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Are Even the Best Running Shoes any Good Really? November 17, 2010 - 21:45:25
There was a report in the New York Times a couple of months ago that completely upended world of high-end athletic shoes. Basically, what the report found was that, everything that the high-end manufacturers of the best running shoes claim for motion control shoes, stability shoes, neutral shoes, all mean practically nothing. The study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine was clear. The whole area of conventional wisdom that recommends that you need to build a certain kind of shoe for a certain kind of a running style and foot has been completely debunked. They found that if you just went in and randomly bought a pair of shoes with no heed paid to what the expert shoe store salesman recommended for your kind of feet, you would probably run a lower risk of injury.
It all began with the US military that tried to see if getting the best running shoes for their recruits accurately chosen by an expert for foot type, would help at all. Once they had fitted many recruits with all the high-end shoes and invested a lot of money in the process, they begin to wonder if the high-end shoes were really provably helping prevent leg injury. They looked to see what studies there were in this area, and found that there were none. Of course it is hard to imagine that all these high-end shoe companies that claim to use all this research and science in their footwear haven't done one study to make sure that any of their high-end technology actually works. But there it is.
So, the military began research of its own, and these were published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. The studies basically found out that no matter what the high-end experts recommended injuries remained high. As a matter of fact, they found that recruits that got the right kind of high-tech shoes have even more injuries. Athletes who have been investing top dollar in the best running shoes all around the world may have been doing all of it for no reason. There has been another study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that has analyzed dozens of marathon running women that has found more or less the same. They found that motion control shoes were the worst of all. The people who run with their feet toed out too far (the overpronators) that these shoes are designed for, do not benefit from them. There was no kind of runner that actually benefited from them.
If you are planning on investing good money in the best running shoes there are, you have to be completely certain of one thing - according to the US military, the belief that people with fallen arches will benefit from motion control shoes and people with high arches will benefit from well-cushioned neutral shoes has been completely debunked. These shoes are worthless. Not that they don't do what they promise. They do change your gaite as they promise they will. It's just that there is no science that says that you do need to correct gait. No one knows why you should. That finding should be your counsel.
- mrknowitall
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