The heel does not protrude when running.
Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.
Children, when running, do not land on their heels. Heel-landing is a learned development caused by heel-heavy shoes. Children land on the front/middle of their feet.
By contrast, an animal doesn't have to study running technique. A cheetah doesn't have to think "Gee, I'm doing this wrong according to some pages I Googled; I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."
Cheetahs do have to think about how to run. Have you ever seen cheetah cubs?
I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."
Try running without shoes. You'll learn very quickly, without google, not to land on your heels. It's the same way that animals like cheetahs learn to run-by doing.
The sheer thickness of the meat and fat on the lower leg of a human tells you that we have evolved away from running. Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.
Every claim in that paragraph is wrong.
You must have never lived in a wood frame building, below a family with kids.
Have you ever lived in a place where children routinely travel on the ground, barefoot? This would be a useful scenario to bring to the table here.
Kids trapped in an attic... not so much.
I admit that I haven't been to the Highlands though, where True Scotsmen's children can be observed.
If we grew up barefoot or wearing huaraches, we wouldn't have to "learn" how to forefoot strike. Thick-soled shoes mess up our running instincts.
> Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.
It's different with bipeds, yeah? Lots of shock-absorbing magic has to happen in the lower leg.
Google "ostrich weight" immediately comes up with a "250 pounds" factoid result. A Wikipedia result just below that quotes cached text stating that they range from 63 to 143 kilograms.
"Doing what comes naturally" after being trained and conditioned from childhood to ambulate in shoes is a far cry from what actually comes naturally.
As I discovered myself, walking barefoot is utterly different from running barefoot, and no amount of walking around barefoot will teach you to run barefoot, if you are used to putting on shoes to run. And the 'thin soled footwear' people show me when they try to explain that they already 'run practically barefoot' is almost always too inflexible. I use $16 water deck shoes, myself.
It took six weeks of daily practice for me to learn to run properly barefoot - the process is very counterintuitive, after a lifetime of running in shoes. There are conditioning problems too: halfway through, I could neither walk normally nor 'barefoot' without some pain, because I didn't have the muscles to run barefoot properly - landing on the ball of my feet and pushing off with my heel (many people think that barefoot running is just 'running on your toes'. Do that and you will have a bad time).
Now that I have learnt to run barefoot, the other method feels difficult and unnaturally jarring, as it did, before I could run barefoot style.
Resistance exercise can make your bones at least 50% more dense and, given that single hip can withstand one metric ton of load, makes your bones more than adequate.
If you go barefoot from day 0, you'd learn proper run technique from day 0. Or, if you have massive body like me, you have to learn proper run technique to just run. And you, just like me, will do that in one day.
Having our posture to be very different from other animals, we have to have different muscle groups trained (thick meat). For example, the more upright position of animal, the more thick gluteus maximus is - for horse it is very small, for chimp it can be seen as just small and it is very thick for humans. So, as upright walking humans, we have to have different legs from all other animals. And different running technique.
The foot is terribly engineered and suffers from injuries.
Human bones are frail; you have only 25% of the bone density of a gorilla or chimp. Hence the stress fractures.
The big, protruding heel of the human foot is completely counterproductive for running. It helps us stand on two legs and walk. Humans have to consciously learn a proper technique for running to avoid misusing the heel. Doing "what comes naturally" is just horrible.
By contrast, an animal doesn't have to study running technique. A cheetah doesn't have to think "Gee, I'm doing this wrong according to some pages I Googled; I should change my form so that my center of gravity is rather such and such, and my footstrike is altered in such and such a way."
We can't even stand up when we are born and have to learn how to walk, which usually takes place more than a whopping year after birth.
The sheer thickness of the meat and fat on the lower leg of a human tells you that we have evolved away from running. Running requires a stick-like lower appendage, with all the muscle higher up.