How We're Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take
nymag.com
nymag.com
It's honestly a little weird, getting rid of all those things like arches and padding that seem so necessary, and discovering that they're actually doing nothing for you.
Edit: Of course, in a few weeks I'll have to switch back to big waterproof boots for the winter. Alas.
Example: http://www.billabong.com/eu/product-cat/225/booties#_
At first, we had pains in places we'd not had before being on elliptical machines or my wife doing aerobics, especially in the shins and forefoot and midfoot. I got some slight blistering on the big toe the first week as well, but it's all gone away over the subsequent weeks.
The verdict? It's about as fun as running as a kid barefoot on a summer's day. We actually look forward to doing 5k in them. Then, we go trail running, which I'm sure will be a blast. It seems to feel alot better underfoot on soft dirt than paved surfaces, anyway.
I'd recommend trying, if you haven't already, a bit of actual barefoot running - only for a short distance to just get a feel for how it changes your stride. The reason I say this even though you're starting "barefoot" is I notice that the vibrams have enough padding to have a slightly different feel for me than actually going barefoot, so it might be worth testing it out and seeing if you notice a difference (if so, try to maintain the barefoot stride while wearing the shoes).
Good luck on the 5k, I'm sure you'll enjoy it!
I suspect that it'd make you more stable just because your toes can settle on slightly different levels on uneven ground, but that's just guessing.
Mainly I like that it's letting my toes spread out as much as they feel like. My toes are less lumped together now after a day in shoes. (And my old shoes weren't overly narrow or anything like that.)
There's also a very big difference in toe strength from having them be able to move separately, and I've had a noticeable improvement in balance from wearing them. And I'm pretty stable anyway. When your toes are stuck moving together, they don't develop any ability to do so, and toes are pretty important to walking / balancing.
(edited for toes instead of bunions, as I think it makes a better case)
For example, prior to using Vibrams, I could only run for 10 minutes or so before my ankles and hips started to hurt. (This was almost certainly due to poor technique as much as the "hard strike" cushioned by my trainers.) Now though, I'm actually enjoying running again. I can do 30-40 minutes, and it's my fitness - or lack, thereof - that makes me stop rather than joint pain.
I can only think that having so little cushioning on the foot forces better technique (I'm certainly aware that my running stride is now much shorter and that I'm lighter on my feet, too).
It took a couple of weeks to really get used to them and adjust both my walking and running strides accordingly, but now I feel as though I can run like a kid again rather than a puffing middle-aged bloke.
Lots of expert & product placement in this article. I call a Sub ~ http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It's sneaky, because by even bringing the issue of running barefoot up, they get to look like the pragmatic choice, unlike all those members of the Evil Shodding Conspiracy.
As far as conspiracies go, you don't actually need to buy their product to try it for yourself - just take off your shoes, run for a bit, then try to maintain the same stride when you strap your shoes back on. The only reason you'd need "barefoot shoes" is if you like it and end up wanting to run barefoot often enough to warrant wearing them to protect your feet from glass and other dangers.
I'm not a runner, but I'm an avid cyclist, and given how much broken glass (and metal shards, etc.) I've pulled out of my tires over the years, it gives me pause. Plus, I live in Michigan - it gets COLD here.
It's NYMag...
Back problems are very common. Digestive problems are very common. Foot problems? Not so much. Most old people have feet which are still perfectly functional and comfortable, and the shoes they wore most of their lives are less comfortable than shoes are now. Even women who have spent most of their lives in high heels do not, for the most part, seem to suffer from serious foot problems.
So where's the horrendous downside, that I seem to be missing, of shoes?
I don't think this is true. All the women I know who wear high heels routinely complain of foot or knee pain (at least, the women I know well enough who would complain to me). I know of at least two women with permanent knee injuries caused (in large part) from wearing high heels.
If you ride the subway in NYC, you'll see plenty of ads for podiatrists typically featuring an unhappy looking woman (call 1-800-???-FOOT).
"Curious, they used MRI and saw that the Achilles’ tendon compensated for muscle fiber length. The tendon was significantly thicker and stiffer in high-heel wearers."
They are in the civilized world, where everybody wears shoes with fat heels, and eats garbage. Take a look at places where people have to walk barefoot and you'll see a huge difference.
More relevant links: http://mtkfitness.typepad.com/mtk-fitness/2009/07/more-antis... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1170253/The-...
As my medical history professor put it: "Have you ever noticed how in [American civil war] pictures, Confederate soldiers looked smaller than the Northern soldiers, like some of them were still kids? A lot of them had their growth stunted because of hookworm, due to walking barefoot." This was a major public health issue in the Southern US in the 30s. It still is in much of the world. Suggesting people run barefoot is pretty irresponsible, and shows how many things they take for granted - like people crusading against vaccination .
Also, a lot of peasants centuries ago ate poorly, too. Want an example? Read about pellegra in Italy, beri-beri, or how much alcohol was commonly consumed in colonial America on a daily basis. As counter-intuitive as it must sound, many peasants were poor, and weren't always able to eat well.
Humans moving to Northern climes traded the hazards of living in clothing for the hazard of living with endemic diseases (which both clothing and a colder climate warded off).
But I'd personally like to avoid both kinds of problems if I could...
Also, Pallegra wasn't a disease of the traditional peasant diet but was a result of the introduction of corn into the diet, a feature of development. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#History)
Better example: When health-food advocates talk about how whole grain bread is more nutritious than bread made with just white flour* , they sometimes note that people favored white flour because of some elaborate cultural subtext about whiteness and purity. That's BS - it's because without refrigeration, the oils in the bran go rancid . Readily available whole grain bread is actually a modern luxury, thanks to transportation infrastructure and pervasive refrigeration. White flour has a much longer shelf life, so it was common historically - it's not junk people started getting fed recently due to some evil processed food conspiracy.
* Spoiler alert - it is, and it often tastes better.
(1) According to Wikipedia, "the usual method of infection is ... walking barefoot through areas contaminated with fecal matter". How often do you see fecal matter lying around in the areas you walk in? When I suggested comparing the "civilized world" with "places where people have to walk barefoot", I didn't mean that you look at /all/ aspects of those places. You can have your cake and eat it too - in the "civilized world" you can walk barefoot without having to worry about hookworm as much as you would in the developing world.
(2) If hookworm is still an issue, feel free to go with a middle-ground option like wearing Vibram Five Fingers. They're almost as good as barefoot while still protecting you from hookworm et al.
Have you ever been to San Francisco?
How about any city with any stray animals whatsoever? Have you never accidentally stepped in dog crap in a park? Fecal matter doesn't have to be human in origin to spread disease.
The fact that this story keeps getting reintroduced and the Vibram Five Fingers are always mentioned makes me suspect it's a marketing ploy, much like "the suit is back" / The Men's Warehouse in PG's "The Submarine" (http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
from http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/4BiomechanicsofFo...:
"In heel striking, the collision of the heel with the ground generates a significant impact transient, a nearly instantaneous, large force. This force sends a shock wave up through the body via the skeletal system. In forefoot striking, the collision of the forefoot with the ground generates a very minimal impact force with no impact transient."
In other words, your knees, hips, and back act as shock absorbers when you heel strike.
Try this experiment - jump into the air, landing on your heels. Then jump, landing on the balls of your feet. How does each one feel?
When you support yourself day in and day out with the wrong shoe, your back has to work harder to pick up the slack. The average person is a heel striker which sends up vibrations to the knees and back. Since the knees work harder than normal, the muscles in your legs work hard and develop. From there, the average person does little to no exercise to stretch out the muscles, especially the hamstrings which when developed and tight pull on the back.
Then there's the simple fact that we have five toes which normally would be spread apart and help with balance and agility. We then shove them into badly fitting shoes and we squeeze our toes together practically forming one giant toe. This of course due to the fact that humans as a race decided walking on concrete and asphalt was much better than grass and dirt.
It's not a stretch to think that adding new elements to a complex system that's developed over millions of years may introduce problems. Eliminate the new element, and you may eliminate the problem.
These supposed foot problems which supposedly 80% of 40-year-olds have are apparently invisible and symptomless. How is this different to someone telling me that my aura is misaligned or that I have too many body thetans?
The increase in lung disease is not noticeable in the sense that you could not connect cigarettes and lung disease without scientifically studying it. In the 1920's, you'd find claims cigarettes helped the lungs.
I'm not certain about the direct shoe-body-misalignment thing. But I know physical therapists can measure habitually shortened or stretched muscles in people and this is a condition that will often cause physical problems as a person gets older even the person doesn't notice anything at the moment of measurement.
See: http://www.amazon.com/Muscles-Function-Florence-Peterson-Ken... The standard reference for physical therapists.
And do people get up votes these days on HN for taring any opponent with over-the-top New Age rhetoric?
The theory is if we strengthened our foot muscles and such, there would be less load on the muscles further up the body so to speak that are compensating for improper balance or gait. basically your feet should be handling those functions, in extremely thick shoes, the feet aren't doing their job as well.
I'll agree that the "barefoot" shoes are on the more expensive side, but I'd expect that's a function of being in a relatively niche market.
Finally, i began to run barefoot and never had an injury again. Barefoot running also encourages you to land your feet softly on the ground, in addition to the major benefit of not weakening tendons and ligaments etc by supporting/raising them.
After that you will be glad you did it, and you will be glad that you have a pair of shoes.
My feet feel better than they have in years, and I now seem to have arches! Both feet were pretty flat, but I now have a nice arch on the right side, and some on the left.
I can't say whether it was the specialist physio exercises or the MBTs that did more to help my immediate problem at the time, but I can vouch for many of the claims that MBT marketing tends to make. They do reduce that nasty impact on each step (which you probably don't notice until you have another problem, but then you really do). They did encourage me to walk with both feet aligned properly, and on the odd occasions that I've had a similar problem again over the years, switching back to MBTs for a while has rapidly cured it. You definitely feel the more active use of certain muscle groups when you first switch to them, but in my case I found that after using them for a few days, all kinds of minor irritations that might be explained by relative weakness/imbalance in those muscle groups started to clear up.
They are expensive shoes, but if the pairs I've had are at all representative, the quality means they last way longer than expensive-but-not-that-expensive regular shoes anyway. I always have at least one pair in good condition now, and at the first sign of any irritation in my legs (usually if I haven't been doing much physical training for a few weeks and I'm getting out of condition) on they go.
The only major downside I've found is that because of the curved sole, MBTs aren't particularly comfortable to stand around in for extended periods. These shoes are made for walking, not standing (or running/sports).
For the record, I have no commercial interest related to MBTs, I'm just a very satisfied customer.
The fact is, when we were kids running around barefoot, we ran on the balls of our feet, because that is the instinctual way to run.
Funny, I belong to some autism boards. "Toe walking" is considered indicative of ASD -- ie it is viewed as pathological. Makes me wonder if that view is partly a product of a culture where we are so used to shoes that we simply don't know how to walk/run without them. My oldest son sometimes runs the trash down barefoot -- roughly a quarter of a mile -- and he runs on the balls of his feet when he is barefoot. I have read this is the norm with barefoot runners.
interesting though, i'd never heard of a link between autism and "toe walking," but i suspect you are right, this is one of those situations where society has shoe-style-walking so heavily ingrained in our minds that we see something else (even if its natural) and think something must be wrong.
I really can't say for sure what they mean by "toe walking". I filter out a lot of what gets said as "noise".
I bought a pair as soon as I tried them on because they are so immensly comfortable; it feels less like a shoe and more like a snug, high-tech sock. Any health benefits are a bonus. (It may have improved my posture slightly, but I never paid attention to this before so can't be sure)
Pick the less of the evils.
Too much time spent walking outside barefoot as a kid led me to step on a lot of bees. Get stung by enough bees and eventually you'll probably develop a bee sting allergy, like I have. Now, the next bee I step on could kill me.
Anyway, there's a lot of things on the ground which suck in one way or another. Our ancestors invented shoes for a reason, and it wasn't because Nike marketing told them to.
Agreed, but only partially. Our ancestors invented shoes because they provided a benefit, and continued using shoes because of that benefit. What they didn't (and couldn't really) know was the cost that came along with it. Now we have the science to find out exactly what that cost is. Ignoring that cost isn't going to make it go away.
That being said, if, with full knowledge of the costs and the benefits, you decide to wear shoes anyway, then that's your choice and I can respect that.
So the solution can be pretty easy.
I could try walking around for six hours in my bare feet, but I'm pretty sure I'd slice my foot open on something.
For a really flimsy canvas shoe, I'm imagining something along the lines of the cheapest Keds.