A recent study published in Footwear Science concludes that the surface underfoot plays a major role in foot-strike determination. On a soft surface, only 20% of subjects landed on their midfoot or forefoot. On a hard surface, this percent increased to 65%.



The results appear to undercut one of the arguments advanced by proponents of barefoot and barefoot-like running. They often argue that we were “born to run” barefoot. That’s unassailable; we weren’t born with shoes or hooves attached to our feet.



But the barefoot fans usually mean something more. They assert that humans evolved to land on their forefeet when running. This position is assailable for the simple reason that no one knows how Paleo runners placed their feet when running. Not even the vast YouTube archives contain any two-million-year-old videos of human runners.



Sure, a few years back Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman filmed some Kenyan youths who mostly ran on their forefeet. More recently, a study of much-less-accomplished Kenyan runners (from the Daanasach tribe) produced a contrary finding. There may in fact be many “natural” running styles.

Indeed, it would be easy to construct an evolutionary argument about foot strike that does not rest on the forefoot hypothesis. We might call it the “Intelligent System” view. The argument would go like this: Humans adapted to run in the way that works best for the body, according to the surface (including shoes or lack of shoes) underfoot. The brain, spine, hips, knees, lower legs, and feet communicate back and forth as we run over different surfaces, soft savannah to Rocky Mountains, and select the optimal foot strike for each surface.



That seems to be the implication of the study from a UMass running biomechanics group that’s generally skeptical of the barefoot hypothesis. They asked 40 habitually shod runners to run barefoot over a hard runway surface, and then over an identical runway made softer by the addition of EVA foam (much like the foam found in many running shoes). Most of the runners continued to rearfoot strike on the soft runway, but nearly two-thirds switched to a mid- or forefoot strike on the hard surface.



As a result, the reseachers concluded: “The unconscious choice to adopt either a midfoot or forefoot pattern when running barefoot may be a result of the surface rather than being unshod.” They also found that, along with some previous studies, “the heel height of the modern running shoe is likely not the source for the existence of the rearfoot pattern in humans.”



Why does a hard surface turn runners into forefoot strikers? The researchers believe that it’s simply a mechanism “to reduce pain.”



The study offered no theories about injury incidence or running economy. It simply reported the fact that runners seem to run differently on hard and soft surfaces.

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