Tag: barefoot running

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This week’s Jockology column is now posted on the Globe and Mail website. It takes on a topic that’s reasonably familiar to readers of this blog: whether the “right” running shoes will reduce your risk of getting injured:

[…] “I was completely convinced that impact is something bad, and pronation is something bad, and I wanted to show that,” recalls Benno Nigg, a biomechanics researcher and co-director of the University of Calgary’s Human Performance Lab, who helped shape the original theory of pronation.

The initial studies were promising. Specialized running shoes, designed to address different degrees of under- or overpronation, could indeed reduce the impact forces shooting up through the legs of runners in lab testing. In the United States, sales of these high-tech shoes jumped from 25 million pairs in 1988 to 40 million in 2009, and growth was similar in Canada.

But there was just one problem: Running injuries didn’t disappear…[READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE]

I also spoke to Michael Ryan, the researcher whose UBC/Nike randomized trial of different shoe types made a huge splash last year:

“We were a bit nervous, because … if you see someone who is highly pronated, putting them in a neutral shoe may be a recipe for causing more pain,” acknowledges Michael Ryan, the study’s lead author, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin.

He needn’t have worried…

In terms of practical advice, the article ran with a sidebar that doesn’t appear to be posted online, so I’ll add it here:

Picking a running shoe
Shoe researchers Benno Nigg and Michael Ryan agree that comfort is a good starting point for picking a running shoe. Some other factors to consider:

• You can only assess comfort by actually running in the shoe. Many running stores will allow you to run around the block or on a treadmill.

• Don’t ignore fit in favour of fancy shoe features. Find a brand and/or model that fits the specific characteristics of your foot, such as width.

• Dr. Ryan’s research suggests that heavier, bulkier shoes may be associated with more injuries. So all else being equal, choose a lighter shoe.

• If you’re making a radical switch (trying minimalist shoes for the first time, for example), take it slow. Expect to spend four to six months adjusting to the new shoes.

• If you’re currently running successfully in a certain type of shoe, stick with it!

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Just got back from a fantastic canoe trip in Quebec (and yes, I caught more pickerel, along with a pike and a whitefish). While I was away, my Jockology column on how shortening your stride can mimic some of the effects of barefoot running ran in the Globe and Mail:

…a forthcoming study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin suggests that many of the benefits promised by barefoot running, including a reduction of the forces acting on knees and hips, can be obtained simply by taking shorter, quicker steps.

“We found very similar loading patterns,” says Bryan Heiderscheit, the senior author of the study, which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, “and you don’t have to go all the way to the extreme of getting rid of your shoes. [READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE…]

I initially blogged about this study last month, but I subsequently had a really interesting interview with Dr. Heiderscheit. Obviously, this is a very controversial topic these days, and it sometimes seems as if everybody has a biomechanical study that supports their point of view. So I was happy to hear that the Wisconsin team is undertaking a proper randomized, controlled clinical trial that will follow runners for a year or two as they alter their stride length, to see whether it actually affects injury rates as opposed to just joint forces.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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After last week’s discussion of the presumed death of the “pronation control paradigm,” I came across this new Australian study posted online at the British Journal of Sports Medicine about using orthotics to combat patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS — the nasty affliction sometimes known as “runner’s knee”).

The basics: 52 volunteers suffering from PFPS were given off-the-shelf three-quarter-length orthotics to insert in their shoes, with “built-in arch supports and 4 [degree] varus wedging.” They were then immediately tested to see whether they had less pain and could do more single-leg squats, step-downs and rises from sitting. The results:

Prefabricated foot orthoses produced significant improvements (p<0.05) for all functional outcome measures.

Hurrah! But here’s the rub:

A more pronated foot type and poorer footwear motion control properties were found to be associated with reduced pain during the single-leg squat and improvements in the number of pain-free single-leg rises from sitting when wearing foot orthoses.

Hold on, I thought we decided pronation and motion control don’t matter because they were just invented to make money for shoe companies! But that’s not what the authors think. In fact, they conclude that

foot orthoses have greater effects in poorer-quality shoes, possibly as a result of a greater potential to improve motion control properties.

Let’s step back for a moment. This study has a lot of limitations, not least of which is the fact that it wasn’t blinded, randomized or controlled. Also, if you look closely, the results are rather mixed. For step-downs, 57% got better, but 27% got worse; for squats, only 38% got better, while 20% got worse. Is this because orthotics made pronators better and supinators worse? Maybe… sort of… but not quite. Even the researchers had to waffle a bit in their discussion:

Although supportive of traditional theory, the associations of foot posture and change in foot posture with functional improvements were only fair.

So what can we take from this? Well, this study certainly doesn’t “prove” the pronation paradigm. But the fact that more than half the people in the study got immediate relief from a shoe insert tells us that monkeying around with joint forces is capable of affecting running injuries, for better or worse. Now, if you put those knock-kneed, flat-footed volunteers on a minimalist program, it’s entirely possible that they’d compensate for their weaknesses and imbalances and get rid of their knock knees and flat feet — eventually. Proper shoes, on the other hand (or in this case, orthotics), seem to cure the problem for some people immediately.

In a perfect world, we’d all be patient, careful, and dedicated to our exercise regimens — and no one would need running shoes. But this study suggests to me that the pronation control paradigm is able to offer quick fixes to some people, in some circumstances. As a result, while I expect the minimalism trend to continue to grow (and I’ll be glad to see that), I also don’t expect current running shoe technologies to disappear. Not because shoe companies are evil, but because some people will continue to want what those shoes can offer.

THANK YOU FOR VISITING SWEATSCIENCE.COM!

My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Over the last week, there has been another bubble of excitement about the impending demise of conventional running shoes, spurred by the publication of a couple of studies that found no reduction of injuries when runners are fitted with shoes specific to their running stride — “motion control,” “neutral,” “stability” and so on. Gretchen Reynolds at the Times does a nice job of summing up the studies.

These are important studies. But I found the reaction to be a bit overblown, in some cases. Chris McDougall, the author of Born to Run, wrote a blog post with the title “Breaking news from Nike: We’ve been talking a lot of crap, and selling it,” calling the results “mindboggling and explosive stuff.” I don’t think he can be referring to findings themselves — he wrote a book on this stuff, so there’s no way he doesn’t already know that there’s never been a study linking shoe choice to injury rates. What he finds so  amazing is that one of the co-authors of one of the studies works for Nike. (It’s actually Gordon Valiant, who figured in a blog post just last week.) To him, this is evidence that Nike is peddling stuff that it knows doesn’t work.

Another point of view comes from blogger Pete Larson. In his initial summary of the research, he also marvels at this apparent contradiction:

Makes one wonder if the shoe makers actually have “proprietary data” supporting these designs, or if the whole pronation-control shoe paradigm is nothing more than a giant marketing gimmick.

Larson followed up a day later with another post titled “What is Nike doing? Speculation on a Shoe Market in Motion,” which I think is more on the money. In that post, he notes that “the questionable benefits of pronation control shoes have been present in the scientific literature for some time now (see this 2001 paper by expert biomechanist Benno Nigg).”

Here, for the record, is a list of the footwear companies that have employed Nigg’s consulting services, including Nike, Adidas and Mizuno. All the major shoe companies are perfectly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of current shoe research, and they all fund studies trying to learn more. It certainly looks like what Larson calls the “pronation control paradigm” is due for revision, as more than one shoe researcher has acknowledged. (Asics consultant Simon Bartold, for instance, told me earlier this year that Asics has completely abandoned the concept.)

The question is, what do we replace the pronation paradigm with? Nigg’s advice is to run in a shoe that feels comfortable to you — his group has produced some interesting studies suggesting that your body “knows” what will help it minimize the energy needed to stabilize your muscles.

To Larson (and McDougall, needless to say) the answer is even more obvious: “Your body evolved to run long distances, and it evolved to do so barefoot.” On the surface, it’s hard to disagree with this statement. But if you’re asking “What shoes are best for recreational runners in modern Western societies?” rather than “How did our ancestors run 100,000 years ago?” then I’m not sure we can assume the answer in the absence of studies. The barefoot/minimalist argument is extremely logical and makes a lot of sense — exactly like the “use shoes to cushion feet and reduce biomechanical forces” argument was in the 1980s and 1990s. Let’s not fall for the same mistake again by skipping the part where we check that the idea actually works in the real world.

[AUG. 5 follow-up: orthotics study suggests there’s life in the pronation paradigm after all.]