WHY YOU NEED TO TRAIN BAREFOOT
THESE DAYS, MOST TRAINERS COME IN TWO STYLES: CUSHIONED AND HEAVILY SO. BUT IF YOU WANT TO RUN, TRAIN AND MOVE AS NATURE INTENDED – WITH THE CHANCE TO IMPROVE BIOMECHANICS AND PHYSICAL RESILIENCE – IT’S TIME TO BARE YOUR SOLES
Ross Edgley – the ‘extreme adventurer’ best known for swimming around the UK, and the man pictured here – once spent two months living and training with Namibian bushmen. In 2008, he abandoned all home comforts to join the San people in the Kalahari Desert. ere, he “hunted for miles every day wearing nothing but a loincloth, sandals and a smile.” Often covering more than a marathon distance each day, like his hosts he chose to eschew shoes altogether, running in bare feet instead. “Essentially, barefoot biomechanics was improving my running technique and e ciency to such an extent I was evolving into something that resembled a semi-good endurance athlete in as little as 30 days,” he says. He describes how his hosts “would glide across the sand with impeccable forefoot striking, leaning forward and without wasting any energy.” At the beginning of his stay, Edgley found himself lagging behind the bushmen. “Quite possibly the worst San bushman in history,” he says. “My 5ft 9in, 100kg, hobbit-sized frame was left to drag itself around Namibia, displaying the worst running form ever to grace the African plains. But after a month of blisters and a bruised ego, things got better. Much better. I began to forefoot strike. I began leaning into each stride. My footprints no longer resembled that of a baby elephant and for a brief moment I looked like a semi-competent San bushman. Why? Because barefoot running had given me a heightened sense of what my feet and legs were doing. I could feel every grain of sand between my toes.” Edgley says that ever since his time in Namibia, he has been an exponent of barefoot training and minimalist shoes. It’s a choice that has helped him clock up some amazing athletic records, all without the comfort of cushioned sports trainers. In 2016, for example, he pulled a 1,400kg car for a marathon distance around the Silverstone race track. same year, he completed consecutive rope climbs that equalled the height of Mount Everest. He once ran 1,000 miles barefoot, with a 50kg rucksack on his back. Another time, he completed an Olympic-distance triathlon while carrying an enormous tree trunk. Not to mention his most audacious feat to date when, in 2018, he swam 1,792 miles around the coast of Britain – without touching land.
AS NATURE INTENDED
Of course, barefoot training is nothing new. For the vast majority of human existence, we have been running around in bare feet. Estimates are that it wasn’t until between 40,000 and 26,000 years ago that we
rst started covering our feet
in the most basic footwear. And even then it wasn’t until the 1960s that we started wearing sports trainers, when Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike, persuaded us all that we needed to wrap our feet in expensive, cushioned shoes. Nowadays, we are sold all sorts of specialist, cushioned footwear for all sorts of di erent sports. But do we really need it? Or is it in fact damaging our feet rather than protecting them? at’s what minimalist shoe brands, such as Vivobarefoot, believe. Ben Le Vesconte is a running and foot specialist at the company’s central London store. He recommends minimalist shoes for all manner of sports and exercises, ranging from running, hiking, squash, golf and tennis, to gym workouts, circuit training, weight lifting and swimrunning. Le Vesconte says there are two key bene ts to training in minimalist shoes. e rst is a heightened sense of what’s known in sports science as proprioception: a sense of self-movement and body position. He points out how there are thousands of nerve endings in the human foot. “ey are there to give our brains information about our balance,” he tells Men’s Fitness. “ey are, in e ect, a pressure plate built into our feet. If you take that away from your feet [by wearing cushioned shoes], you have to work harder to nd your balance. With heightened proprioception, your balance is better.” Cushioned sports shoes, he adds, increase the length of time your feet are in contact with the oor. “Imagine jumping up and down on a thick mattress compared to jumping up and down on a hard oor. You can jump on the hard oor more easily. e cushioning is tricking your body into thinking you’re moving around on a big fat mattress.” e second bene t, Le Vesconte says, is that minimalist shoes o er the feet greater exibility: “Your feet will move more, get stronger and build up the muscles.” Ross Edgley agrees: “Imagine if you put your leg in a cast for six months and didn’t use it. What do you think would happen? Yes, the muscles would shrink and shrivel and, with it, so would your strength and functionality. at is all because of something called muscular atrophy. Our feet come loaded with tiny muscles, tendons and a natural arch that acts like a spring when we run. When they’re ring and functioning, they quite literally put a spring in our step. But what do you think happens when we wrap our feet in big, clumsy shoes? Your feet experience this same form of atrophy.”
MINIMAL MAGIC
Although some podiatrists and sports coaches have been sceptical about highly cushioned sports shoes for decades, the revolution in minimalist shoes didn’t attract mainstream attention until 2009, when a book called Born To Run was published. Penned by amateur American runner Christopher McDougall, it told the story of Mexico’s Tarahumara Indians, who are able to run for hundreds of miles without rest, wearing just traditional leather sandals, called huaraches, on their feet. McDougall himself had been plagued by running injuries, but eventually overcame them after modelling his running style on the barefoot technique of the Tarahumara.
e book also presents the theories of many scienti c experts who worry that cushioned sports shoes can cause damage to athletes’ bodies. Dr Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, for example, writes in the book: ‘A lot of foot and knee injuries that are currently plaguing us are actually caused by people running with shoes that make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate, [and] give us knee problems.’ Vin Lananna is president of the American sports governing body USA Track & Field. ‘People went thousands of years without shoes,’ he writes. ‘I think you try to do all these corrective things with shoes and you over-compensate. You x things that don’t need xing. If you strengthen the foot by going barefoot, I think you reduce the risk of Achilles and knee and plantar fascia problems.’ And Dr Barry Bates, former biomechanist at the University of Oregon, suggests that worn-down running shoes are safer than newer ones, because they help runners gain foot control. As McDougall, who is a large man compared to most distance runners, writes: ‘All that cushioning does nothing to reduce impact. Logically, that should be obvious – the impact on your legs from running can be up to twelve times your bodyweight, so it’s preposterous to believe a half inch of rubber is going to make a bit of di erence