Barefoot and forefoot walking/running has been a topic of interest to me for many years and there are several questions raised here, so I hope folks don't mind if I use this opportunity to discuss the topic in depth.
Been enjoying walking barefoot as much as possible for the last year. Not at work, but I don't work that much, (standby) so it's easy.
Concrete is not good and hot pavement is really not good
Yes, Raw-Al, I've noticed that concrete is one of the worst surfaces for walking and running on in bare feet or thin-soled shoes for more than short distances that I've encountered. I seem to have mildly injured my right forefoot walking in thin-soled shoes on concrete sidewalks, so I have temporarily added some more insole padding and I try to walk as much as possible on any grass adjacent to sidewalks until my foot recovers. Interestingly, barefoot walking on concrete does not seem quite as harsh as thin-soled shoe walking. I think it's because the bare foot is more flexible and can walk more gently. I think increased cushioning in shoes may have developed in part in response to concrete sidewalks.
Blacktop, when not hot, is much less of a problem for me. It feels much softer than concrete. My father explained that blacktop is less dense, with more air pockets.
I noticed a couple of young girls (18 or so) in the neighbourhood walking/running BF.
Coincidentally, I was walking on my way to work when I saw for the first time a barefoot (and shirtless) guy jogging on the sidewalk of the main street in my neighborhood. I had only run barefoot in the woods up to that point. After seeing that I did some barefoot walking on the same main street when my right foot was really hurting me, which got some brief stares. It's amazing how rapidly the barefoot craze is taking off after an initial harsh reaction from the "experts" and the public.
PP,
The moccasins that the Indians wore must have been nice. Do you know anything about them? Did they put the fur on the inside or outside?
Depending on the location, moccasins were reportedly usually made of furless hides:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beadedmoccasins.jpghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soft_moccasin.jpgWhen fur was used, my understanding is that fur could be on either the inside or the outside, but I'm no expert on moccasins.
I dunno wtf midfoot is, sounds like bs, although I've heard lots of people say it. I don't see how you can walk midfoot, unless your foot is shaped like the shoe in the attached image..
I wrote "heel-and-midfoot-first", not "midfoot walk", so I'm not sure why you cut out the mention of the heel, unless you were just reminded by mention of the word midfoot that "midfoot strike" is a commonly used imperfect term, such as by Danny Dreyer, founder of ChiRunning and ChiWalking, here:
"The midfoot strike is characterized as having your heel and the ball of your foot touching the ground simultaneously with each foot strike." ("Midfoot strike, Forefoot strike or Heel strike…which one is best?" http://www.chirunning.com/blog/2008/07/25/midfoot-strike-forefoot-strike-or-heel-strike%E2%80%A6which-one-is-best)
As you can see by Danny's description, the midfoot strike is really more of a flatfoot strike centered over the midfoot. Clarity is good, but because it's both a new field of inquiry and a new lifestyle movement that involves people of diverse backgrounds, I think it's crucial to not get too hung up on the literal meanings of terminology and focus instead on what people actually mean as they try to come up with words to describe what they're talking about.
I've seen those ridiculous curved-sole shoes before and I've always considered them a bizarre abomination. The part of the midfoot that naturally contacts the ground is not the middle of the foot's arch, it's the side of the foot, as showed by this footprint image
, and it's not curved out like those shoes, nor is there any need for it to curve out in order to contact the ground. The developers of the shoe claim it creates the proper walking motion, but it makes no sense to me to create an artificial sole surface in order to promote natural walking. The bare sole of the foot is the best surface to promote that.
In my case "heel-and-midfoot-first" walking or near-flat-foot-walking, if you prefer, is not BS, it's just what I naturally do at the current time. I don't have a video camera to show it to you, unfortunately, but this is a pretty good approximation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZk4qoTVdnQ. It's a nearly flat-footed landing with the heel lightly contacting the ground first, instead of landing on the balls of the feet or pounding on the heel like this:
. Sometimes I'll walk with less heel and more of a flat-foot strike if I'm consciously thinking about it, as in this example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfnAP1m6lNM&NR=1, but at this time I tend to naturally revert more toward the first example. The differences are subtle, but I find that putting more emphasis on the front of the foot still causes me more soreness after more than a year of barefoot and barefoot-style-shoe walking and running. It could be a transition stage (which I initially speculated months ago) or a result of weak connective tissues, like I wrote above, and weak foot muscles. I think because I'm still a little flat footed and have weak connective tissues, it may take longer for me to adjust to forefoot walking and perhaps I may never fully adjust.
I hypothesized in this forum months ago that forefoot-first walking is the natural method (see
http://www.rawpaleoforum.com/exercisebodybuilding/born-to-run-tarahumara-barefoot-running-pose-method-chi-running-egoscue/msg20382/#msg20382, Nov 2009) and as early as January of 2007 in the PaleoFood forum (
http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?A0=PALEOFOOD), and it first occurred to me many years before that, but, when I tried to force myself to gradually shift to forefoot-first walk I ended up with sore forefeet and couldn't continue with it.
I suppose I might be able to film my walking/running barefoot somehow to show you, if I can find a camera >.>
I didn't doubt that you do it, Miles, but the more data the merrier, if you want to film it, as I am looking for more evidence to support my hypothesis of forefoot walking being the optimal natural method. However, I'm particularly interested in images or written reports of significant numbers of lifelong barefooters walking forefoot-first and thinking nothing of it, the way there is of traditional people commonly squat-sitting, "stack-sitting" and "tallstanding", rather than moderners consciously converting to it as you apparently did and like I tried to do.
When I say forefoot I don't mean staying on my tip-toes...
Of course; I can't imagine anyone walking on their tip toes for very far and I've never seen anyone make that claim, so I don't know why you're mentioning that. Are you extrapolating "tip-toes" from the TV character comment about "toes-first" walking? I think it's more likely that the scriptwriter meant forefoot-first walking, rather than someone walking on their tip-toes. When I first heard the "toes-first" comment I thought the character meant that the toes contact the ground first in forefoot walking (though I didn't think he meant tiptoes, which would be a rather funny walking style for a killer in a remote desert
), but I later discovered through self-experimentation that the ball of the foot does, rather than the toes.
One article did refer to fox-walking as being like "tiptoeing" and also used the midfoot-strike terminology that you understandably take issue with. Despite advocating barefoot walking, the author took a harsh stand against forefoot walking being the natural method of walking (emphases mine):
Barefoot walking is, in its mechanics, very similar to barefoot running. The idea is to eliminate the hard-heel strike and employ something closer to a mid-strike: landing softly on the heel but rolling immediately through the outside of your foot, then across the ball and pushing off with the toes, with a kind of figure-eight movement though the foot. There's a more exaggerated version of this style of walking known as "fox-walking," which is closer to tiptoeing and which has caught on with a small group of naturalists and barefoot hikers. Fox-walking involves landing on the outside of the ball of your foot, then slowly lowering the foot pad to feel for obstructions, then rolling through your toes and moving on. All of which is great, if you're stalking prey with a handmade crossbow, or you're an insane millionaire hunting humans as part of the Most Dangerous Game. As for walking in the city, fox-walking has no real practical application, in part because it's incredibly frustrating to master and in part because you look like a lunatic. ("You Walk Wrong," http://nymag.com/health/features/46213)
Not trying to justify it, but maybe one reason that imprecise terms like mid-foot strike and tiptoeing are sometimes used is that flat-foot strike sounds too much like "flat feet," which is a bad thing, and people are more familiar with tiptoeing than forefoot walking. When I talk about forefoot-first walking I mean like the infants in these videos I found with a little searching some time ago:
Collin's First steps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU72k0daevU&feature=relatedBaby Em's first steps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWVM-m9veLo&feature=relatedInterestingly, notice that those infants do a semi-shuffle-step that resembles some of the traditional dance steps of Zhu/wasi Bushmen:
Bushmen dance at SanDüne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p2QBHCdjT8Maybe they mean the very back of the ball of the foot? Or more of a flat strike where the ball hits a moment before, or at the same time, as the heel?
The answer appears to be the latter, and below is another example of this that I recently came across. Here too, they use "mid-foot strike" as a synonym for "flat-foot strike." Again, I'm not defending it, but just explaining that it appears to be an imperfect way of briefly describing a foot strike in which the heel is not pounded hard like is typical with a big-heeled shoe and neither is the strike solely on the ball of the foot.
"Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe." (Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod runners, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/full/nature08723.html)
By quoting that excerpt I'm not trying to imply that "mid-foot strike" is a good description. I think flat-foot strike is more apt.
I've been keeping my eyes out for more evidence of forefoot-first walking among adults. I've been puzzled by the fact that I haven't found much of it yet other than a few anecdotal reports and some opinion-based pieces at barefoot-promoting websites. I've even found reports from longtime forefoot-first runners that they still have some heel strike in their walk. I thought Esther Gokhale's book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, might contain some evidence, since she studied some relatively traditional people of Burkina Faso, including some barefooters, but I was suprised to find her advocating heel-strike-walking (though she did at least advocate a light heel strike) and images that show heel-striking. She even instructs to "press" the heel towards the floor/ground. She further states that a common mistake is "not leaving the heel on the ground long enough." That was the biggest surprise of all for me.
Don't worry, I haven't abandoned my original tentative hypothesis of many years ago, which is that forefoot-first barefoot walking is the most natural style, since that's how all infants apparently start out walking, but I've been puzzled by my difficulty in finding photographic or textual evidence of this from first-hand observations of adults in longtime barefoot-walking populations. Anything people might have along those lines that they could share would be much appreciated. The first time I researched this on the Internet I don't recall finding any references to it, then eventually one or two, but with the recent barefoot craze there has been a growing amount of information that touches on it, so I'm confident that the evidence one way or the other will become clear in the near future.
On the other hand, I was little surprised to discover a video that shows a chimp walking heel-first:
Then again, humans aren't chimps.
I have walked on my forefoot first since I saw some Martial arts movie, maybe Karate Kid. Grasshopper not want rip rice paper.
Thanks for sharing that, raw-al. That encourages me some more to think that my hypothesis may be on target. I saw the original Karate Kid and don't remember that, despite my curiosity about the topic before I saw it. If anyone knows whether it was in that movie or another, I'd be interested to know which one.
If the entire Japanese people recently walked forefoot-first, that would be huge evidence and it would lead me to expect that the Chinese did also, which would of course be massive evidence and the only potential remaining argument at that point for heel-strike walking would be biological differences between groups requiring some people of some backgrounds to heel-strike, which would be a weak argument.
It's pretty neat to find other people in Western culture who share my interest in barefoot- and forefoot-first walking and running. Years ago I used to wonder if I was one of only a few modern people who were interested. People used to act like I was nuts if I dared to talk about it,
but the growing number of news stories on it has gotten a few to start to take me seriously about it--though no one has converted to barefooting or barefoot-style shoes (my father considered the latter, but the prices turned him off). So thanks much for the inputs here!
@Lex: Thanks for the fascinating reports. I too have noticed that I handle both hotter and colder water and weather than other slim people now. In the past even warm water felt hot and stingy to my feet at times, and I told my physician of the time about it and he thought I was nuts, of course. Now I can put my feet or hands in water that other slim people tell me is way too hot or cold and it feels good to me instead of painful. I too think that my circulation has improved, though I still can't stay in cold water as long as my relatives that have much more body fat. I think this may be because the cold water has more direct access to my bones and its the bones that chill us most.
Running into broken glass nearly everywhere is one of the annoyances of barefooting. It has brought to my attention the vast amount of broken glass that can be found, even deep in the woods and even now with recycling. It seems to have increased in recent years, which I think may be due to the fact that inflation has made the nickel deposit worth much less than what it was when the law went into effect in the 1970s.
I read that a forefoot strike was the natural way to walk barefoot so tried to force myself to walk that way.
Where did you read that?
Over time I gave up the quest as my body just didn’t want to do it on normal surfaces. It naturally seemed to want a light heal strike then a roll onto the ball of the foot with the toes spread followed by a push-off from the forefoot and toes. .... My gait will also change to forefoot strike first when walking on crushed gravel or other very uneven surfaces, but on solid surfaces like dirt, grass, asphalt, and concrete my normal gait is a light heal strike first.
Same here. I gave up for the time being on everyday forefoot walking, but I've always used a forefoot strike when walking barefoot on sharp gravel, even when I wore big-heeled shoes.
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