EFL Blog

The topic of footwear and running have come up in the media again this week, with an excellent New York Times piece cautioning those jumping on the barefoot running bandwagon, and a Consumer Reports article on the high injury rates associated with those ridiculous looking “toning” shows.

At EFL I encourage most people to try training barefoot, or with flat shoes, depending on the person’s condition. And some who haven’t trained barefoot before are noticing improvements in balance and strength. But if someone wears orthotics or has some related condition that makes going barefoot uncomfortable then I don’t push it.

We also do very little plyometric work and no box jumps, which may not be the best choice of exercise when barefoot.

Everything I have learned from the smartest people in the business such as Bill Hartman, Gray Cook, Lenny Parracino etc… indicates that a high volume of repetitive motion on hard surfaces with a lot of impact on joints and connective tissue can cause pain and injury. Especially if the person is not conditioned to it, or otherwise just not strong enough to handle the stresses on muscles, fascia, connective tissue, and joints.

In other words more and more I have come to believe that distance running on hard surfaces is a poor choice of exercise for many people, especially if they lead a fairly sedentary life and have poor posture due to sitting all day.

Not to mention the fact that jogging is generally worthless for fat loss, and so an overweight, relatively detrained (weaker) person is going to incur a hell of a lot of stress on the joints and connective tissue and likely end up not attaining their goals.

But back to the NYT article, goos points are made regarding taking some time to slowly adjust to exercising barefoot because most of us have worn shoes for the majority of steps we’ve taken since childhood, which has fundamentally altered our gait. Heel strikes when done barefoot are not enjoyable, so to suddenly change to landing on the balls of the foot causes a reaction up the kinetic chain.

This particular part regarding force dissipation is particularly interesting in that it shoes heel striking causes more trauma to the bones (joints) while landing on the balls of the feet allows our elastic tissue to function as it should and absorb energy.

Even when a barefoot runner has developed what would seem to be ideal form, the force generated may be unfamiliar to the body and potentially injurious, as another study presented at last week’s conference suggests. For the study, conducted at the Biomechanics Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts, runners strode across a force plate, deliberately landing either on the forefoot or on the heel. When heel striking, the volunteers generated the expected thudding ground reaction forces; when they landed near the front of the foot, the force was still there, though it generally had a lower frequency, or hertz.

Earlier research has shown that high-frequency forces tend to move up the body through a person’s bones. Lower-frequency forces typically move through muscles and soft tissue. So shifting to a forefoot running style, as people do when running barefoot, may lessen your risk for a stress fracture, and up your of developing a muscle strain or tendinitis.

In other news this week my friend Lou Schuler wrote here about what fitness business guru Thomas Plummer considers to be the future of the industry in a talk at the Perform Better Summit and kindly mentioned EFL as an example of specialized gyms that eschew typical machines and treadmills.

Finally, here is a cool video of UFC fighter Kenny Florian training at Mike Boyle’s gym in Boston. Mike is known as one of the most forward thinking guys in the industry, and I’ve read just about everything he’s written. Good to see fighters training intelligently (not doing random hard stuff) at one of those facilities of the future.