Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [15]
Which brings us to the most controversial topic of all: running shoes. Just like high-top basketball shoes, there’s plenty of research into how different types of running shoe alter the forces transmitted through your legs each time your foot smacks the ground. But it has been very difficult to take the next step and show that certain types of running shoe decrease (or increase, for that matter) injury rates.
Researchers at the Allan McGavin Sports Medicine Centre in Vancouver have used training clinics for the Vancouver Sun Run 10K, an annual race that attracts more than 60,000 runners, as a laboratory to study the training of thousands of recreational runners over the past two decades. Injuries still occur, says lead author Jack Taunton, who was the chief medical officer of the 2010 Olympics, “but as we’ve seen shoes get better over the years, they’re less often found to be the main factor.” One correlation that Taunton found is that men whose shoes were more than four months old were more likely to get injured. For women, the effect was noticeable only once their shoes were more than six months old, presumably because men are generally heavier and thus compress the shoe cushioning more quickly.
On the other hand, a 2010 study from Taunton’s laboratory found that prescribing certain types of shoes (“neutral,” “stability,” or “motion control”) to runners based on their foot posture didn’t decrease injury rates in the subsequent 13 weeks. If anything, the runners assigned to heavy “motion control” shoes experienced more injuries than the control group who received randomly assigned shoes.
What does seem increasingly clear is that the rival running-shoe technologies touted by manufacturers don’t make much difference. A study by researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso, published in 2009 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found no difference in the effects of air, gel, and spring-type cushioning on the performance of running shoes worn for 200 miles or more. Still, if you head out for a run, you’re much better off in a pair of running shoes—whatever the type—than you would be in a pair of tennis or basketball shoes. Unless, that is, you’ve decided to go barefoot . . .
Will running barefoot help me avoid injuries?
We were born to run—barefoot. That’s the buzz these days, spurred in part by Christopher McDougall’s 2009 bestseller, Born to Run, and by Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman’s argument that distance running shaped the evolution of the human body. Now biomechanical studies are beginning to emerge that—by some accounts—finally offer scientific proof that you’d be better off ditching your footwear or running in “minimalist” shoes that do little more than protect your soles. But these studies need to be interpreted with caution.
The question of whether modern running shoes increase or decrease injuries remains shrouded in uncertainty. In a 2009 British Journal of Sports Medicine article, Australian shoe researcher Craig Richards argued that no study has ever succeeded in showing that modern running shoes reduce injuries. “Shoe researchers and manufacturers will try and bamboozle you with the results of hundreds of biomechanical studies,” he says. But these studies simply show that shoes change the forces acting on your feet—and no one knows for sure how those forces relate to injury rates.
In 2010, Lieberman published in the journal Nature the results of a study of American and Kenyan runners. His two main conclusions were, first, that barefoot runners are more likely to land on the middle or front of their feet, while shod runners generally land on their heels; second, that the peak vertical force upon impact is three times greater in shoes than it is barefoot. Newspaper reporters took this as proof that barefoot running is “better”—but in fact, this is precisely the kind of biomechanical study that Richards had dismissed as useless, because it says nothing about injury rates.