Barefoot Running

"Running barefoot or in minimal shoes is fun but uses different muscles" said Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman. "If you've been a heel-striker all your life, you have to transition slowly to build strength in your calf and foot muscles." (Credit: Image courtesy of Harvard University)

Scientists have found that those who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear, tend to avoid "heel-striking," and instead land on the ball of the foot or the middle of the foot. In so doing, these runners use the architecture of the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.

"People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different strike," says Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and co-author of a paper appearing this week in the journalNature. "By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world's hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes."

Working with populations of runners in the United States and Kenya, Lieberman and his colleagues at Harvard, the University of Glasgow, and Moi University looked at the running gaits of three groups: those who had always run barefoot, those who had always worn shoes, and those who had converted to barefoot running from shod running. The researchers found a striking pattern.

Most shod runners -- more than 75 percent of Americans -- heel-strike, experiencing a very large and sudden collision force about 1,000 times per mile run. People who run barefoot, however, tend to land with a springy step towards the middle or front of the foot.

"Heel-striking is painful when barefoot or in minimal shoes because it causes a large collisional force each time a foot lands on the ground," says co-author Madhusudhan Venkadesan, a postdoctoral researcher in applied mathematics and human evolutionary biology at Harvard. "Barefoot runners point their toes more at landing, avoiding this collision by decreasing the effective mass of the foot that comes to a sudden stop when you land, and by having a more compliant, or springy, leg."

The differences between shod and unshod running have evolutionary underpinnings. For example, says Lieberman, our early Australopith ancestors had less developed arches in their feet. Homo sapiens, by contrast, has evolved a strong, large arch that we use as a spring when running.

"Our feet were made in part for running," Lieberman says. But as he and his co-authors write in Nature: "Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning."

For modern humans who have grown up wearing shoes, barefoot or minimal shoe running is something to be eased into, warns Lieberman. Modern running shoes are designed to make heel-striking easy and comfortable. The padded heel cushions the force of the impact, making heel-striking less punishing.

"Running barefoot or in minimal shoes is fun but uses different muscles," says Lieberman. "If you've been a heel-striker all your life you have to transition slowly to build strength in your calf and foot muscles."

In the future, he hopes, the kind of work done in this paper can not only investigate barefoot running, but can provide insight into how to better prevent the repetitive stress injuries that afflict a high percentage of runners today.

"Our hope is that an evolutionary medicine approach to running and sports injury can help people run better for longer and feel better while they do it," says Lieberman, who has created a web site, www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu, to educate runners about the respective merits of shod and barefoot running.

The Nature paper arose out of the senior honors theses of two Harvard undergraduates, William A. Werbel '08 and Adam E. Daoud '09, both of whom went to Africa with Lieberman to help collect data for this study.

Lieberman's co-authors on the Nature paper are Venkadesan and Daoud at Harvard; Werbel, now at the University of Michigan; Susan D'Andrea of the Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence, R.I.; Irene S. Davis of the University of Delaware; and Robert Ojiambo Mang'Eni and Yannis Pitsiladis of Moi University in Kenya and the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

The research was funded by the American School of Prehistoric Research, the Goelet Fund, Harvard University, and Vibram USA.

Many of you may be suffering from chronic running related injuries. I won’t tell you that Running Barefoot will cure everything wrong with you, or magically make you the fastest runner in the world, or that you will never cut your foot while Running Barefoot.

What I will say is that many of the chronic foot problems, common in our shoe-addicted society, are practically non-existent in societies that do not wear shoes!

And, much to my own surprise, when I first started sharing my Running Barefoot experiences on the internet, thousands of other people were not only running barefoot, but many were running barefoot because they couldn’t run in shoes without chronic and debilitating knee and back pain.

Before we begin, Take OFF that FOOTWEAR! If you want to take baby steps in your transition to Running Barefoot, fine. But, no baby, I’ve ever seen, was born wearing protective footwear, so they could run further, before they learned HOW to run - before their bare feet were strong enough for running! If your bare feet aren’t currently tough enough to run a mile while barefoot, then DON’T run a mile barefoot, not yet! If you wear some kind of minimalist, or “transitional” footwear, before you have had the advantage of LEARNING how to run while actually barefoot, you’re just asking for problems – problems that occur when we try to do too much, too soon – when we protect our sensitive soles from telling us how to run more gently, or when it’s time to stop for the day - problems that occur when we’re still running with bad technique, but without the support provided by those big clunky shoes that allowed us to learn how to run badly. It’s a lot easier to LEARN to sing on-key, when we aren’t wearing earplugs, to block the pain of listening to ourselves singing off-key!

 

Try not get hung up on the details. The ultimate goal of running is simply to move the body forward – preferably without causing damage. Remove the motions or rigidity which interrupt forward movement, and/or cause discomfort, and we will have come a long way toward achieving that goal.

The details about Running technique below are here to help us move toward this goal. Learning the technique exactly as written, or exactly as someone else runs, is not the goal!

We don’t want to learn how someone else runs. We want to learn how to learn how to run for our self.

We want to play with the details. Listen to our body. And especially listen to our sensitive BARE soles (there is a reason there are more nerve endings in our bare sole than anywhere else in our bodies). Watch the bill of our hat while running (when we’re wearing a hat). Make mental notes of how much, or how little it is bouncing up and down or side to side (the goal is to move forward, not up and down, or side to side). Make continuous adjustments to our technique. Listen continuously to our bodies and soles. Ask the tough questions. Are we eliminating pain and discomfort? Are we moving forward? Or are we simply trying to get used to the pain of running the way we habitually learned to run while wearing thickly cushioned shoes? Play with the techniques? Fine-tune each detail. Review the effects on the other details. Fine-tune those, one at a time, or a few at a time. Work at PLAYING toward LEARNING how to eliminate discomfort, and wasteful motions, or lack of motions (stiffness) that sways us from our goal – moving forward without injury.

For infants first learning to walk and run barefoot this process seems almost automatic. However, for adults it is much different. We don’t have the seemingly infinite patience and wisdom of the infant – we want to learn NOW! Or worse, we don’t want to learn anything new. Taking off our shoes, is only the first step in improving our technique.  So, we need to make conscious efforts to stay conscious while running, and work at PLAYING, to LEARN new truths. Stimulation of our bare soles will help to that direction.

And finally, If we come to believe that we, or anyone, has PERFECT running technique, then we still have much to LEARN about LEARNING how to run!