The Right Shoe For the Job: Part I (Running Shoes)

Now THAT's a flexible shoe!

Injury = weaknesses showing its ugly head.

If you're working hard on strengthening your body - think about what you may be leaving out.  The body is a big chain of muscles and tendons; movement of that body or parts of that body is a series of small reactions among those body parts.

Common sense, you say?  You might think so, yet we commonly see people wearing shoes akin to casts on their feet. You've seen them: those heavily cushioned and overly supportive shoes meant to make you feel as if you're "running on air" or to "correct" your "bad running form." In reality, these heavily cushioned casts serve only to prevent movement, immobilizing a joint or series of joints.  

On this blog, we often discuss shoe selection for running. The best kind of shoe to allow your foot to move the way it's supposed to and build strength in your foot are commonly referred to as "minimal shoes." These are shoes that offer protection from elements and extreme temperatures but do not impede natural running form. These shoes require you to improve your running form, which in turn strengthens your foot (and helps prevent injury).

So, what about those heavily cushioned "casts" we see so many people wearing typically for the wrong reasons.  These are rife with problems and they will only exacerbate existing form problems and injuries. They:

• Overly absorb impact, making you unaware you've landed on the ground. This makes you push down harder seeking for firm ground. 
• Attempt to offer a springiness (or compliance) that helps, but can easily be out of synch with the springiness of your natural stride.
• Block the foot's nerves enough to keep the fact you've landed on a tree root secret so you can just roll an ankle.
• Weight, a shoe shouldn't be a % of your body weight.  We may think we are using the best "space age materials" - typically shoes are way too heavy.  Especially heavy for the young; an 8oz shoe for an 8 year old is like a 3lb shoe for an adult.
• Remove your proprioceptive feedback that is necessary for balance, stability and posture.
• Raised heels to encourage rear foot strike, check out 'Do running shoes still need raised heels?'.
• ((Did I miss anything))

For shoe sizing, it's more about flexible points not length!  Details here. 


So, we know the best shoes for running are shoes that allow the many muscles, tendons, and ligaments in your foot to do their job, unimpeded. Have you thought about how that might transfer to work shoes or gym shoes?  ((See part 2 and 3))

Make Your Own Trail Mix Bars

Trail Mix Bars

These bars have many of the wonderful nuts, seeds, and crunch of a trail mix–but without the sugar load. This poses only a modest carbohydrate exposure, as the dates provide 4 grams sugar per date.
 However, if you are a marathon runner, triathlete, or other long-duration exerciser and would like to use these bars as your during-exercise carbohydrate source, they are easily modified to increase carbohydrate content to suit your needs. You can add more 2-3 more dates, for instance, or more raisins or apricots, ground in your food chopper or food processor in the first step. If you are not a long-duration athlete, leave these bars as is!
 
Ingredients for every 2 bars (e.g., multiply ingredients by 4 to obtain 8 bars):
2 tablespoons shredded unsweetened coconut
1 tablespoon raw pumpkin seeds
1 tablespoon raw sunflower seeds
1-2 whole pitted dates
1 tablespoon walnut fragments
1 tablespoon cacao nibs
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Sweetener equivalent to 1 tablespoon sugar or sweeten to taste
1 tablespoon coconut milk (full thickness), room temperature
1/2 tablespoon almond butter, room temperature
Preheat oven to 200 degrees F.
Combine coconut, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and dates and grind in food chopper or food processor until consistency of coarse coffee grounds. Pour into bowl.
Add walnut fragments, cacao nibs, cinnamon, and sweetener and mix thoroughly. Taste batter to ensure degree of sweetness. Stir in coconut milk and almond butter by hand. (If almond butter is too thick, microwave prior to adding to mix in 15 second increments to obtain a liquid consistency.)
On parchment paper-lined cookie sheet, divide dough into two parts (or into as many bars as you desire). Shape into bar shape with the flat edge of a butter knife.
Bake for 60 minutes. Remove and cool.

the ole 'overtraining'

The old saying is that it's better to go into a race (or any activity) 10% under trained than 1% over trained. We're on a precipice of advanced and convenient medical devices coming out.  Devices that will integrate with our 'smart devices'.  Nike, Jawbone and others have these pretty neat activity detectors intended to graph your exercise, lifestyle and even sleep cycles.  This is all good!  But the only metrics I want to know is am I overtraining??  There are huge potential downsides of over training, such as:

A major effect that extreme exercise has on our bodies is an immediate increase in cortisol, the hormone that is released when the body is under stress. Heavy-resistance exercises are found to stimulate markedly acute cortisol responses, similar to those responses found in marathon running. Chronically high levels of cortisol can increase your risk for a variety of health issues, such as sleep disturbances, digestive issues, depression, weight gain, and memory impairment. Excess cortisol also encourages fat gain, particularly around the abdomen.

Overtraining can also have harmful effects on the immune system. Research has shown that the cellular damage that occurs during overtraining can lead to nonspecific, general activation of the immune system, including changes in natural killer cell activity and the increased activation of peripheral blood lymphocytes. This hyperactivity of the immune system following intense overtraining can possibly even contribute to the development of autoimmune conditions. 

 Although there's not yet a device you can put around your wrist to tell you you're overtrained, there are signs.  Mark Sisson's 8 signs of overtraining (from here):

1. You repeatedly fail to complete your normal workout.

2. You’re losing leanness despite increased exercise.

3. You’re lifting/sprinting/HIITing hard every single day.

4. You’re primarily an anaerobic/power/explosive/strength athlete, and you feel restless, excitable, and unable to sleep in your down time.

5. You’re primarily an endurance athlete, and you feel overly fatigued, sluggish, and useless.

6. Your joints, bones, or limbs hurt.

7. You’re suddenly falling ill a lot more often.

8. You feel like crap the hours and days after a big workout.

You'll need to ratchet it back down if these markers describe your situation.  Here are a few techniques to avoid overtraining while still enjoying high intensity exercise:

1. Reduce the frequency. While pushing yourself hard at the gym is not inherently problematic, doing it too often during the week is overtraining. High intensity, high stress exercise should be limited to two or three times a week, especially for those who are dealing with other health issues such as autoimmune conditions or digestive troubles. Compounding those stressors with extra stress from your exercise routine will not leave you healthier, and can easily cause you to become more sick.
2. Get adequate rest. I’ve written before about how important sleep quality is for health. Not only is taking breaks from exercise important, but getting adequate sleep to allow recovery from intense exercise is vital to avoiding the overtraining syndrome. Make sure you are getting adequate sleep, particularly on the days you train. Interestingly, one symptom of overtraining is disturbance of sleep, so if you’re feeling restless and having trouble sleeping through the night, you may want to reconsider the intensity of your training schedule.
3. Mix it up. While high intensity exercise may be ideal for losing body fat and improving lean muscle mass, we know that high levels of cortisol can cause the body to hold onto fat. For this reason, you may consider trying a type of exercise that can help modulate your cortisol levels. Some may knock yoga as being too easy to affect weight loss, but regular yoga practice is shown to reduce cortisol levels, which may help in reaching your weight and fitness goals. Instead of doing a fourth day of CrossFit, try doing a yoga class instead. You may find that this stress reducing exercise helps you recover more quickly from your more intense exercise schedule.
4. Eat more carbohydrates. While cutting down carbohydrate consumption is often seen as the best way to decrease body fat, a combination of overtraining and low-carb eating can actually raise cortisol significantly and negatively impact immune function. There is also a possibility that very low carbohydrate (VLC) diets suppress thyroid function, a debate thoroughly discussed by Paul Jaminet on his blog. So if you’re regularly doing high intensity training and want to avoid symptoms of overtraining stress, don’t skimp on the carbs!

Thanks Chris Kresser and Mark Sisson for breaking it down for us!

-PR

A Scientific Look at the Dangers of High Heels

Important takeaway:

The risks extend to workouts, when heel wearers abruptly switch to sneakers or other flat shoes. “In a person who wears heels most of her working week,” Dr. Cronin says, the foot and leg positioning in heels “becomes the new default position for the joints and the structures within. Any change to this default setting,” he says, like pulling on Keds or Crocs, constitutes “a novel environment, which could increase injury risk.”
It should be noted, he adds, that in his study, the volunteers “were quite young, average age 25, suggesting that it is not necessary to wear heels for a long time, meaning decades, before adaptations start to occur.”

 

A Scientific Look at the Dangers of High Heels

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Illustration by Henrik Sorensen

Not long ago, Neil J. Cronin, a postdoctoral researcher, and two of his colleagues at the Musculoskeletal Research Program at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, were having coffee on the university’s campus when they noticed a young woman tottering past in high heels. “She looked quite uncomfortable and unstable,” Dr. Cronin says.
Some observers, particularly women, might have winced in sympathy or, alternatively, wondered where she’d bought stilettos. But the three researchers, men who study the biomechanics of walking, were struck instead by the scientific implications of her passage. “We began to consider what might be happening at the muscle and tendon level” in women who wear heels, Dr. Cronin says.
How shoes affect human gait is a controversial topic these days. The popularity of barefoot running, for instance, has grown in large part because of the belief, still unproven, that wearing modern, well-cushioned running shoes decreases foot strength and proprioception, the sense of how the body is positioned in space, and contributes to running-related injuries.
Whether high heels might likewise affect the wearer’s biomechanics and injury risk has received scant scientific attention, however, even though millions of women wear heels almost every day. So, in one of the first studies of its kind, the Australian scientists recruited nine young women who had worn high heels for at least 40 hours a week for a minimum of two years. The scientists also recruited 10 young women who rarely, if ever, wore heels to serve as controls. The women were in their late teens, 20s or early 30s.

The scientists asked the heel-wearing women to bring their favorite pair of high-heeled shoes to the lab. There, both groups of women were equipped with electrodes to track leg-muscle activity, as well as motion-capture reflective markers. Ultrasound probes measured the length of muscle fibers in their legs.
All of the women strode multiple times along a 26-foot-long walkway that contained a plate to gauge the forces generated as they walked. The control group covered the walkway 10 times while barefoot. The other women walked barefoot 10 times and in their chosen heels 10 times.
It was obvious, as the scientists had suspected watching the woman during their coffee break, that the women habituated to high heels walked differently from those who usually wore flats, even when the heel wearers went barefoot. But the nature and extent of the differences were surprising. In results published last week in The Journal of Applied Physiology, the scientists found that heel wearers moved with shorter, more forceful strides than the control group, their feet perpetually in a flexed, toes-pointed position. This movement pattern continued even when the women kicked off their heels and walked barefoot. As a result, the fibers in their calf muscles had shortened and they put much greater mechanical strain on their calf muscles than the control group did.
In that control group, the women who rarely wore heels, walking primarily involved stretching and stressing their tendons, especially the Achilles tendon. But in the heel wearers, the walking mostly engaged their muscles.
That biomechanical distinction is important, says Dr. Cronin, who is now a researcher at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. “Several studies have shown that optimal muscle-tendon efficiency” while walking “occurs when the muscle stays approximately the same length while the tendon lengthens. When the tendon lengthens, it stores elastic energy and later returns it when the foot pushes off the ground. Tendons are more effective springs than muscles,” he continues. So by stretching and straining their already shortened calf muscles, the heel wearers walk less efficiently with or without heels, he says, requiring more energy to cover the same amount of ground as people in flats and probably causing muscle fatigue.
The obvious question raised by the findings, though, is so what? Does it fundamentally matter if a woman’s calf muscle fibers shorten and she neglects her tendons while walking, especially if she loves the looks of her Louboutins?
That question is difficult for a biomechanist to answer, Dr. Cronin admits. Aesthetics are outside the realm of his branch of science. But the risk of injury is not. “We think that the large muscle strains that occur when walking in heels may ultimately increase the likelihood of strain injuries,” he says. (This risk is separate from the chances that a woman, if unfamiliar with heels, may topple sideways and twist an ankle or bruise her self-image, which is an acute injury and happened to me only the one time.)
The risks extend to workouts, when heel wearers abruptly switch to sneakers or other flat shoes. “In a person who wears heels most of her working week,” Dr. Cronin says, the foot and leg positioning in heels “becomes the new default position for the joints and the structures within. Any change to this default setting,” he says, like pulling on Keds or Crocs, constitutes “a novel environment, which could increase injury risk.”
It should be noted, he adds, that in his study, the volunteers “were quite young, average age 25, suggesting that it is not necessary to wear heels for a long time, meaning decades, before adaptations start to occur.”
So, if you do wear heels and are at all concerned about muscle and joint strains, his advice is simple. Try, if possible, to ease back a bit on the towering footwear, he says. Wear high heels maybe “once or twice a week,” he says. And if that’s not practical or desirable, “try to remove the heels whenever possible, such as when you’re sitting at your desk.” The shoes can remain alluring, even nestled beside your feet.

Plantar Pain?

I like the "forget trying to diagnose the condition, instead just fix it"!  As with any injury the key point is to work up the chain and deal with anomalies along the way. 

Enter to win coaching with Eric package

Link Here

Stride Rate and what it means

180 isn't a magic number- Stride Rate and what it means

Posted by Steve Magness

Speed= Stride Rate X Stride length

How do we increase speed:
There seems to be an ingrained belief that stride rate is constant and that to increase speed we simply lengthen the stride. This is a staple teaching in Chi Running for example, but others such as Amby Burfoot in his recent post brough up the same concept.

The general idea that we use stride length to increase speed (via an increased force application, not by reaching out) to a greater degree than stride rate is true. But there becomes a problem when we think in absolutes and limit ourselves to we ONLY see changes in speed with stride length.

We’ve got two different ways to pick up the pace, why limit ourselves to one particular way?

If we look at a previous post of mine that showed how elite 10k runners ran at just below 10k pace and then picked it up during the race, you see clearly, that runners use several different methods to increase speed. Bekele for instance went from running 10k pace to running just faster than mile pace solely by increasing his frequency from 190 to ~216. He did this without a change in stride length. On the other hand, some of the other runners increased speed by lengthening their stride or doing a combo of both. The point is, that the data shows us that to increase speed from 2:45 per kilometer to a sub 60 last lap, athletes employed several different methods. And the method they used was that which they hadn’t relied upon all race (i.e. Bekele had relied on a long stride and “slower” frequency so he increased the frequency).

If we look at some other data from a group of top notch NCAA athletes from UTEP 2-3 years ago, you can see their stride rates and relative stride lengths (a ratio of their height) at a mix of paces (note this is the average for the group so we can’t see how individuals pick up the pace):
Pace ---Stride Rate---Relative stride length
7:40--- 175--- .68
6:43--- 181--- .76
5:58--- 185--- .82
5:22--- 191--- .83
4:58--- 196--- .93
(Data from De Heer, 2008)


For these athletes you go from a very easy pace to about marathon pace or a tad faster, so still not that quick in the big scheme of things. As a whole, their stride rate changed by an average of 21spm to accomplish an increase in stride length.

Lastly, I think it’s important to realize what happens during fatigue. When we tire our ability to produce force quickly starts to fade. Since we aren’t imparting as much force into the ground we do one of a couple options. We either slow down as our stride length diminishes or we compensate. We compensate by increasing stride frequency to take up the slack and maintain or increase speed (remember speed=rate X length, so if length drops, we got to increase rate to maintain the same speed), or we do something to allow us to maintain force production such as increase the range of motion of our arms. (Open up the arms like a sprinter- allows for increased force transmission.)

What’s the point of all this? To show that, yes we do rely on stride length more so proportionally to increase speed, but don’t neglect the role of stride rate. They both change, and to try and hold one constant is not a good idea. We don’t simply increase stride length to change speeds like is often taught.


What the heck is a high stride rate?
The other part of this debate is the notion that everyone should have a high stride rate. That’s the argument coming from several in the running industry. I don’t disagree on the surface that a quicker stride is better compared to what most people do, but how high is a high stride rate?

In several running form publications they tout 180 as the magic number. There is nothing special about 180. It comes from work back in the day when Jack Daniels counted stride rates during competition of elites and found that they all had a stride rate of over 180. People forget the “over” part and they also forget the question of what speed were they running at? As we can see from the data above, speed matters. If we measured the Kenyan Runners warming up at the same pace, they would have been at 175, with some being at 165 and some being at 188 (based on guessed from Standard Deviation data). If we only looked at when they were running a tempo run, then the average is 196, and its almost guaranteed that they are all over 180.
If we go further to faster paces, stride rates get even higher. Elite sprinters like Tyson Gay reach around 300spm when sprinting the 100m. In the Bekele data, he reaches 215 or so for the last 400m. I’ve got data from travelling around watching world class athletes that have guys running 200spm and 220spm roughly at the same 3k pace.

To back this idea up further I took some data from myself as I picked it up from a slow jog 7:30 pace to down to about 5min pace, which is about threshold pace for me at the moment. At 7:30 pace I was around 166, in the mid to high 160’s. At the tempo pace I was 192-198 consistantly.

Which brings us to the current topic of increasing stride rate that everyone seems to be talking about. If we know elites go from anywhere from the 170 range for easy distance pace (~7min/mi) up to 215+ for 3k race pace, what does that mean for the rest of us? Do we copy the elites in having relatively “high” rates even though some recreational runners might be jogging 4+min slower/mi on the distance pace side of things?
Does it make sense for a recreational runner running 10-11min miles to be trying to hit 180spm? Probably not, unless that is a quicker pace for him. Just to do the math, if we had a runner doing 180spm at 11min mile pace, he’d have a stride length of just 32inches!


Then why is everyone in a rage over increasing stride rate? Because as I’ve pointed out before, most recreational runners simply overstride, which artificially creates a very low stride rate. Why? Because the foot lands so far out in front of the Center of Mass that it takes a while for your body to be over it and ready to push off. So, when some running form coach says to increase stride rate to X, what ends up happening is the runner is trying so hard to increase stride rate, he chops his stride a bunch by putting his foot down earlier and landing closer to his center of mass, thus decreasing the overstriding. Nothing particularly wrong with that.

Where we go wrong is in the logic that the stride rate increase is the key. No, it’s not. It’s the elimination of the overstriding. Using the cue to increase stride rate is a way for coaches/runners to reduce the heel striking overstride.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, until people start taking it to the extremes. That’s when you get the claims of a magic stride rate and the idea that you can NEVER have a low stride rate. Or another bad direction is when you have people who stick to a certain stride rate without variance.

Stride Rate, footstrike, and Ground Reaction Forces
All of this somehow brings us to the excellent post by Jay Discharry on stride rate and GRF/loading rates. To really cover this topic, another post is required, but briefly I’d like to make some points.
I agree with Jay that footstrike isn’t everything. I’ve seen it numerous times where you can have an athlete forefoot or even midfoot strike while still reaching out with their lower leg. We used to call it toe reaching and there was a pretty good elite runner about a decade ago who routinely would fall into that pattern when fatigued. I also agree that it’s quite possible to heel strike with a low impact loading rate if you land close to your center of mass without reaching out. You see this with athletes who have always been taught to dorsiflex like crazy (i.e. Toe up- coaches love yelling that for some reason), instead of just letting the ankle be neutral and do its thing.

The thing to keep in mind though is that it doesn’t mean that footstrike isn’t important. We’re looking at one variable, GRF loading rates, which are important presumably but we still don’t know their exact role. If GRF was all that mattered, great, we could just say land close to your COM and that’s it. Except for the fact that transmission of forces, not just how they load, must play a role. As does putting the foot in position for push off, maximizing elastic energy, etc.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, and the questions regarding foot strike, loading rate, or what have you are very complex. But we’ve got to be careful when focusing on single variables. It’s fun and easy to do and gives us seemingly concrete answers. The problem is when we get into business of tailoring towards single variables, we lose the big picture. You see this in running training when people started to focus on improving single variables like VO2max or Lactate Threshold. Ya, you might improve that, but your making a leap that that one thing is the key to performance and forget the complexity of performance.

The same goes with biomechanics and performance or injury prevention. A single footstrike isn’t the answer. Neither is simply changing stride rate nor simply getting that strike closer to your center of mass. All are pieces two the puzzle. Don’t become obsessive over one and forget the others.

If you really want to minimize loading rates, run really slow with a tiny stride length where your foot barely comes off the ground. It’s simple and it would do the job…but that’s the point, there are more things than just loading rate

For instance, high GRF aren’t all bad. Sprinting is partially dependent on producing high GRF.

What does this all Mean:
In a roundabout kind of way, we get back to the original point of this blog post. Stride Rate is a variable. If you combine it with stride length you get a calculation of speed. It’s very easy to measure, anyone can do it. Because it’s easy to measure, we’ll put more emphasis on it (you don’t see a magic stride length # do you??) I don’t mean that it isn’t a good variable, just don’t give it more meaning than it deserves.

It’s simply one of two ways in which we pick up speed. It’s simple really, turn over faster or lengthen the stride, or some combination of both. Don’t limit yourself to only one of those options artificially.

What I’ve found in my years working on running mechanics and in being taught by some of the best minds on the subject, is that I nor them have ever focused on stride rate or length. Those are outcomes of what you do. They are feedback. They are not things you directly change. If you take care of the mechanics, whether it’s arm swing, body position, force application, footstrike or whatever, the rate and length will optimize. Is it useful to measure length and rate? Sure, but remember that they are data. If one of them seems “off” you’ve got to figure out how to fix it.

Stretching... on purpose. good or bad?