It’s funny to think that before 1966, the word “jogging” was completely alien to the American vernacular. In 1962, Bill Bowerman, a successful track and field coach, was exposed to a recreational running club during a trip to New Zealand. When he returned to the United States, he published a book called Jogging, and helped found a company that would eventually become Nike. The company that Bowerman created now participates in an $18.1 billion per year industry, and today there are 30 million adult runners in the United States alone. Millions of dollars are spent each year to develop the next high-tech running shoe, as shoes with gadgets ranging from microchips to liquid gels find their way onto store shelves, all designed to maximize comfort and minimize injury. Wearing sneakers has become a necessary part of everyday life. However, some would beg to differ. Recent data points to the surprising conclusion that athletic footwear may not prevent injuries at all – some, like the authors of one study from Illinois, claim that sneakers actually increase the likelihood of sustaining an injury. Many others, such as Bryan J. Cardillo, CSOM ’11, have found through painful experience that exercising barefoot with proper preparation and training may be a healthier alternative.
Central to the argument against wearing shoes is the fact that humans have been running for hundreds of thousands of years. Scientists point to many morphological features of humans to suggest that humans are possibly the most accomplished long-distance runners on the planet. In a 2006 article in Discover, University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble and Harvard University paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman pointed to our highly efficient sweat glands, our Achilles’ tendons, which allow us to store and transmit large amounts of energy during our strides, and to our powerful gluteus maximi muscles. They concluded that our ability to outlast and outrun our prey may have been instrumental in our species’ ancient transition from life in the trees to life on the plains.
Humans are natural and formidable cross-country runners, and we became this way without the help of shoes.
It must be noted that shoes do protect us from sharp debris, such as glass, and are instrumental in aiding people with specific structural deficiencies. Yet, for the average athlete, running shoes form a dense protective layer around the foot, which alters the natural running gait. Sneaker-clad runners tend to land hard on their heels before transferring their weight to their toes and springing into the next step. When running barefoot, the foot lands toward the front and has a slight inward roll during the stride, distributing the force of the impact along the Achilles’ heel to the calf muscles, a much less jarring mechanism.
Such factors have been cited in a study published last year by Lutheran General Hospital in Illinois. It suggested that athletic shoes led to a higher incidence of ankle and pronation injuries – the very injuries against which expensive footwear is designed and marketed to protect. In the study, Calonje and Vormittag noted that shoes may limit the pronation, or rotation during the running gait, that likely protects runners from injury.
The footwear industry is aware of the growing trend of barefoot supporters. New shoes, such as the Nike Free or the Vibram FiveFingers, have hit the market as protective skins to shield the foot from sharp and rough surfaces while still allowing a more natural running gait.
Cardillo is a member of BCPK, a parkour group on campus. “Parkour is the art of movement, and its goal is to get one’s self from point A to point B in the most efficient, speedy and fluid manner possible,” Cardillow explained, “It obviously requires a lot of running, footwork, and involves significant impact on your feet, knees and lower body. I started out in Parkour with just running shoes, and noticed that my knees eventually started bothering me. I tried different types of sneakers, and it didn’t help.”
In addition to producing pain in his knees, he found that shoes may have interfered with the proper form of parkour, which requires “taking your environment in and using your center of gravity and your momentum to redefine both how you can get places and what is really possible for the human body.” The dense protective coating of the shoe prevented his feet from becoming strengthened and sensitive. So, he went barefoot, re-training his feet to walk and run without shoes for weeks. The result was less pain and better form in Parkour.
By walking barefoot, the nerves in his feet became re-accustomed to their surroundings. “I felt the ground,” he said, “and it was really, really nice.”
Running barefoot gains ground as smarter way to exercise
Health & Science
Published: Thursday, January 28, 2010
Updated: Monday, February 1, 2010
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