"All you need to run is a pair of shoes." - or maybe not!

ScienceDaily (Feb. 1, 2010) - New research is casting doubt on the old

adage, "All you need to run is a pair of shoes."

Scientists have found that those who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear,

tend to avoid "heel-striking," and instead land on the ball of the foot or

the middle of the foot. In so doing, these runners use the architecture of

the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and

potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight,

that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.

"People who don't wear shoes when they run have an astonishingly different

strike," says Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology

at Harvard University and co-author of a paper appearing this week in the

journal Nature. "By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot

runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners

generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is

dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world's

hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. All you need is

a few calluses to avoid roughing up the skin of the foot. Further, it might

be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes."

Working with populations of runners in the United States and Kenya,

Lieberman and his colleagues at Harvard, the University of Glasgow, and Moi

University looked at the running gaits of three groups: those who had always

run barefoot, those who had always worn shoes, and those who had converted

to barefoot running from shod running. The researchers found a striking

pattern.

Most shod runners -- more than 75 percent of Americans -- heel-strike,

experiencing a very large and sudden collision force about 1,000 times per

mile run. People who run barefoot, however, tend to land with a springy step

towards the middle or front of the foot.

"Heel-striking is painful when barefoot or in minimal shoes because it

causes a large collisional force each time a foot lands on the ground," says

co-author Madhusudhan Venkadesan, a postdoctoral researcher in applied

mathematics and human evolutionary biology at Harvard. "Barefoot runners

point their toes more at landing, avoiding this collision by decreasing the

effective mass of the foot that comes to a sudden stop when you land, and by

having a more compliant, or springy, leg."

The differences between shod and unshod running have evolutionary

underpinnings. For example, says Lieberman, our early Australopith ancestors

had less developed arches in their feet. Homo sapiens, by contrast, has

evolved a strong, large arch that we use as a spring when running.

"Our feet were made in part for running," Lieberman says. But as he and his

co-authors write in Nature: "Humans have engaged in endurance running for

millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the

1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot

or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and

little cushioning."

For modern humans who have grown up wearing shoes, barefoot or minimal shoe

running is something to be eased into, warns Lieberman. Modern running shoes

are designed to make heel-striking easy and comfortable. The padded heel

cushions the force of the impact, making heel-striking less punishing.

"Running barefoot or in minimal shoes is fun but uses different muscles,"

says Lieberman. "If you've been a heel-striker all your life you have to

transition slowly to build strength in your calf and foot muscles."

In the future, he hopes, the kind of work done in this paper can not only

investigate barefoot running, but can provide insight into how to better

prevent the repetitive stress injuries that afflict a high percentage of

runners today.

"Our hope is that an evolutionary medicine approach to running and sports

injury can help people run better for longer and feel better while they do

it," says Lieberman, who has created a web site,

www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu, to educate runners about the respective

merits of shod and barefoot running.

The Nature paper arose out of the senior honors theses of two Harvard

undergraduates, William A. Werbel '08 and Adam E. Daoud '09, both of whom

went to Africa with Lieberman to help collect data for this study.

Lieberman's co-authors on the Nature paper are Venkadesan and Daoud at

Harvard; Werbel, now at the University of Michigan; Susan D'Andrea of the

Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence, R.I.; Irene S.

Davis of the University of Delaware; and Robert Ojiambo Mang'Eni and Yannis

Pitsiladis of Moi University in Kenya and the University of Glasgow in

Scotland.

The research was funded by the American School of Prehistoric Research, the

Goelet Fund, Harvard University, and Vibram USA.