Static stretching, could make your muscles tighter before a run, as your body reacts to your manual attempts to lengthen them. The New York Times reported on a large study that found stretching before a run had virtually no effect on injury prevention.
What is your experience?
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Barefoot running is taking off. It started as a weird thing that a few runners did. Now non-running magazines are writing about it. The July issue of Men’s Health has an article on Barefoot running.
The article nails it.
The wrong debate has been promulgated by journalists,” says Daniel Lieberman, a professor in human evolutionary biologist a t Harvard whose January study in Nature sheds a different light on the potential benefits of barefooting. “It’s not about barefoot versus shoe running – that’s a lifestyle debate, It’s really a debate about stride techniques.
Running barefoot forces you to develop a better stride, a stride that is in alignment with gravity. The immediate negative or positive feedback of not having a buffer between you and the ground changes your stride. If, like other runners, you lean back and heel strike, not only will your heel experience that shock of impact, your entire body will also.
The 40 to 80 percent of injured runners per year is an indication that something is unnatural about a natural activity. If our ancestors had that injury rate, we wouldn’t be here today.
Bill Gifford, author of the article, said his friendship with Christopher McDougall, the author of Born to Run, was his inspiration to try running barefoot. As many of us men, he experienced the “little is good, more must be better” phenomenon. Gifford over did it. He recites what Irene Davis, a biomechanics professor at University of Delaware, said to him: “Three miles is too much. You should start with no more than a quarter of a mile.”
All the runners I have seen over the years are a lot tighter than they realize. After a few decades of an unnatural form, your soft tissue (muscles and fascia) harden and shorten. To demand too much of them will surely create injuries. Leaning back with a forward stride shortens the backs of your legs—your calves and hamstrings. To suddenly lean forward with legs that have shoe leather for soft tissue will injure the weak points of your legs.
The article mentions how McDougall’s heel strike was the cause of his pronation. When the foot lands improperly, its three arches and structural integrity is unavailable to support the body. We are smart enough to know not to jump out of a tree and land on our ass. We know our legs are better shock absorbers. So why don’t we use some common sense to figure out leaning forward is a better way to absorb shock when running?
After decades of modeling bad runners, and being told by experts what good running form is, we have increasing running injuries. These experts see body as a machine that can be disassembled into understandable parts – while the running shoe industry sold us on needing technology to run, we de-evolved. We learned to run leaning back, opposite of where gravity pulls us.
To cheat the barefoot running change, runners are getting Rolfed. When a Rolfer understands what running naturally is about, he or she can greatly facilitate your body in erasing the effects of bad from. When your soft tissue is no longer short and misaligned, your body will want to run naturally—barefoot or with shoes.
The Men’s Health article gives you a review of barefoot running shoes. I know that is an oxymoron, but we all know that in marketing logic is not relevant.
Bonus: to read an excerpt from Born to Run, go to this link for a long article in Men’s Health.
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Daniel Lieberman, a professor in human evolutionary biologist at Harvard whose January study in Nature outlines his thesis about how we are meant to run, has an excellent YouTube video.
He went to Africa to learn how endurance runners ran for more than a million years. Lieberman claims humans evolved to run. His research inspired him to run barefoot through the streets of Boston.
Shod runners strike the ground with about three times the impact of barefoot running, setting themselves up for increasing the risk of stress injuries. The shoe’s big heel design makes it very comfortable to land on your heel. Our technologically advanced shoes encourage bad form.
Back to the original design
I like how science is finally getting smart. Through learning from our ancestors, we are learning less is better. For decades, all the bio-mechanical research we did on running form was wrong. Back in the late 1980s, I did a study on Rolfing and Running with Arizona State University. There were three groups – a control group who received no treatments, a group who had ten massages, and a group who had ten Rolfing sessions.
The first two groups showed no significant improvements in injury recovery or performance improvements. The Rolfing group of runners experienced improvements. What was interesting was the bio-mechanical measures were not significantly different between all the groups. Yet all the running times for the Rolfing groups were better. These runners set new personal records.
Taking the body apart to analyze it gave us pieces; but studying the entire body as one integrated organism as Lieberman did shows us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Screwing with its parts and not taking in the whole into account can create problems, as the new research about how expensive running shoes create injuries shows us.
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