SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
published 3/19/11, updated 3/14/12
This is shallow and dismissive, completely lacking the in-depth analysis my reputation is built upon. It’s almost like I don’t even really care about running styles and novelty running shoes!
— Paul Ingraham
There are many faddish running styles—like POSE, or barefoot running, which is super hot right now, thanks to several books—and funky new minimal shoes, like Vibram FiveFingers (and several others that look less like feet), that might, perhaps, maybe, help prevent or treat overuse injuries of the knee, legs, and feet. I haven’t done my homework on these things, and I really don’t want to. By the time I am done looking into them, they will probably be replaced by new ones anyway. It’s a fairly silly debate so far.
(And don’t misss the brilliant sequel, Shit Runners Say To Barefoot Runners
2:48)
I don’t think that they are important for me to spend much time on. The logic of my dismissiveness is perfect and unassailable. Behold my Spock-like powers …
The nature of overuse injuries means that running biomechanics fundamentally can’t be anywhere near as important a factor as the sheer amount of activity. I just don’t buy that any running style or footwear can change the forces on your joints so much that it really matters very much one way or the other. If you’re doing so much running that you’re going to injure your legs or feet sooner or later, no biomechanical advantage is going to do any more than slightly delay your fate.
It might do that. It might matter, a little. Of course it might. And I realize that many badass distance runners are pushing the envelope and interested in the tiniest sliver of an edge, but there’s still a problem: tiny slivers of edges are super hard to prove.
I have not gotten any reader reports of a “cure” by barefoot running, and I get a lot of reader reports from very serious runners. Even if I did I’d be all, “Okay, that’s nice. So?” Of course, you’re going to come across people who swear by these methods—and so will I, immediately after publishing this—but the only way to actually find out if something like a running technique or a shoe truly works in any way is to test them extremely thoroughly and carefully and sciencey, and perhaps with explosives, like the MythBusters … and those tests simply have clearly not been done, and probably never will be done.
There’s just no real research about this stuff, and trying to guess if it works is like wondering if Guinness or Heineken makes you better at darts. Don’t be shocked by the lack of real science here — it’s entirely predictable. See sidebar.
There is some research by Lieberman et al about the biomechanics that has shown that “habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot before bringing down the heel” and “generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers.” Daniel Lieberman is a smart guy, his research his interesting, and he interviews well. However, trying to infer injury prevention outcomes from his findings is pure guesswork. It’s so, so, so easy to see the words “smaller collision forces” and assume that this is a good, injury-preventing thing. That is really just not a safe assumption, of course. For all we know, that smaller collision force (assuming it’s real) is coming at the expense of, say, much greater stresses on your calves and achilles to control the sproingier ankle action … which might protect against shin splints, but send achilles tendinitis rates through the roof. We don’t know that stuff, and we can’t know until thousands of runners have been carefully studied.
Biomechanics expert Benno Nigg on forefoot running: “It increases some forces and decreases others, mainly shifting the load to different structures,” from his book Biomechanics of Sport Shoes, well-described by Amby Burfoot for RunnersWorld.com. (That’s a great little read, and an excellent companion to this here rant.)
And, get a load of this: you can’t even get experts to agree that smashing the ground more softly is going to help something like, say, stress fracture — the one injury that seems to be particularly likely to be associated with higher impact! A 2011 review of thirteen papers on this topic was thoroughly inconclusive: “There is disagreement in the literature about whether the history of stress fractures is associated with ground reaction forces (either higher or lower than control), or with loading rates.” Translation: we literally cannot confirm that smashing the ground harder with your legs actually increases the risk of injuring them, and it might actually be exactly the other way around.
Do you really want to delve any deeper than that? Yeah, me neither. All that really matters here is that it’s obviously un-guessable, and yet that’s what everyone seems to be happy to do.
Given the shifting scientific analysis, runners are left with impassioned testimonials and heated debates.
If Vibram had any research supporting the health/running benefits of their FiveFingers product, I’m pretty dang sure they’d be shouting it out—but they aren’t. Their “health & wellness” page is barely longer than a haiku and offers only five incredibly broad bullet points of vague, meaningless, but nice-sounding things like “improve posture” and “move naturally” and (of course) “align the spine”—sure, it’s just like wearing a chiropractor on your foot! • eye roll •
There are probably dozens of well-known running techniques and hundreds or even thousands of groovy products that have never been properly tested and would quite likely fail if they were. Somewhere in there, there’s probably stuff that helps, at least a little bit, but it is literally impossible to know without testing.
So I don’t waste a heck of a lot of energy on trying to figure out if these things work when I know that the only way that it possibly can be figured out is not going to happen. To conclude, more from Benno Nigg:
Nigg has noted that running injuries have not changed over the years despite the massive development of the running-shoe industry. Unlike others, he hasn't jumped to the conclusion that shoes are bad, or that barefoot or minimalist-running or forefoot-striking is the answer. Instead, looking at the same data, Nigg concludes: Okay, apparently shoes aren't a big part of the equation.
So get over it.
If you found this article useful, you may also be interested in some other articles I’ve published:
