Tag: barefoot running

Posted on

Can biomechanical analysis cure Dathan Ritzenhein’s injuries?

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)

***

Dathan Ritzenhein just announced that he’ll be running the New York City Marathon this November, joining a stacked field that already includes Haile Gebrselassie and Canadian hope Simon Bairu. One thing that jumped out at me from the press conference (as reported by Letsrun) was his coach Alberto Salazar’s assertion that Ritz’s injury problems are a thing of the past thanks to some high-tech analysis:

“Gordon Valiant – the head of biomechanics for Nike – did an evaluation of Dathan and was able to find some things that are unique to Dathan with the way he runs and strikes his foot. With that (study completed), we now have some modified inserts. I wouldn’t call them orthotics – just an insert into the shoe where he has an abnormal amount of force near his third metatarsal. It seems to have alleviated his symptoms completely and we’ve retested him in the lab and shown those forces have been lessened tremendously.”

For those who’ve been following the barefoot running debate, this should raise some flags. For years, critics of the big shoe companies have pointed out that measuring forces in a lab setting doesn’t necessarily equate to a change in injury rates. Australian minimalist advocate Craig Richards said as much in an article I wrote back in 2008:

“Shoe researchers and manufacturers will try and bamboozle you with the results of hundreds of biomechanical studies,” [Richards said]. While these studies tell you how your stride is affected by the shoe, “they cannot currently tell you what this means for either the injury risk or performance of the wearer.”

Fair point — though, as I pointed out last month, minimalists are suddenly more enthusiastic about biomechanical studies now that Dan Lieberman and others have provided them with some studies of their own.

Anyway, we now have a study (with n=1) in which the manipulation of biomechanical forces in the foot is hypothesized to solve a longstanding injury problem. The outcome measure: whether Ritz makes it to New York in one piece, with an uninterrupted build-up. Here’s hoping!

Posted on

Barefoot running and the difference between biomechanics and injury rate studies

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)

***

I just noticed that a short article I wrote for Canadian Running‘s May/June issue is now available online. It’s my attempt to provide some context for the studies on barefoot running that made lots of (somewhat wild) headlines at the beginning of the year. It doesn’t offer any definitive conclusions, mainly because I don’t think such conclusions yet exist. My main point is the distinction between biomechanical studies and injury-rate studies. Everyone has been beating up on the shoe industry for years because it relies on the former rather than the latter — but that distinction is suddenly being “forgotten” now that biomechanical studies supporting barefoot running are appearing.

A short excerpt:

[…] There’s no doubt that thinking on footwear has evolved in the last decade or two. For instance, plush cushioning is no longer considered the ultimate defence against injury. “I wish running companies would stop rattling on about ‘gel’ and ‘air’ and so on,” says Simon Bartold, an Australian shoe researcher who consults for Asics. Newer shoes reflect this thinking, he says: Nike has introduced the Free, for example, and Asics has completely abandoned the concept of “motion control.” But rushing to the opposite extreme and claiming that runners of all shapes and sizes should give up shoes makes no sense either – and the new studies certainly don’t support this position. […]

Posted on

National Magazine Award nominations

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)

***

If you’ll pardon a little self-promotion, the nominations for this year’s National Magazine Awards were announced last night, and I was thrilled to pick up three. Two of them were for my piece in The Walrus about the neuroscience of navigation and how using GPS may be affecting our brains.

The third was for a piece in Canadian Running on evolution, barefoot running and injuries, including some interesting thoughts from Chris McDougall, the author of the bestseller Born to Run. (The piece was written last spring, before McDougall’s book was released and rocketed the topic into the public conversation.) I included a brief excerpt from the piece in a blog entry last summer, but now the full piece is available online for the first time here:

The giant screen at the front of the lecture theatre shows, in gruesome detail, a dissected bare foot connected through tendons to ten different muscles in the lower leg, all pulling in slightly different directions. Benno Nigg, a renowned professor of biomechanics who co-directs the University of Calgary’s Human Performance Laboratory, is leading an audience of Australian academics gathered at the University of Sydney through a presentation titled “The Future of Footwear.” During almost four decades as one of the world’s leading athletic shoe researchers, Nigg has worked closely with major companies such as Adidas, Nike and Mizuno. But plotting the future of the running shoe, he now believes, may require a look to the past, at what worked for our ancestors.

“Look at all these muscles here,” he says, gesturing at the dissected ankle. He asks the audience to guess which of the muscles we need in order to walk while wearing a typical shoe. Only two of the ten are needed, it turns out: the tibialis anterior (shin) and the triceps surae (calf). “And all the other ones, you don’t need, because the shoes take over.” Nigg pauses to let his audience consider this piece of trivia, then poses the central question of his talk: “Is that a problem?” [READ ON…]

Posted on

If heel-striking is so unnatural, why do apes do 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)

***

In the wake of Dan Lieberman’s foray into the barefoot running debate, there’s an interesting counterpoint in the newest Journal of Experimental Biology from David Carrier of the University of Utah — the man who anticipated Lieberman’s 2004 “endurance running” evolutionary hypothesis by 20 years.

muybridge-walkingIn a nutshell, Carrier’s paper points out that heel-striking — a.k.a. “the devil,” as far as Lieberman is concerned — actually has advantages in some contexts. As the Utah press release puts it:

Humans, other great apes and bears are among the few animals that step first on the heel when walking, and then roll onto the ball of the foot and toes. Now, a University of Utah study shows the advantage: Compared with heel-first walking, it takes 53 percent more energy to walk on the balls of your feet, and 83 percent more energy to walk on your toes. […]

Economical walking would have helped early human hunter-gatherers find food, he says. Yet, because other great apes also are heel-first walkers, it means the trait evolved before our common ancestors descended from the trees, [Carrier says].

The main point of the paper is that it’s curious that our foot anatomy is adapted to heel-strike while walking (i.e. we have a big, prominent heel), unlike most other mammals. But it’s a trait we share with all the other great apes, so it’s not something that was only created by the advent of thick-heeled modern shoes. As both Carrier and Lieberman have argued, many of our anatomical features seem to have evolved precisely to favour endurance running — but our heels, in contrast, seem better suited walking. This isn’t that surprising, the authors argue, given that both running and walking were likely essential to early hunter-gatherers.

Ultimately, none of this conflicts with the arguments put forth by Lieberman. Even if it’s natural to heel-strike while walking, the evidence suggests that early humans didn’t heel-strike while running. (Though the new study confirms earlier findings that there’s no difference in efficiency between heel-foot and fore-foot striking for running.) But as the barefoot running debate heats up, it’s interesting to note that heel striking has an evolutionary origin.

Posted on

Lieberman says barefoot running is better than shoes

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)

***

This is going to make a big splash. A paper by Dan Lieberman — the Harvard anthropologist who made headlines with the argument that long-distance running was a key evolutionary driver in humans — in tomorrow’s issue of Nature argues that barefoot running is better than modern running shoes. Here’s how the Associated Press is reporting this story:

Harvard biologist and runner Daniel Lieberman had a simple question: “How did people run without shoes?”

The answer he got is: Much better.

At least running barefoot seems better for the feet, producing far less impact stress compared to feet shod in fancy, expensive running shoes, according to a study by Lieberman in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. The study concludes that people seem to be born to run—barefoot…

What great timing, you might think. After all, it was just last week that I blogged about Mark Plaatjes’ thoughts on barefoot running — and two of his key statements, which I agreed with, were:

4. There are no clinical trials that show an effect of barefoot/minimalist running for a prolonged period of time.
5. There are no research studies that prove that wearing traditional running shoes increases injuries or that barefoot/minimalist running reduces injuries.

So does Lieberman’s study fill this gap? No. What he found is that his subjects strike the ground with three times more force when they’re wearing cushioned running shoes compared to running barefoot. This is reminiscent of the study that made waves a few weeks ago (which I blogged about here) that made the convoluted claim that running shoes are worse than high heels. What we’re dealing with in both cases is very indirect measures that may or may not have some connections to the outcomes that matter to us — i.e. pain and injury. I really don’t care how many Newtons of torque my patella is feeling if it doesn’t result in any injury or discomfort.

Now, I haven’t seen the study, so I’ll be very interested to read it when it comes out tomorrow. But given the current wave of popularity surrounding barefoot running, I have a sinking feeling that this is just the beginning of the storm — we’re going to see a whole bunch of studies coming out, accompanied by press releases and news stories, that capitalize on this interest without really telling us what we want to know. Hopefully there are also people doing the long, painstaking, prospective research that would really shed new light on this question.

I don’t mean to sound too skeptical here. I think a lot of what’s said about barefoot running makes very good intuitive sense. If I was growing a batch of test-tube babies to create a distance-running army, I’d probably have them avoid shoes during their formative years to develop the stride we see in Kenyan runners.

But most would-be runners in the Western world are not starting from scratch — and the question of what shoe makes the most sense for a middle-aged, overweight neophyte is still very much open. Even staunch minimalists would acknowledge that running barefoot isn’t an instant miracle cure. (“If you change the way you run quickly ‘you have a high probability of injuring yourself,’ Lieberman says. In general, changes either in running shoes or distance should be no more than 10 percent a week.”)

That may well be true. My feeling, though, is that most people who are REALLY cautious and patient enough that they never change their weekly running distance by more than 10 percent a week will find that they’re able to run successfully in almost anything. It’s like (bear with me here) buying a house to get the financial advantages. We can debate until we’re blue in the face whether owning or renting makes more sense — but for many people, buying acts as a “forced savings” mechanism, since they no longer have any disposable income to waste. Maybe barefoot running acts in a similar way: it forces runners to be cautious and build up very gradually — precisely the approach that works best no matter what you’re wearing.