Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [16]
Another study, this one from Casey Kerrigan and her colleagues at the University of Virginia, made even bigger headlines in early 2010 with the claim that running shoes are worse for your feet than high heels. What this study actually found was that running shoes create greater torque on the hip and knee joints than barefoot running. They then compared these results to an earlier study of walking in high-heeled shoes and made a very dubious comparison between the two.
There’s no doubt that thinking on footwear has evolved in the last decade. For instance, plush cushioning is no longer considered the ultimate defense against injury. “I wish running companies would stop rattling on about ‘gel’ and ‘air’ and so on,” says Simon Bartold, an Australian shoe researcher who consults for Asics, a sports shoe manufacturer. Newer shoes reflect this thinking, he says: Nike has introduced the bare-bones Free, for example, and Asics has quietly abandoned the concept of “motion control.” But there’s no evidence that runners of all shapes and sizes would benefit from simply giving up on shoes. Of course, Bartold works for Asics, so we can’t trust him, right? Well, Lieberman’s study was funded by Vibram, which makes the barefoot-simulating FiveFinger. And Kerrigan and Richards have both founded their own minimalist shoe companies.
The point isn’t that the new barefoot studies are bad. On the contrary, they offer valuable information about how we run, and they do indeed suggest that injury-prone runners might benefit from some cautious experimentation with barefoot (or nearly barefoot) running. That might involve jogging barefoot on grass for five minutes, a couple of times a week, and building up from there. But if we’re holding the barefoot advocates to the same standard of “proof” that we demand from the shoe companies, let’s be clear: any link between barefoot running and reduced running injuries remains unproven for now. (The negative effects of stepping on something sharp, on the other hand, are extremely well established!)
Will compression clothing help me exercise?
From the sleeve on Allen Iverson’s shooting arm to marathoners racing in knee-high socks, there’s a lot of tight clothing in the upper echelons of sport these days. But compression garments have come a long way from the wave of colorful spandex that engulfed gyms in the 1980s. The first wave of tight clothing offered benefits like cooling, sweat management, reduced chafing, and (ahem) better support. Modern compression garments, in contrast, are designed to squeeze your arms and legs hard enough to affect blood flow and stabilize vibration in your muscles, resulting in bolder claims of enhanced power, better endurance, and faster recovery.
These new garments are descended from medical leggings that have been used for decades to treat blood clots and circulatory disorders. The key is that they deploy “graduated” compression: they squeeze more and more tightly as they move farther from the heart, which reduces blood pooling in the legs and speeds the return of blood to the heart. One of the clearest benefits compression offers for athletes is quicker recovery from “delayed onset muscle soreness”—the aches that appear after an intense bout of unaccustomed exercise. Wearing a compression sleeve around the affected muscles seems to help control swelling and, through enhanced circulation, hasten the removal of cellular waste products.
More controversial is the research into explosive movements such as sprinting and jumping. A 1996 paper by University of Connecticut researcher William Kraemer, then at Penn State, found that volleyball players who wore compression socks were able to produce more power in their vertical jumps. One theory is that the physical support offered by the garment reduces unwanted oscillation and jarring of the muscle—that’s the rationale behind compression shorts for basketball players, though more recent studies have produced conflicting results.
For runners and cyclists, the key to potential endurance gains is the “calf muscle pump”: with each