This is not something I taught her. Sure, I’m an active dad and I don’t mind bringing her along on the occasional adventure, but to call that teaching is a bit much to me. My wife and I fostered an encouraging and loving environment for her mobility to thrive, but watching the process showed me that all I did was help it along. The inevitable fact remains: she would have walked, and subsequently ran, whether I did anything to teach her or not. The reality of the situation is that I’m going to have to spend far more energy reigning in my child’s urge to run around than I ever would on actually teaching her how to do it. As humans, as ambulating animals, we simply run. It’s a natural feature of our existence.

We are built to run. For play, for survival, we’re made for it. It’s deeply encoded in our DNA. Our ancestors were persistence hunters, chasing for miles upon miles, running the equivalent of marathons to wear down and ultimately take down their prey. There was special equipment involved, yes, but that was more in the way of blades and projectiles. Our bodies were kept unhindered. Granted the ability to move every joint and muscle through their ideal ranges of motion for the specific purpose of running for tremendous distances. Our feet and joints conditioned to master the various terrains.

Shoes were crafted eventually. Their role being almost entirely protective, any shoe that was more than a thin sheet of leather tied to the bottom of a person’s foot had a very direct purpose. Boots for overcoming dense forests and resisting the abrasions that are inherent to woodland underbrush. Boots that shield the wearer from frigid climates that would otherwise deliver frostbite. These sorts of footwear were absolutely pivotal for the advancement of humanity, as it made way for us to do what was otherwise impossible.

There is one crucial element that needs to be understood here, as we move into modernity. Footwear of old was making up for things we are no good at without help. Our skin is easily penetrated by sharp objects and devastated by extreme cold. Conditioning can only do so much, so protective elements were implemented. There are things we can’t do without certain purpose-built tools. Prior to the 1960s, running wasn’t considered among those things. When athletic footwear was considered at the turn of the 20th century, the ideal shoe was lightweight and flexible. The most common shoe for athletes of all stripes, including marathoners, was essentially a thin piece of flat rubber attached to a canvas upper. There wasn’t any specific thought put into it outside of the fact that the human body is most comfortable performing in equipment that doesn’t stifle its natural movement patterns.

When Bill Bowerman popularized running as an exercise modality, he built Nike as a way to ride the new wave. In a world where people who ran did so in flats, newbies were finding themselves suddenly getting injured due to a lack of conditioning and spending most of their days in a heeled leather dress shoe. Bowerman brought onto the market a cushioned alternative in what is now known as the Nike Cortez, aiming to address these injuries by creating an athletic sneaker with an elevated heel to better accommodate the new unconditioned runners. A foreshadowing of the future idea that a high-tech sneaker can do for you better than you can do for yourself. As this was only an untested intervention at the time, this also marks the beginning of medical literature on running injuries. Because, you know, they caused the injuries.

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Now that we’ve laid a bit of groundwork, let’s get to the crux of the article. Running research is dumb, and I’m tired of acting like it isn’t. The fact that there is even a debate about the effectiveness of barefoot/minimalist running vs. conventional shoes in 2024 is similar to questioning whether or not humans should be chewing their food when blenders exist. The average runner’s grandfather was in his 30s before the notion of cushioned shoes was even conceived of. Yet, due to the fact that running injuries became a concern in the wake of this technological intrusion, researchers simply start from the baseline idea that running should be done in a cushioned shoe. As if the reason for the absence of literature in that avenue was simply due to a lack of research, and not that the issue ultimately didn’t exist before. To think otherwise is fringe lunacy.

The thing that really grinds my gears about this topic is that it is so controversial to adjust the starting point. In nearly 60 years, researchers and scientists and designers have crafted a plethora of interventions. They craft shoes with more rigid foams and aggressive arch support because your foot spends .0624 seconds too long in pronation. They added nearly two inches of foam stack under the foot so you can stand to run 26 straight miles in them while “keeping your foot in a neutral position” to avoid straining. Shank plates of nigh infinite shapes and materials, all supposedly tuned and engineered to make you the best runner you can be. The kicker? None—and I mean literally zero—of these interventions have done anything to prevent injuries. Half a century of innovation somehow led to EIGHTY PERCENT of marathon runners experiencing at least one annual overuse injury, and the idea that their innovations are the problem wasn’t considered.

There is a whole host of convoluted shenanigans afoot that allow the idea of the necessity of cushioned shoes to continue relatively unimpeded. For starters, shoe companies never make wholesale claims that their shoes have any tangible benefits to the wearer’s health. Reason obviously being that there is no data supporting it. What it does mean, however, is that when a company does claim to have shoes that build stronger feet, they get the absolute crap sued out of them. The claim by the shoe can even be true, but if there is no data specifically supporting the idea the company claims, the impeding lawsuits are inevitable. The state of applied science in market products is such that you can’t extrapolate reasonable inferences as a means of proposing the benefits of a product.

This was the crux of the issue with the Vibram lawsuit that so many believe to have wiped out the credibility of barefoot shoes as a whole. Their claim was simply that the available data indicates that a more flexible, less cushioned shoe led to increased muscular size in the foot. Nike used this same information when they designed their Free technology. The obvious extrapolation to be made here is that if you have a cushiness shoe that is maximally flexible—down to the individual toes, even—that there is a very high chance that the foot muscles will grow, and this will be correlated with an increase in strength. So when the FiveFingers were introduced with the claim that wearing them will strengthen your feet, a fundamentally correct statement, there was a case for the lawsuit due to the fact that there wasn’t any data that directly stated that those exact shoes did such a thing. The fact that there was data that supported the concept didn’t matter, because it wasn’t explicit enough to claim outright.

Here’s where the shenanigans really come into play. Big Shoe is able to get by with fancy language to explicitly claim various performance benefits of their cushion technologies, all without ever touching on the topic of injury prevention. This is entirely due to the fact that the development of research-driven sports devices began with the untested implication that their original ideas and design were the base, and the entire industry was built upon that notion. Making the athletic shoe industry a battle between subtle differences in EVA and ETPU foam blends, rather than an investigation into the validity of those very features. The litigious nature of these brands means that the mere idea that their products cause issues can’t be very thoroughly tested, as the lack of definitive evidence is grounds for suit.

Such a limitation has somehow become a shield, or a smokescreen of sorts. They have no data indicating the safety and necessity of their product, but the products that go against them have to jump through rather odd hoops to generate any amount of credibility in the market. If you’re wondering how they have managed to assert dominance in a field of effectiveness that they legally cannot claim space in, the answer is quite simple. Doctors, physical therapists, running bloggers, and salespeople have no such legal ramifications for spreading their “informed” opinions on this topic. So Nike would never say their Zoom Air encased in React foam is somehow linked to safer runs with fewer injuries. Your local running store associate, on the other hand, just might. Hoka would never claim that their shoes are the best shoes for the general health of your feet. Your podiatrist just may walk into your appointment with a pair of Cliftons, and wouldn't tell you to avoid them. Shoe companies simply are able to operate in a realm where they don’t need to claim their effectiveness, as the culture around them does it for them in ways that the companies themselves can’t (and honestly shouldn’t) be held accountable for.

Now, what I’m absolutely not saying is that designers and researchers are all intimately aware of the damage their products are likely to be causing. Designers themselves are generally very passionate artists who believe in the purpose behind their designs. Engineers are definitely aiming to craft products that improve athletic performance. There are higher ups who are fully aware of these issues, but they have a fiduciary responsibility to not make any changes, as they may delegitimize the company as a whole. Fundamentally, however, this entire issue is driven by one primary issue. That issue being that the baseline idea as it pertains to footwear is simply that the human foot is insufficient. The human default should be a cushioned shoe. The designers, researchers, and the greater culture are completely blind to the possibility that all of these injuries that we simply assume are a part of life stem from that flawed perspective. To the point where researchers are genuinely perplexed as to how, after 60 damn years, they still haven’t improved rates of injury.

The blindness to this possibility isn’t just limited to running shoes. The whole health industry offers a host of braces, tapes, supplements, therapies, orthotics, surgeries, etc. all in the name of fixing the fact that your pesky feet just aren’t perfectly built for their shoes. None ever entertain the idea of minimizing the use of these new technologies. The researchers never seem to take into account the fact that humans have been running as a species without these technologies for millennia. All of them are simply assumed to be safe, effective, and ideal until someone can attempt to prove otherwise.

The deeply unfortunate side of this is that shoe technology is a pipeline that starts in running and bleeds down into other sports, casual wear, and work. The foams and shanks that are developed for running (with no reduction in injury risk) are going to be moved into basketball shoes and soccer cleats. There, they will again pose no benefit from an injury prevention perspective, and will continue to be ignored as non-contact leg injuries further increase in their prevalence. All while we researchers scratch their heads wondering where they went wrong, never once assuming that their baseline idea—athletic shoes should be cushioned—is flawed from the start.

Because running research is dumb. And I’m tired of pretending like it isn’t.

There are a handful of very direct, practical, and pretty obvious ways that we could address this societally. Encouraging diets that promote bone integrity, making sure people stay active into their older age, etc. Urge seniors to participate in some weight training to stave off sarcopenia. There are workshops out there that are geared toward teaching older people how to fall more safely to minimize damage, which is a skill I think most people should have under their belt. I’m strongly in favor of every one of those suggestions and interventions, but there is one thing you can do in old age that passively reduces your likelihood of falls without avoiding being up and active. Being barefoot.

Now that you’ve encountered the shocking reveal, let’s talk about it. Bearing in mind the obvious, muscular strength in your feet is vital to your ability to keep balance. Weak feet being the primary connection you have to the floor nearly guarantees that your foundation will be inconsistent and compromised overall. Elderly individuals need every advantage they can take in order to maximize the strength of that foundation, considering their reduced ability to recover and rebuild tissue contributes so greatly to the frequency and severity of falling injuries.

The most common way to address this issue is through a series of medical devices that take the burden of walking off of the individual. Think walkers, canes, lots of sitting around and not much unassisted movement. The footwear that’s recommended is another layer of the issue. The name of the game becomes support, so the shoes are tall, structured, and stiff. This is problematic because there is good evidence, such as this study, that indicates that structured support in shoes weakens the muscles of the foot arches in healthy runners. There is every reason to believe this effect is multiplied in more sedentary elderly people. People’s feet—just like literally every other collection of muscles, joints, and various other tissues— become atrophied when their use is minimized and their structures are too strongly supported externally. So it seems like when we attempt to compassionately support our elders through their later years, we may simply be accelerating their deterioration

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So now let’s think about solutions, and why they work. The best thing a senior can do to improve their ability to move through the world is to be barefoot as often as possible. If they aren’t big on that idea, minimalist/barefoot footwear seems to be nearly identical in its benefits. Getting out of those thick, stiff orthopedic shoes, and into something more forgiving and flexible, allows the body to rebuild the strength that can be found in their arch muscles. Reason being that the role of a barefoot shoe is to make space for the natural function of the foot. Allowing for this movement will encourage muscle snd nerve stimulation that contributes to building strength in the tissue. A 2020 study confirms this possibility, indicating that being in minimal shoes allows the building of greater stability and balance in elderly people. Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t really an age where people become unable to build muscle and rebuild tissue. It absolutely does become more difficult in later years, but the results still occur. We simply need to give our bodies the opportunity to do so, minimally impeded.

This is fundamentally just an extension of the age-old advice given to people who are tasked with working with the elderly: “Do not do for them what they are capable of on their own.” So just like a person shouldn't push an elder around in a wheelchair if they’re capable of walking themselves, a shoe shouldn't be supporting the otherwise self-sufficient arch structure of anyone’s foot. Doing so only contributes to the degradation of one’s ability to operate without that external assistance. This is why the correct approach to this issue is to, in all manner of ways, let people’s bodies and minds function while they still can. So they can both keep their abilities, and maintain the capacity to gain new ones.

One takeaway that I find incredibly valuable from this study is that these improvements took place when these elderly people were given the opportunity to build this ability in their senior years. Meaning, that improvement in balance and stability occurred when their bodies were at their least capable in terms of muscle and skill building. As a person who isn’t a senior citizen, I take this to mean that if I build these skills now, in my relative youth, I will have a far better starting point in those later years. It seems to me like the best practice for improving my longevity isn’t supplements or some highly specific dietary/workout schedule. Even with how much I love sauna and tolerate cold plunges. It looks like the baseline is simply to stay active, maintaining my skills, and doing so as close to barefoot as possible.

This is my general view on existence itself, not just footwear. It has just become very apparent to me that many people view features of our human foot anatomy as vestigial to the optimal human form in a way that is unique to feet. In my estimation, the best way for humans to live is to embrace the use of our entire form, rather than allow the seemingly useless parts of us to degrade in the presence of technological advancements.

The human body, much like every organism in existence, is loaded with complexities that lie well beyond the scope of complete human comprehension. Our collective understanding of it, while vast relative to no knowledge at all, is so insignificantly small that we are woefully incapable of crafting a construct that even reasonably mimics a singular feature of human function. We can’t seem to build a robot that walks like a human, let alone look like one while doing it. My oversimplified point here is that if we as humans can’t collectively reproduce human motion, it seems asinine to me to assume we understand it well enough to fruitfully augment it without expecting major unintended problems when doing so.

And yet.

This is one of many instances of a company believing that they so deeply understand human running, that they aimed to create a shoe that completely replaces the function of your foot of the act of running. An amalgamation of foam, carbon fiber, and plastics that somehow, despite being wholly disconnected from the rest of your body, is able to optimize your performance in ways your own feet could never hope to. This makes zero functional sense.

Isolating your foot in a restricted position through an otherwise natural motion without the expectation of downstream (and upstream) problems is, well, stupid. Which is why I personally take the stance that if you’re going to make it a point to wear shoes at all, there are some very important things to consider in order to minimize the negative effects you can expect from any intrusion on your natural form.

While wearing the shoe,

• Can you wiggle and splay your toes?

• Can you bend and flex your foot?

• Can you feel the intricacies of the floor throughout the whole sole?

• Can you do all the above with little to no resistance from the shoe itself?

And just as importantly, if you cannot do any of these things in the shoe you’re wearing, you need to simply ask yourself: Is what you are getting from the shoe in exchange for this intervention something that you, under your own power, aren’t capable of doing in any meaningful way? So, if you can’t feel the ground or wiggle your toes, is the show waterproof? Weatherproof? Does it provide better grip on your terrain than your bare feet would be able to? Maybe it protects from abrasions. Either way, understanding and minimizing the ratio of drawbacks to ideal features is crucial to reducing the impact of these companies’ “innovations” on your body.

Above all, you should wear shoes as infrequently as your life would allow. Just like you wouldn’t arbitrarily wear mittens, or casually wear a neck brace, don’t wear shoes where you don’t need them. There is simply no need to interrupt the natural function of any part of your body, and this includes your feet.

Why did I tell you all of that? Framing. I grew 9 inches relatively quickly, all while playing sports with a strong passion. This, as a lot of you will know, came with the old growing pains. Patellar tendonitis, Osgood-Schlatter, the works. One thing I was blessed to narrowly avoid, however, is shin splints; an ever-looming specter in the realm of youth athletics. This is an ailment that is very poorly understood by a good number of (most) people involved in the training of young athletes. It’s one of those injuries that’s so ubiquitous that it’s assumed to be a nigh inevitability. Obviously, I’m here to let you know it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way.

Shin splints for the uninitiated, are sharp pains experienced in the shin, almost always during or after intense training or exercise. It’s generally associated with sprinting/running drills, and drills requiring quick, sharp changes in direction. What is often misunderstood about shin splints, mostly due to an incomplete understanding of muscular anatomy, is that it is not an injury of the bone itself. Generally speaking, shin splints are simply the colloquialized term for straining your tibiais anterior, which is a muscle that sits on the outside of your shin, and is a key part of the compliant spring mechanism that is the human leg. I don’t know about you, reader, but if I find that there is an epidemic of injury that seems to center around the straining of one key muscle group, I think it’s a sign something isn’t quite right.

Okay, so let’s just humor the uneducated fellow for a sec and have him explain himself. How in the hell are all of these guys just straining their shin muscles? Glad you condescendingly asked! Plain and simple, basically every athlete on the planet, once given a pair of running shoes, is just running incorrectly. Pair that with the intentionally exhaustive conditioning program that most competent coaches will put their teams through, and you essentially are just asking that tibialis to do something outside of its job description for too long.

Let’s, for a second, break down how to properly run so we can then understand where people seem to be going wrong. I referred to the leg as a spring mechanism earlier, and that’s because it literally is just that. Your hips, knees, and ankles are the fulcrums of a simple set of levers, where resistance and rebound are provided by tendons, ligaments, and muscles. The best way to maximally engage this spring when doing anything is to strike the ground at the forefoot or mid foot, allowing the interplay between your foot arches, Achilles’ tendon, calves, etc. to manage the force loads created by moving your body. When this is done properly, your toes will raise up prior to impact, then they will naturally descend as a function of engaging the calf. You can understand this concept by simply doing a calf raise. The act of utilizing the calf, by necessity, pushes the toes into the floor.

The running shoe issue comes into play in a very sneaky way, and I can honestly understand why it’s not generally considered as a problematic element. Here’s the deal. The running motion of an athletic human is very efficient. When barefoot, it’s not uncommon for the runner to lift their swinging foot mere fractions of an inch off the ground. This can be a problem when that efficient gait pattern is interrupted by the wiles of a shoe company’s foam cushioning systems. Cushioned shoes, especially those with an elevated heel, promoted a style of running known as heel striking. Where mid and forefoot strikers primarily handle impact forces through the structures of their foot, ankle, and a bent knee, runners who land heel first are experiencing that major impact force primarily through their knee and hip with a fully extended leg.

That action creates a whole gang of downstream problems, but we’ll focus on the way this style of running contributes to straining the tibialis anterior. When your weight is being managed at the forefoot with a bent knee, your tibialis and calf muscles are in a prime position to manage the force of your running body through your ankle. Your tibialis can raise your toes up in dorsiflexion, and your calves can push the toes down in plantar flexion. This distributes the burden of bringing the foot to the floor equitably between the two muscle groups. When heel striking, however, the mechanics are entirely screwed up. When your heel hits the ground, your calf is already at full extension, and your weight is positioned directly on the fulcrum it relies on to apply force through the toes. Your tibialis is in tight flexion, because it has to be in order to carry the foot through the gait without dragging the toes. This creates an issue. The toes need to be lowered to the running surface in order to continue the gait cycle, but the calfs are mechanically unable to do their job. This means the only option available to the body is to have your tibialis eccentrically lower the toes to the floor. That muscle is absolutely capable of that feat, but over reliance on that action will absolutely lead to injury. Most commonly, shin splints.

So what do I have in the way of solutions? The specific advice I would offer is going to be found in a later article for my paid subscribers. I have to justify the effort somehow. The simplest and easiest start, though, would be to just ditch the cushioned running shoes altogether. Especially in youth sports. Kids are very capable of growing and adapting to thrive in their environments. Leave their feet alone, and their bodies will strengthen them beyond your wildest imagination. The support and softness they need is from their parents and coaches, not their shoes.