All the recent hubub over Dr. Lieberman’s research is a wonderful confirming statement – that it is not comfortable to pound our heels into the ground without thickly padded shoes. Something barefoot runners already knew!
The more important discovery in Dr. Lieberman’s research, wasn’t the precise details of how we run – it is that we learn to run better, more gently, when our bare soles are allowed to touch the ground with each and every step. According to the study, some 75% of those who learned how to run while wearing shoes – learned to pound their heels into the ground. Of those who learned to run while barefoot – none! Even those who first learned to run with shoes, and later started running barefoot re-learned how to run, and improved significantly.
While this is an important study, especially something for shoe-makers to consider, in how humans should be running, and how shoes have been altering our tendency to run differently than we should be, and especially about how we LEARN to run in the first place.
The message is clear, and the same one we’ve been telling shod runners whenever they complain to us about knee and back pains. TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES! Your soles will teach you to run naturally, and more gently!
And yes, it is possible to run gently, even with shoes blocking these important messages – Kenyans and Ethiopians run gently in nearly every major marathon, they do it with shoes, and they do it very fast. Why, because they spent the better part of their childhood running barefoot over every conceivable type of terrain – not only soft dirt and grass, but rock-hard mountain trails often littered with razor-sharp volcanic debris (sorry folks, humans can’t take all the credit for littering the earth with sharp dangerous objects).
So what about the runners who manage to run gently despite learning how to run in shoes? Well, that’s about a 25% success rate – and I don’t believe it would be presumptuous to state that that is just among the small percentage of people in our society who actually run, or more likely, participate in public running events. In other words, of those folks in our society who continue to run, or call themselves runners, only 25% actually run well!
And what about all those other people? Over the years, hundreds of people have contacted me explaining that every time they tried running their knees, and/or back would hurt. Basically, they were telling me that, not only did they not consider themselves runners, they were told by their health care provider that they just “weren’t designed to run!”
However, these people contacted me, because they had discovered that indeed they could run, and without the knee and back pains they suffered before, because they discovered Running Barefoot – which helped them learn how to run naturally, and more gently!
So, that 25% “success” rate among runners, becomes much smaller when we include “non-runners” in our study group. However, as I’ve implied above, it’s quite possible that had we all learned to walk and run while barefoot, more of us would be classified as runners.
Even Christopher McDougall, author of the book Born to Run, put himself in the “non-runner” category for many years, until, with good coaching, and later, running barefoot, he discovered how to run more naturally, more gently, without pounding his heels into the ground.
The problem was, we did the testing, we made alterations in the way we ran, but we were never really looking at the results of that test – our messengers, the many, many nerve endings in our bare soles were imprisoned from the very start because listening to them complain about how badly we were pounding was uncomfortable! So rather than paying attention to our own “research”, we buried the report, inside some over-stuffed, over-padded, over-priced shoes!
Imagine we all learned how to play basketball wearing blindfolds. Occasionally some of us would still get a basket. Now you take a small percentage of that group, just the people who continued playing basketball while blindfolded, and you may very well get a success rate similar to what we see in shod runners. After all, we’ve already weeded out the majority of people who just couldn’t even get close to the basket while blindfolded.
Likewise, the important message of Dr. Liebermans research, isn’t that there is a specific way we should be shooting to make baskets – it’s that it would be much easier for most people to learn that specific way to shoot baskets, if only they removed their blindfold.
As Dr. Lieberman himself discovered, when he realized he should actually try Running Barefoot, our bare soles – or at least the multitude of nerve endings in our soles – are the “missing” link in the human running machine.
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