The way running shoes are evolving, the day shouldn't be far off that those Nike trainers on the Spielberg blockbuster Back to the Future 2 should arrive on our store shelves, the ones with the self-tightening laces. That movie put the date on the year 2015, but the kind of advancements they're bringing in - motion control running shoes, NASA- designed cushioning and everything, self-tightening laces don't seem that far-fetched anymore. But the thing is, are all these high-tech advances actually good for your feet? The very fact that one should need to ask this question, would point you to where this is headed - health research these days is finding are that high-tech trainers strain your joints in a certain subtle way; and you risk all kinds of long-term damage to your entire motility system - hips downwards. Orthopedic doctors and researchers go so far as to say that even running barefoot wouldbebetter by far - if you avoided paved surfaces..
Now this is not to be interpreted as a free pass to skip gym class, just because the researchers say that you might as well be running in high heels for all the good you're doing your joints going about and those high-tech motion control running shoes. It's just that you need to try to get the right kind of walking and running motion to counter whatever damage is being done so that you don't find yourself laid low with osteoarthritis when you are 45. Here is how the research came by these findings. They put a bunch of men and women who regularly ran a couple of miles every day, in a laboratory decked out with cameras and laser pointers. They put stickers on all their joints so that the cameras could pick up the exact way their joints moved, and then they had them run barefoot. The cameras track their joints and this helps the scientists get their facts straight on what kind of motion is natural to their bodies. Then, they trick them out in one of the best pairs of motion control running shoes out there, and follow the way their joints move again. They measure how much weight they put on all their joints each way they run, and the direction in which they twist their body parts too.
You would think that for the couple of hundred dollars they charge you for the best running shoes, Asics, Adidas or Reebok would do research like this themselves; well, the researchers find that people typically use more twisting forces on all their leg joints when they run in motion control running shoes, and every other kind of high-priced sneakers. When they run barefoot, typically everything is rock steady - the twisting forces are low or nonexistent, and all is well. So what should you do? Are you supposed to run barefoot then with a bunch of hay in a plastic bag tied to your feet? Despite how the book Born to Run gets all misty-eyed about going back to nature barefoot, running on man-made surfaces, concrete, tiles or asphalt could do just as much harm. What they say now is, running with your regular trainers is just fine, just as long as you don't go overboard with the functions and features. Too much high-tech, likein motion control running shoes, and the wrong kind of cushioning, will just get your skeletal system all mixed up.