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The big, protruding heel of the human foot is completely counterproductive for running.

The heel does not protrude when running.

Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.

Children, when running, do not land on their heels. Heel-landing is a learned development caused by heel-heavy shoes. Children land on the front/middle of their feet.

By contrast, an animal doesn't have to study running technique. A cheetah doesn't have to think "Gee, I'm doing this wrong according to some pages I Googled; I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."

Cheetahs do have to think about how to run. Have you ever seen cheetah cubs?

I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."

Try running without shoes. You'll learn very quickly, without google, not to land on your heels. It's the same way that animals like cheetahs learn to run-by doing.

The sheer thickness of the meat and fat on the lower leg of a human tells you that we have evolved away from running. Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.

Every claim in that paragraph is wrong.

> Children, when running, do not land on their heels.

You must have never lived in a wood frame building, below a family with kids.

What an odd statement.

Have you ever lived in a place where children routinely travel on the ground, barefoot? This would be a useful scenario to bring to the table here.

Kids trapped in an attic... not so much.

I've never seen any children anywhere, that didn't create the impression that 400 pound, hooved animals are thundering by.

I admit that I haven't been to the Highlands though, where True Scotsmen's children can be observed.

Ironically, living in a small house with hardwood flooring applied to car-decking (t&g 2x8 subfloor, atop 4x8 girders 4'oc -- loud AF), my kids naturally began to avoid striking their heel after a year or two. The sound transmission through flooring here is unusually bad though. But we never allowed shoes indoors anyway.

As a minimalist runner, this comment seems all wrong to me.

If we grew up barefoot or wearing huaraches, we wouldn't have to "learn" how to forefoot strike. Thick-soled shoes mess up our running instincts.

> Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.

It's different with bipeds, yeah? Lots of shock-absorbing magic has to happen in the lower leg.

Ostriches are bipeds, too.

They're also much lighter.

Much lighter than what?

Google "ostrich weight" immediately comes up with a "250 pounds" factoid result. A Wikipedia result just below that quotes cached text stating that they range from 63 to 143 kilograms.

Why not just say sandals instead of huaraches? I know what the word means but I suspect a lot don't. The word is really neither here nor there.

I was using the term to refer to a very thin-soled sandal. I might be using it incorrectly. "Sandal" to me evokes a 2-inch thick chunk of plastic with giant velcro straps.

>The big, protruding heel of the human foot is completely counterproductive for running. It helps us stand on two legs and walk. Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.

"Doing what comes naturally" after being trained and conditioned from childhood to ambulate in shoes is a far cry from what actually comes naturally.

People do wear thin soled footwear, and go barefoot indoors. It doesn't make a difference. Chronic wearers of flimsy sandals, in which you feel every jarring footstep and every little stone, do not have any better running instincts than anyone else.

>People do wear thin soled footwear, and go barefoot indoors.

As I discovered myself, walking barefoot is utterly different from running barefoot, and no amount of walking around barefoot will teach you to run barefoot, if you are used to putting on shoes to run. And the 'thin soled footwear' people show me when they try to explain that they already 'run practically barefoot' is almost always too inflexible. I use $16 water deck shoes, myself.

It took six weeks of daily practice for me to learn to run properly barefoot - the process is very counterintuitive, after a lifetime of running in shoes. There are conditioning problems too: halfway through, I could neither walk normally nor 'barefoot' without some pain, because I didn't have the muscles to run barefoot properly - landing on the ball of my feet and pushing off with my heel (many people think that barefoot running is just 'running on your toes'. Do that and you will have a bad time).

Now that I have learnt to run barefoot, the other method feels difficult and unnaturally jarring, as it did, before I could run barefoot style.

Cheetah goes barefoot from day 0. Chimps and gorillas do physical exercise from day 0.

Resistance exercise can make your bones at least 50% more dense and, given that single hip can withstand one metric ton of load, makes your bones more than adequate.

If you go barefoot from day 0, you'd learn proper run technique from day 0. Or, if you have massive body like me, you have to learn proper run technique to just run. And you, just like me, will do that in one day.

Having our posture to be very different from other animals, we have to have different muscle groups trained (thick meat). For example, the more upright position of animal, the more thick gluteus maximus is - for horse it is very small, for chimp it can be seen as just small and it is very thick for humans. So, as upright walking humans, we have to have different legs from all other animals. And different running technique.