Barefoot Running Shoes
Choose the Best Barefoot Running Shoes for Your Feet
An exciting new trend in good running shoes is the emergence in the past few years of barefoot running shoes.
Our feet are not supposed to be stiff. They're designed to be flexible and adaptable. Your feet and ankles have 26 bones in them. That's a quarter of the entire number of bones in your body. They also contain 33 joints and over a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments.
In other words, our feet are designed to adapt, stretch and curve around a great many natural surfaces. Our ancestors had to run through tall grass, on sand, smooth rock, bumpy rocks, forests full of fallen sticks and stumps, uphill and downhill, and across open land.
Our feet and ankles are marvels of practical engineering. When we run, we exert a force of up to eight times our body weight (depending on how hard you're working, of course). That force hits the earth, creating an equal and opposite reaction up our bodies.
If that force is not sufficiently and efficiently absorbed by the arches of our feet, it wears our knees and hips and throws our spines out of alignment. That often happens with those of us who are flat footed or have arches that are too high and inflexible.
When we put a layer of flat leather or rubber between the bottoms of our feet and the ground, by wearing shoes, we are also interfering with the ability of our feet to feel and to adapt to that ground.
Barefoot Running Shoes Give Us the Best of Both Worlds
Of course, shoes protect us from rocks, broken glass and so on. We no longer have the thick calluses on our feet that are ancestors no doubt had. We also don't have the smashed toe nails, cuts and injuries they certainly must have had.
We gained a lot of protection for our feet, but in preventing our feet from encountering the natural world, we lost some of their ability to respond to different surfaces. You lose what you don't use.
Since running first became popular in the early 1970s, running shoe manufacturers have competed to come up with running shoes that offer the most support, cushioning, stability and motion control. The technology has greatly improved.
So has how the various models and brands of shoes can target runners with specific running problems. Overpronation, supination, shin splints, you name it - shoes exist to prevent or improve the problem.
Yet runners still suffer many overuse injuries.
So lately some experts have come to believe the solution to many running injuries and errors in running technique is to wear barefoot running shoes. That seems a contradiction in terms.
Frankly, running barefoot is probably the best thing to do. But it's also difficult to find places to do so safely, especially for long stretches. Beaches come to mind, but who wants to always run on a slope in sand? So unless you own and totally control a large stretch of smooth land that's not too hard (concrete), or you grew up running in primitive areas and still retain your childhood calluses, you'll want to protect your feet as much as possible.
The Top Three Barefoot Running Shoes Are:
Vibram Five Fingers -- these look like gloves for your feet. They have separate sections for each of your toes. They sort of like slippers, but with a firm rubber bottom designed to protect your feet.
The Bikala is the best model for outdoor runner, followed by the Classic and KSO. The Moc (Men) and Performa (Women) are mainly for indoor use - it's not designed to hold up under long term outdoor use.
Nike Free 5.0 V4 -- these look a lot like ordinary running shoes, but they're made with a lot of flexibiity, to allow your feet to move as though barefoot. The "5.0" means they are halfway between bare feet (1.0) and regular running shoes (10.0).
Newton Running Shoes -- Newton is a new and up and coming running shoe manufacture. It was started by runners, for runners. Their basic concept is to design shoes to encourage proper form and technique in runners.
They come in various models. The Newton Running Sir Isaac (Men) and Lady Isaac (Women) are neutral shoes, which means they have some pronation support. Therefore, they may be good if you do have flat feet and a tendency to overpronate.
The Running Distance and Running Gravity also give a close to barefoot feel.
The Vibram shoes come in European sizes, and that may throw you off if you're used to thinking of your shoe sizes in American terms. I've seen charts online to help you convert from inches to the equivalent European size.
But inches aren't the same as American shoe size, although they seem to be.
For example, I wear an American size 13, and when I looked at the charts online they stopped right before 13 -- but that's inches. But I thought they didn't make the shoes in my size. At the REI store the clerk let me measure my feet on their scale, and I need a European size 44, which is eleven and one quarter inches long.
So now, with barefoot running shoes, it's possible to get the benefits of running with no shoes, with the protection of shoes.
Next: Adjust to Vibram Five Fingers -- it may not be easy to change to wearing Vibram Five Fingers running shoes.