Running barefoot: Dipping your toe
There’s nothing like good news from the scientific community to spur interest in a given exercise: We’re all open to the latest magic bullet when it comes to getting in shape or improving performance. We’re even more susceptible when that magic bullet includes the promise of health minus hurt. Which is why a study appearing last week in the journal Nature suggesting that running barefoot may help prevent injury has caused the sports medicine community to respond with an optimistic cringe.
“Taking this kind of study and dispensing advice is risky business,” exercise physiologist Ross Tucker wrote last week on his Web site, The Science of Sport. “As a friend pointed out yesterday, the media’s interpretation of this study will be a ‘stimulus plan for physical therapists and podiatrists’.”
“I wouldn’t advise anyone to throw out their running shoes and just run barefoot,” cautions Michael Sharp, a certified athletic trainer with the The Athletic Performance Center in Raleigh.
Rare is the individual who can shuck their shoes and go totally barefoot overnight. The vast majority of us, they say, should proceed with caution.
The Nature study — “Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot runners versus shod runners” — found that runners wearing high-tech running shoes tend to land on their heels, barefoot runners on their forefoot. A forefoot strike, according to the study, reduces the loading rate and peak impact force, both of which are thought to lead to greater risk of injury. The study, led by Dr. Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, was quick to note that further research needs to be done to see if landing on the forefoot does in fact reduce the likelihood of the foot, knee, ankle and hip injuries common to runners.
“Switching could lead to a variety of other injuries,” says Sharp. That, he says, is because running barefoot and changing how your foot lands will tax a whole new set of muscles, muscles that will be subject to the same overuse injuries responsible for most runners’ woes. Thus, it’s generally recommended that if you’re intrigued by running barefoot, you ease into it.
Sharp suggests you find a soft surface relatively free of puncture-wound inflicting debris, the beach, for instance, or better still, a football or soccer field. “At the end of your regular training run, do some barefoot [strides]. Maybe start with four, work up to six or eight. Go the length of the field, then jog back to the start and repeat.”
Tim Clark, a running coach in the Raleigh area, says he hasn’t bought into the barefoot-or-nothing (pardon the oxymoron) camp, but agrees that doing some barefoot running, especially for strides and cool downs, can be beneficial and therapeutic. “An unrestricted foot plant and push-off strengthens the feet and lower legs, and improves overall foot/ankle flexibility.”
In fact, that’s seen as the main benefit of running barefoot: that by offering a more honest reaction to the running surface it allows the body to build the muscles best able to deal with the demands of running. You don’t necessarily need to run barefoot; minimalist shoes that allow your foot to react to the surface can do the trick.
A couple caveats from the barefoot running community.
One, listen to your feet. “The feet are like the canary in the mine; if they hurt, chances are something else will too if you keep going,” says Josh Sutcliffe (pictured), who went barefoot in July and has logged 500 miles sans shoes since. Shoes take away the canary. By learning how to run barefoot, I’ve learned how to avoid the pain by making adjustments in real time to the way I run.”
Adds Amelia Kirkland, a triathlete and triathlon coach in Moore County, “From a coaching perspective, I’d tell my clients to try it and if it hurts, stop.”
Two, barefoot running may not be a universal cure. “I don’t think it’s an everyman’s thing,” says Mickey Fongzales of Durham has been running since middle school, initially for utilitarian purposes (“My parents wouldn’t give me rides and I didn’t have a bike”) now because she just enjoys it. People who are overweight/obese, for one, might be wise to stick with shoes. The lack of cushion to absorb some of that excess weight could create stress issues, says former personal trainer who says she once qualified as “clinically obese.”
Perhaps more importantly, she says running barefoot may not be for people who aren’t in touch with their bodies. “You have to have good body awareness,” she says, touching on Sutcliffe’s “canary feet” hypothesis. It’s not just a matter of paying attention to avoid injury, but to improve your technique and performance as well.
Even Lieberman, the Nature study author, agrees that running barefoot or in minimalist shoes isn’t for everyone. Asked what he would advise in the wake of his study, he replied, “People should have fun and do what they want.” He, too, cautions against making a wholesale transition to running barefoot.
“My big worry is that people are extremely likely to develop Achilles tendonitis if they transition too fast. It is vital, absolutely critical,” Lieberman adds, “to transition slowly and carefully and not all at once.”
Sharp, the athletic trainer, said another injury concern with switching too fast is plantar fascitis, or irritation and swelling of the thick tissue on the bottom of the foot, a common source of heel pain.
The incentive, though, to incorporate some degree of barefoot running to a running routine is strong. Considering that 40 percent to 60 percent of runners are injured in any one year, the allure of running injury-free is huge.
And while most barefoot runners say they run for fun, not for competition, there’s evidence that running barefoot can make the competitive even moreso.
“I’ve been taught from USA Triathlon, my coaching certification, that all your power for running should be generated from the pelvic girdle, not from the legs,” says Kirkland. “And running barefoot seems to enforce that, at least for me.”
