Born to run 6 | The Evolution of Running Shoes

[@TadeuszCantwell]

Can you expand on what you mean by vertically orientated shins, does that just mean the knees tend to rise up higher? In a previous video you mention vertical head oscillation is associated with bad running economy. Is the the current science that there is no correlation in the higher shin movement and say a higher head rise in order to have that faster leg turn over. Wondering why you mentioned landing on the ball of the foot, which I presume you mean under the big toe and not a long the out side of the foot, landing the big toe a split second after. Or would you disagree with that statement?

[@CailbheDoherty]

Thanks. I was just using vertically oriented shins (specifically, at the start of the stance phase of running gait) as a proxy for a forefoot strike pattern: if your shins are perpendicular to the ground during initial contact, you will likely be landing on your midfoot or forefoot. Your question about running economy is a little trickier to answer-people who have a better running economy seem to have a lower vertical oscillation of their centre of mass, but this is by association only; it’s hard to infer any casual relationship between the two variables. And the same is true of foot-strike pattern When it comes to running biomechanics, I believe that there is so much kinematic individuality that definitively stating what optimal running ‘form’ looks like or what the specific characteristics of a forefoot strike pattern (like landing on the medial or lateral side of the foot first) is reductive as there will always be exceptions among the population. This means that any statements I make are deliberately generic (and sometimes even vague). This sentiment is summarised in this video kzbin.info/www/bejne/nmPJl4hmlrabnbc from 6:10 to 8:40. These papers might be of interest to you too: doi.org/10.1016/0021-9290(89)90224-8 doi.org/10.1260/1747-9541.6.2.243 doi.org/10.3389%2Ffspor.2020.00102

[@TadeuszCantwell]

@@CailbheDoherty Rewatched the video which talked about the vertical shins and noticed I’d missed the animated downward arrow, so you were more talking about the angle of the shin for a stiffened leg before impact compared to shod runners. It reminded me of the advice in barefoot/minimalist circles to have a higher head oscillation to gain enough height to move the feet faster enough for the above 160ish average spm that most shod runners I understand have. I confused vertical with height, but you seemed to have meant the angle of the leg. Watched the Born to Run 5 | The Epidemiology of Running Injuries video which was a good missing link in the place current science is on the difficulties of doing research and the claims of barefoot running. My interest is not just on the biomechanical aspects, but the broader constraints the research is operating under. I presume the video timestamp was to show this from the difficulty in research based on the variety of peoples run form, but the extra context of each parameter needing extra subjects was very helpful. As someone who enjoys running in minimalist shoes, the Xero HFS mostly, I’m basically trying to get a baseline for where science is now and the way proponents of barefoot/minimalist running use scientific papers to make a case. Currently I’m following the plan in the new Born to run 2 book, which focuses a large part to strengthen the leg in order to bring up your cadence. In general I don’t have the patience to wait the fifty or more years for any kind of conclusion to be reached, unlike you educated folk in Dublin, I’m a wild Wicklow man who doesn’t listen to authority figures! The abstract on reduced leg strength and lower cadence and speed was interesting since the general advice is to take off from the back foot that also requires good leg strength and stiffness, so I wondered how the reduced strength was being measured from a distance and if that would translate to barefoot/minimalist shoe runners. While abstract headline on the differences in Marathon performance states that “training the fatigue resistance of key lower limb muscle-tendon units to avoid decreases in step length”, to my biased perspective shows there is a difference since training in a barefoot/minimalist style gives you that for ‘free’ or as a integral part of this style of running as I’m currently experiencing following the above plan often with various pains in the Achilles tendon or parts of the calf after the faster runs or running on the spot to a 180spm beat for footfall training. It seems curious to me that the major styles in running seem to all be about injury mitigation, from Jeffing, to MAF, to weight training, all things that our ancestors never had to do. I’m not particularity convinced of the idea that it’s the modern world, when there are also bone stress fractures and a multitude of injuries among trail runners as well. Concrete is harder than any hard pan desert or rocky track that some humans ran on on and maybe one naysayer told me in a KZbin comment that my knee cartilage will be worn away after repeated contact is true, but to me the relative hardness of tarmac/concrete is within what humans evolved to handle. The abstract on leg spring was too complex for my primitive leaving cert failing, mountain bog brain to understand.