Benefits of Barefoot Shoes

Benefits of Barefoot (a.k.a Zero-drop and Minimalist) Shoes:

Works to resolve nagging pains, not just in our feet, but in our knees, hips, low back, neck, and even shoulders!
Improves balance.
Boosts performance with improved body positions and functional movement patterns along with stronger connection to the ground from which to produce force.
Improves running technique for massive improvements in efficiency.
Increases freedom and options in life. Instead of needing insoles or certain shoes, we have the freedom to wear whatever we want on our feet or nothing at all.

Are you a cyborg because of your reliance on your shoes or insoles? Do you feel like you need to have special braces on your feet (a.k.a. modern athletic, special lifting, or running shoes) to be mobile, run, exercise, or just live your daily life? Do you feel like you need something on your feet simply to walk around inside your home? There are some people who were born with issues, have had a traumatic injury, or those who have a real medical condition, but in this article we are trying to get through to the vast majority of people - those who either incorrectly put themselves in the former categories simply because they are suffering nagging and chronic pain, those who have been told by shoe salespeople that their feet need more or a certain-type support (especially those who have had thier running technique analyzed by a shoe salesperson), or those who are simply uninformed and wearing shoes that are wrecking havoc on their bodies. By wearing these overbuilt shoes, our feet are getting weaker and weaker as we build a reliance on a cushioned, molded, block on our feet just to get around. Even if we’re currently in pain, it’s not too late to get our feet strong and resolve that pain for good. We are not broken forever...unless we give up and resign ourselves to needing support for the rest of our life. Many people reading this right now are wearing overbuilt shoes or insoles for a foot problem. Many of those people have been wearing special shoes for years and the issues are just getting worse. We want to fix our issues, not bandage them for the rest of our lives. Let’s start taking steps in the right direction.

How did we get here in the first place? It’s a common theme to most of our problems in today’s world - most people seek maximal comfort all the time and in doing so weaken their resiliency to buffer any deviation in environment or stimulus. Most people no longer know how to handle being cold, hot, out of breath, tired, and stressed. And the areas of our bodies and our bodies mechanisms and processes that have been pampered become weak. For most of our lives, the cool, trendy shoes, dress shoes, high heels, etc. became the norm simply without any thought besides what we thought looked the best. But, through wearing these shoes with elevated heels (it’s not just high heels, most athletic shoes have an elevated heel relative to the forefoot), with thick soles, with arch support, and with toe boxes that smash our toes together, we’ve lost range of motion, strength, and structure in our feet and the areas around our feet. Not only did these weaker feet and positions cause foot issues (like bunions and neuroma), but the upstream effects include all sorts of knee, hip, low back, and even shoulder issues! A life with weak feet eventually creates issues. Instead of choosing to strengthen our feet, we succumb to an industry that thrives on foot issues and providing support that seems like it will solve our comfort problems. In the gym, we constantly see people work around their issues instead of on their issues. When people have tight ankles, in the gym, they start wearing Olympic weightlifting shoes which have a raised heel to mimic more ankle range of motion. When runners arches collapse because of a position and stability issue, instead of correcting the postural issue, they find shoes that support their arch. Both of these common solutions are short-sighted and will not only ensure that the same root issues that caused the problem in the first place will persist, but reinforce imbalances that will cascade into bigger and bigger issues long-term. So, maybe we have simply atrophied our feet, and looked for easy solutions, but it’s time we give our feet the attention they deserve and put these issues behind us, for good.

The shoe industry has convinced most of us that we are better off with supported feet (we are not) and that our poor running technique is OK as long as we have the right shoes (it is not). Our feet are incredible machines that are almost perfectly made for everything we want to do in our lives and the wide range of athletic feats we may want to participate in. The way our feet, Achilles tendons, connective tissues, and calves work provides incredible stability for standing and lifting things and amazing energy efficiency for walking and running. Our bodies and mobility are very malleable and very improvable. If we put reasonable effort into it, we can gain back the full range of motion of our ankles and we can strengthen our feet and the positions that let us use our feet as our feet were designed. We have a choice: 1) Put the effort in (it is achievable) and resolve our issues long-term or 2) put casts on our feet, make them weaker, and live with our issues for the rest of our lives. At MovementLink, we build strong feet.

Modern Shoes

Higher Heels Relative to Toes
- Issues
  - Causes loss of ankle range of motion.
  - Causes posterior tightness (feet, Achilles, calves, hamstrings, glutes, back, and neck)
  - Causes anterior overuse and commonly “shin splints”.

Barefoot shoes have an even height between their heels and toes…just like our feet.

This avoids the shortening of muscles and tendons that happens from our ankles not having to bend as much.
This also provides angles and leverages when we move that our body was designed for instead of being tilted off axis.

High Cushion Soles
- Issues
  - Causes a lack of stability and force transfer against the ground.

Barefoot shoes have minimal cushioning (if we are running, especially on trails, we may want to consider a little more cushioning to account for landing on rocks)
- This allows our muscles, ligaments, and tendons to create and incredibly efficient stretch-reflex spring off of the ground when running and walking. Runners who take advantage of this natural spring action can use 50% less energy on every single step.
- Additionally, when moving and lifting things, our body is more responsive as power can transfer better through the floor. Imagine an extreme example of trying to lift something off of a really thick gymnastics mat. Our feet would have to squish down in the mat deep before we could get anything to move. With a solid foundation, far less power and stability is lost.

Arch Support

Issues
- Causes movement patterns that are unnatural, allowing forces that drive through the inside arch of our feet. Movement patterns like this lead to unstable and misaligned knees, hips, and low back.
- The inability to create and maintain a stable arch is a leading indicator of potential knee and hip surgery.
Barefoot shoes are flat, like the ground that our feet were designed to stand on.
- This causes us to learn how to create and maintain our own stable foot positions, which in turn create stable knee, hip, and low back positions too. We do not want something that will let us think we are getting away with poor movement patterns.

Crammed Toe Box

Issues
- Causes structure of feet to be misaligned, potentially causing bunions and neuromas, and narrowing our base of support.
Barefoot shoes have a wider toe area, so that the toes are not cramped against each other.
- By having some space for our toes to move around, they can move in a much more natural way and promotes a natural foot structure.

Modern, CrossFit, Sport-Specific NoBull Shoes
vs
Vivobarefoot Barefoot Shoes

NoBull
4mm Heel-to-toe Drop
Increased EVA midsole height offers more cushioning and improved comfort.
Increased outsole dimensions provide additional surface area for more stability and traction.
Lace system with internal webbings provides lateral and medial stability for improved lock-down and additional durability.
Additional heel and collar padding for comfort and a secure fit.

Vivobarefoot
0mm Heel-to-toe Drop
Foot shaped (not shoe shaped), to let your feet do their natural thing
WIDE to allow for natural stability
THIN to enable you to feel more
FLEXIBLE to enable natural movement.

Transitioning into Barefoot Shoes

The process of transitioning to barefoot shoes needs to be handled with care - remember, most people have spent most of their lives wearing supportive shoes and jumping straight into barefoot shoes for everything they do may be too much strain on their weak feet. A combination of quality movement patterns, targeted mobility work, and gradual higher impact exposure to barefoot positions is key. Especially if we are a runner logging high miles each week, going from a supported platform into actually using our feet like feet, although in the long run we’ll become a much more efficient runner, in the short term, we will be using our feet, Achilles, and calves in a new way and are new positions are likely not up for our previous mileage. So, when training is involved, we want to ease into our new barefoot shoes, be mentally prepared for temporary short term changes in performance, and understand that feet may be sore for a few weeks.

High Mileage Running - A recommendation from the book Ready to Run by Kelly Starrett is to start by doing the first 10% of our runs (while our feet are fresh) with our new barefoot shoes and then each week, increase that percentage by 10%. For example, if we were on our 5th week of transitioning into barefoot shoes and were going to run 10 miles that day, we would do the first 5 miles (50%) with our barefoot shoes and the last 5 miles with our old cushioned, supportive shoes. We’d continue this until we feel ready to replace our old shoes entirely. Shorter runs in workout classes are likely fine to do 100% in our new zero drop shoes, but go by feel and know that we’re likely to be a little sore and that’s OK.

Lifting - Our heels being even with our toes will change our body positions, yes into more natural positions, but positions we likely don’t have very much experience with and angles that will use different percentages of different muscles. If we are used to lifting with high heeled shoes then the range of motion at the bottom of the squat and the angles of our feet in all exercises are going to take some getting used to. We must embrace the short-term phase of change and avoid the tendency to turn our toes outward to make up for the missing, free range of motion provided by the high heeled shoes. We lose a ton of stability, power, and functionality when we turn our toes out too far. We need to be very intentional and keep our feet mostly straight and only go as low as our new, natural positions allow, letting us build that full range of motion and performance over time.

Sport-specific shoes. Do we actually need them?

Most sports have sport specific shoes that most people in the sport wear. If we actually need to wear them while we participate in our sport is too specific to us, our goals, our sport, and we don’t have enough room in this article to try and tack it. So, we recommend that we not just going along with what is common in our sport, but to decide for ourselves if special shoes are a good choice for our sport and circumstance. If we do decide to wear sport specific shoes, then we should not wear them all the time and need to touch on training cycles. When we are far away from competition, events, or our sport’s season, our training focus should be general physical preparedness as we build a general base of mobility, changes in body composition, our aerobic base, use a wide range of exercises in our training, and make our training as natural and functional as possible building up our general fitness. Far away from our events, we will use less gear to build our body naturally, so that when we do add the sport-specific gear later in our cycles, our foundation is strong and we get the most boost out of our gear. As our cycles progress towards the events, our focus narrows to the specific sport and its specific requirements. Workouts start to look more and more like the sport. Exercise selection narrows to use movement patterns and skills specific to the sport. Gear starts becoming specific to the sport. This mixture of a general physical preparedness mindset evolving into sport-specific mindset is how we avoid too many compensations and imbalances and how we can build huge fitness in a way that boosts our sport-specific performance without diminishing the skills and unique challenges of the sport. So, we would incorporate barefoot shoes early on in the cycles and transition into our sport specific shoes as the cycles progress.

Zero Drop Shoe Transition MovementLink Protocol

We perform 10 minutes of functional yoga and targeted mobility exercises every day. During transition, we put more emphasis on our feet, ankle joint, Achilles, and calves than usual to help our feet recover from and prepare for the new stresses they’ll be under as they get challenged and get stronger.
In the gym, we accept that lifting in heels is different from barefoot shoes and so our positions will change, likely into positions we have little experience with. So, we give ourselves a break, don’t pay attention to PRs for a bit, and if our ranges of motion or performance is not exactly where it was, we understand that it will get back there, well beyond, and our training will be much more functional and transferable to doing amazing things in our life.
If we are a high mileage runner, we will start in our zero drop shoes for the first 10% of our runs and then wear our old shoes for the remaining. We’ll add 10% each week and make the full switch when our feet, ankles, Achilles, and calves feel up for it.
If we wear sport-specific shoes, we’ll need to understand the importance of both: general physical preparedness and sport specificity and where those fit into training cycles. Generally, we’ll wear our barefoot shoes in off-season or in the beginning phases of our cycles and then move towards any required gear as the season, competition, or event nears.