accounts - finally offered scientific proof that we’d be better off ditching our footwear. But what did these studies actually show?

THE BACKSTORY

The relationship between shoes and running injuries is shrouded in uncertainty. Last year, an Australian shoe researcher named Craig Richards published an article in the British Journal of Sports Medicine called ‘Is your prescription of distance running shoes evidence-based?,’ in which he argued that no study has ever shown that modern running shoes reduce injuries. “Shoe researchers and manufacturers will try [to] bamboozle you with the results of hundreds of biomechanical studies,” he explains, but these biomechanical studies simply show that shoes change the forces and torques felt by your feet and legs, which may or may not prevent injuries.

THE NEW STUDIES

The most significant new study came from Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman, who is already famous for arguing that distance running shaped the evolution of the modern human form. In the journal Nature, Lieberman studied American and Kenyan runners, and reached two main conclusions: first, that barefoot runners were more likely to land on their forefoot, while shod runners generally land on their heels; and second, that the peak vertical force upon impact was three times greater in shoes than it was barefoot. Many media reports took this as proof that barefoot running is “better” - but in fact, this is precisely the same kind of study that Craig Richards dismissed, since it deals with abstract forces rather than injury rates.

The other study that generated even wilder headlines came from researchers at the University of Virginia, who purportedly showed that running shoes are worse for your feet than high heels. What they actually found was increased torque on the hip and knee joints for running shoes versus barefoot running. Then they compared those results to a separate study of walking in high-heeled shoes in order to make a pretty shaky comparison between the two.

THE ANALYSIS

There’s no doubt that thinking on footwear has evolved in the last decade or two. For instance, plush cushioning is no longer considered the ultimate defence against injury. “I wish running companies would stop rattling on about ‘gel’ and ‘air’ and so on,” says Simon Bartold, an Australian shoe researcher who consults for Asics. Newer shoes reflect this thinking, he says: Nike has introduced the Free, for example, and Asics has completely abandoned the concept of “motion control.” But rushing to the opposite extreme and claiming that runners of all shapes and sizes should give up shoes makes no sense either - and the new studies certainly don’t support this position.

Of course, Bartold works for Asics, so we can’t trust him, right? Well, Lieberman’s study was funded by Vibram, which makes the barefoot-simulating FiveFinger. The lead author of the University of Virginia study, Casey Kerrigan, has reportedly left the university to start a company making minimalist shoes. Richards, too, has started a minimalist shoe company.

The point isn’t that the new studies are bad. On the contrary, they offer valuable information about how we run, and they do indeed suggest that injury-prone runners might benefit from some cautious experimentation with barefoot (or nearly barefoot) running. But let’s not leap ahead of what the studies show. For now, the question of whether barefoot or minimalist running can help reduce injuries remains unanswered.