I’ve been running on barefoot shoes for well over a year now, and today I wanted to share a little insight that I got during a trail run I did a few months back.
For most of the race, I was running at about the same pace as the people around me. However, on the way down, I was doing twice the speed wondering why everyone else was holding back. That’s when I realised the secret was in the shoes.
You see, virtually every running shoe you can buy is built for heel-stride running. Meaning that you land on your heel, ‘role’ over the arch of your foot, and then press forward from the toes. These shoes need heavy cushioning, because the entire shock from landing on your heel is transferred to your knee joints, hip joints, and up.
Barefoot shoes, on the other hand, demand that you transition to a ‘forefoot-stride.’ Where you land on the front of your foot, let your heels come down while the arch in your foot takes up the pressure, and then redirect that energy to your forefoot as you push off.
On flat pavement, you can perform just as well with either stride. (I’d argue that the forefoot-stride is better but that’s a discussion for another time.) But, as I mentioned, for trail running, the fore-foot stride comes out on top. But why?
I think there are two main reasons:
Excess forward momentum
With forefoot running, you put your feet closer under your centre of gravity than for heel-stride running. This means that in the former case, you are leaning—almost falling—downward, whereas with the heel stride you are leaning back.
All that potential energy you created by walking up doesn’t really get the space to be converted in forward momentum going down.
Joint pressure limit
As I mentioned before, heel-stride running can be quite demanding on your joints, hence the heavy cushioning in common running shoes. When you are going down, this pressure is greatly amplified, because each step down you go down for longer, causing your downward speed to accelerate and the blow on your heels to increase.
This is why most runners take smaller steps and hold back going down: simply ‘letting go’ would completely mess up their knees, hips and back.
While I think this makes a strong case for barefoot shoes, I hope it is clear that this isn’t about shoes at all. It is about the stride with which you run, and barefoot shoes simply demand that you adopt a forefoot stride. You can run heel-stride with barefoot shoes, your joints just won’t last very long. Similarly, you can run forefoot with common running shoes, but the latter are designed to be ‘rolled over,’ making forefoot running probably feel a little awkward at best.
