BTW, heel striking is okay. Running form develops naturally. You folks taking this advice seriously want to focus on cadence and getting it to around 180 spm. Cadence has been shown to decrease injury risk. Altering your running form has lots of adherents due to anecdotes but no evidence supporting it.

I think this needs to be clarified: heel striking is not okay if your feet are landing in front of your body instead of underneath it. The reason cadence is a good indication of form is because it implies to what extent your feet are falling where they should be.

If you're already doing something that works for you and doesn't cause you pain or injury, don't change your form. But for most people who are just starting out, they are almost definitely going to need to change their form to avoid injury.

That is my point, keep it simple at first. Cadence is a much better heuristic than "heel strike". Also, it is understood you will run differently without shoes.

Jack Daniel's, (the famous running coach and physiologist) gave a good summary of it: There are two types of runners over time, those that adopt a higher cadence rate and those that get injured. Lore of Running (Noakes) and Daniels are both at complete odds about doing any significant adjustments to your running form other than monitoring cadence. At 180spm for most people that equates to a much lighter step that reduces the GRF (Ground Forces) per strike, which seems more important than other aspects of form.

Try heel striking without 10mm of padding under your foot. When people run barefoot, they naturally fore/mid strike.

I do. It's fine. I have run 40 miles per week for months at a time training for ultra marathons. Anecdotes and all. If you want to prevent injuries, lift some heavy things to make your joints and ensure you don't have any weakness in your legs or posterior chain. Run with a high cadence.

The truth is this, why runners get injured is varied and running form naturally improves if someone runs a lot and practices running drills that encourage new muscle activation patterns. Running a lot with no strength training can mean weaker muscles, so strength training is almost always prescribed as a preventative and as a fix to encourage better muscle activation patterns.

Each persons biomechanical form is different and unique to them. Tinkering with what is natural to them seems ill advised at best given what we do know about injury rates.

Running barefoot is less efficient and probably reduces injuries due to different muscle activation patterns (the leading theory about why some shoes can cause problems and others can fix them). It is thought that pronation isn't really significantly altered by shoes.

In Noakes and Daniels, my favorite two authorities on running, you will find very little focus on running form as a key aspect of being a life long runner because it is something that developers naturally. Only when specific problems occur should you really diagnose and try to fix things. Most people can run a healthy amount without changing anything and wearing any old running shoes. When specific things occur specific fixes must be deployed and "fix all" advise (even like mine, run 180spm, or, don't heel strike) is just not helpful unless it actually addresses the specific cause of the problem. More often than not someone can keep their existing running form and something else is advised (stretching, strength conditioning, running speed drills to improve foot turnover and alter muscle activation, orthotics to activate muscles differently, etc. etc.).

I suspect you need an "eventually" before "naturally" there. You can't instantly transition from heel strike to fore/mid strike without causing a whole mess of problems.

Altra (who are merely zero-drop shoes, not barefoot) recommend a gradual transitioning over at least 6 months.

You mean shifting injuries from knees to heel tendons ?

One thing barefoot runners showed me is the static bounce starting point. Your gesture should be similar to that of landing from small repeated vertical jumps. When you find a balance in how the weight is distributed, you start to go forward.

You're assuming a heel striker automatically has knee problems. This isn't a given. Many of them have no problems at all.

Agreed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26126256

http://www.kinetic-revolution.com/dont-believe-the-heel-stri...

Also: Changing gait is very hard: https://runblogger.com/2011/11/just-quick-post-to-announce-t... -- people revert when they get tired unless it is very deeply ingrained as a change.

edit: My conclusion, ignore any running form purists or blow hards. Throw some shoes on. Go run. Conservatively and following the laws of training. If you get hurt you can fix it and it usually doesn't suck (stretching, less running for a while, strength training). If you don't get hurt, you were better off not overthinking it :)

No, take off your shoes, and run around the yard right now. Tell me how you strike your feet.

Obviously if you've heel striked your entire life while running, you'll have to ease yourself into it. That's also not what I was responding to. Saying heel striking is OK, it is not. It's a bad habit formed by over padding sneakers.

This is blatantly unsupported by any evidence. If you want to run in most places people can easily run you have to wear shoes. There is no conclusive or even decent evidence that heel striking or non heel striking causes injuries. Barefoot running causes very different muscle activation patterns. It is much less efficient (biomechanically) requiring you to compensate very differently.

There is one study barefoot purists like to trot out that they think means barefoot/forefoot striking decreases injuries: https://runblogger.com/2012/02/vivobarefoots-barefoot-is-bes... -- the study was also sub-elite or elite collegiate athletes.

Other studies that I think are more relevant to a typical runner show very different results and the study is more credible: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26126256

Find evidence that isn't anecdotes and is widely accepted and I will gladly change my mind. It is still an ongoing debate and the evidence in either direction is only moderate (in the direction of heel striking being fine, especially for folks running recreationally with a rather low load). Given the general lack of evidence it comes down to anecdotes and you can find those everywhere, people are crazy.

https://www.runresearchjunkie.com/barefootminimalism-running... suggests it's not necessarily that simple.

Since competition as a kid, decades ago I stopped using my heels. I just remember how cross country running shoes help you running properly...

it's true that absorbing soles are probably a bad solution to a non problem.

It depends very specifically on what sort of problems you develop. It is theorized that when you do suffer a lower limb injury using orthotics changes your muscle activation pattern (moreso than changing your form), which helps alleviate the issue. The rate of orthotics fixing problems after a specific injury is pretty high so it is more than just mumbo jumbo.

"70% of runners with lower limb injuries improve when they use orthotic devices (James et al. 1978; Bates et al. 1979, McKenzie et al. 1985; Gross et al. 1991)..." Noakes, lore of running. So clearly orthotics and what you put under your feet can have an impact and make things better (or worse, but probably better if someone knowledgeable about biomechanics can see your pronation and gait).

Ironically I used some orthotics as a teen. My feet are half flat, some "podologist" gave me curved soles. Didn't work on me. I don't refute the idea; I probably just needed a more comprehensive solution for a prolongated time to make a difference.

Why not cycling instead? Seems easier on the joints and muscles

I do indoor biking, for this exact reason. But, it has a much lower impact on my health. Maybe it's because indoor bike don't move, thus not involving as many muscle groups as real bike.

The efforts are not distributed the same way. Obviously biking will exercise your thighs but not much else. While running uses abs, all your legs muscles groups. I also believe that we're wired to be efficient at running and thus running tickles your body in better ways. Also there's a nice feeling when your center of gravity lifts up.

Even if I can go fast on a bike for 1 min, I can barely sprint that long and surely slowly and I end up exhausted differently. In the end I prefered what running brought me. It may be very subjective though, even if I enjoy all sports, I always had a thing for running.

This is all crude opinion, I'd love if anyone with bio/biomech knowledge could shed light on the subject.

Cycling is more fun than running for me but exactly because of all the reasons you mentioned I prefer running over cycling. What I also realized is that nothing works as good as running (at least for me) for weight loss if you also change your eating habits (you need to have a calorie deficit in order to lose fat).

For around 9 weeks I managed to go running for 10km every second day and then my two weeks vacation happened. I'm trying to get back in again because I'm extremely frustrated on days I don't go running. I cannot emphasize enough on the stress relieving part. For me it's around 50 minutes of complete peace of mind where the only things I focus are breathing and moving my body.

One thing I recommend is to track your runs because it's fun and interesting to see your improvement over time. Bonus points if you track your heart rate as well. :)

I use some android app (fitness run or something like this) to have logs. Google fit is nice even though it's not precise GPS wise (relies on Google Maps trip logs).

A smartphone is a bit annoying to carry and use, I might invest in a gps wrist so I can pause / resume with a button.

Right now I'm at 2x2.5km jogging + 5km of walk. And even though I don't have a calorie deficit, I already lost significant amount of fat and got back muscle mass (the bliss of sore muscles right? ;) I'm sure even with a normal diet it's a lot better to have a more active metabolysm as it is now.

Good point for the muscle groups involved. Maybe you could bike for cardiovascular health, and for muscle training add some squats (a simple complete workout would be push ups, pull ups and squats, pull ups require a bar though but it's a very useful investment for your back in the long term)

Cardio is the sole reason I do indoor biking. I was very sick and couldn't do much, so I tried having mild biking effort as a way to rehabilitate my heart.

I used to do exactly what you suggest: bike + full workout. I liked it a lot, but it's not integrated as in a sport. It was odd for instance, I had much more "power" than ever, so much that I couldn't run anymore because my thighs were too strong and I had to relearn how to land my foot otherwise I'd miss the ground.

This is a persistent misconception about running. You absolutely must invest the time to learn proper form (or more accurately, unlearn negative habits, because children naturally know how to run), but as an activity it is not inherently dangerous for your joints or knees.

I invite you to read literature on the subject:

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2556152/?tool=p...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743580/

3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16932832/

Note: I am not a doctor, and the literature becomes mixed as you study runners with higher and higher mileage per week. The point is that someone with a healthy weight should not be damaging their joints merely by repeatedly running - proper running involves allowing your feet to fall below you, not ahead of you, where the calves and quads can properly absorb the impact and use the "bounce" from the ground impact to propel forward efficiently. Doing something other than this, like landing on your heel in front of your body, forces your knees to absorb the impact.

If you're running 60, 70 or 80 miles per week there may be degenerative effects on joint health, but if we're speaking realistically that is unlikely to happen for someone just looking to get into shape unless they're a few years in and training for something. I run 30 miles per week and have no plans to significantly increase my mileage - my health and fitness goals are rather more "intense" than most people I know and it takes up a lot of my time (looking at about an hour of running workout per day).

If someone wanted to gain the benefits from jogging, jogging to the store or even commuting by running five days a week would be far, far lower than what appears to be the lower bound on introducing joint degeneration.

I'm going to echo the grandparent comment: if you're not already moving and have a favorite exercise (cycling, swimming), I urge you to consider running. Running every day quite literally changed my life. Dieting is a close second. My mood significantly improved, my sleep improved, every physical activity felt better, etc. After a month of consistent running you even miss it when you don't do it.

Thanks for sharing, I second this! I've seen a few people mention alternating from free running/jogging to lower impact activities in between running days. This is how I built up to daily running without off days (about 3-4 miles), but after about 6 months of consistency the soreness or discomfort has entirely subsided.

Haven't seen anyone mention it, but a more recent, low impact excersize I've picked up recently is golf (walking, no cart, no caddy). I'm currently working of a project that's going on a year behind schedule, and Monday was the third week in a row of a meeting posponed last minute due to collegues having scheduling conflicts that were existing, but not disclosed until late enough to waste an hour of everyones time. Instead of maintaining a few more hours of poor posture at my sitting desk for a noon reschedule, I took off a half day and golfed 18 holes while enjoying the eclipse. My advise: make sure you jog a few miles in the morning, then do your best to tolerate the dangerous sitting posture of your 5 hour work day. OK, now that you've had just about enough sitting for one day, how about a nice afternoon of golf to strech out that lower back?

First, thanks for the links.

Maybe I exagerated, I just know how easy it is to use your muscle and limb chains badly and then stop because it hurts somewhere.

My advice was to start very slow, and avoiding heel is a trigger to think of landing as absorbing, using your calves at first.

Or a brisk walk to and from the office.

Absolutely! Exercise in general will do wonders for you. Right now I play bball 2-3x/week, and on off days I power lift. Some days ball is at 6:45am and others it's at 7pm. It's funny because the morning bball wakes me up and evening bball helps me sleep at night.

Yeah physical activity is just part of our bodies.

I used to do taichi/noob-wushu in college. It's a funny "sport" because it's oh so smooth and slow but it makes use of so many forgotten muscles that I left my first session drained. I never got high on weed, but that afternoon I was high as fuck.

Some schools experimented doing some taichi first in the morning. Lots of kids said they felt better, calmer and more focused mentally.

How do you dress, and how do you carry things? (Laptop/documents to work, groceries from the store...)

Backpack. Obviously you don't get family scale groceries, But I can carry back fruits + ham + pack of small bottle home regularly.