BTW, heel striking is okay. Running form develops naturally. You folks taking this advice seriously want to focus on cadence and getting it to around 180 spm. Cadence has been shown to decrease injury risk. Altering your running form has lots of adherents due to anecdotes but no evidence supporting it.
I think this needs to be clarified: heel striking is not okay if your feet are landing in front of your body instead of underneath it. The reason cadence is a good indication of form is because it implies to what extent your feet are falling where they should be.
If you're already doing something that works for you and doesn't cause you pain or injury, don't change your form. But for most people who are just starting out, they are almost definitely going to need to change their form to avoid injury.
That is my point, keep it simple at first. Cadence is a much better heuristic than "heel strike". Also, it is understood you will run differently without shoes.
Jack Daniel's, (the famous running coach and physiologist) gave a good summary of it: There are two types of runners over time, those that adopt a higher cadence rate and those that get injured. Lore of Running (Noakes) and Daniels are both at complete odds about doing any significant adjustments to your running form other than monitoring cadence. At 180spm for most people that equates to a much lighter step that reduces the GRF (Ground Forces) per strike, which seems more important than other aspects of form.
I do. It's fine. I have run 40 miles per week for months at a time training for ultra marathons. Anecdotes and all. If you want to prevent injuries, lift some heavy things to make your joints and ensure you don't have any weakness in your legs or posterior chain. Run with a high cadence.
The truth is this, why runners get injured is varied and running form naturally improves if someone runs a lot and practices running drills that encourage new muscle activation patterns. Running a lot with no strength training can mean weaker muscles, so strength training is almost always prescribed as a preventative and as a fix to encourage better muscle activation patterns.
Each persons biomechanical form is different and unique to them. Tinkering with what is natural to them seems ill advised at best given what we do know about injury rates.
Running barefoot is less efficient and probably reduces injuries due to different muscle activation patterns (the leading theory about why some shoes can cause problems and others can fix them). It is thought that pronation isn't really significantly altered by shoes.
In Noakes and Daniels, my favorite two authorities on running, you will find very little focus on running form as a key aspect of being a life long runner because it is something that developers naturally. Only when specific problems occur should you really diagnose and try to fix things. Most people can run a healthy amount without changing anything and wearing any old running shoes. When specific things occur specific fixes must be deployed and "fix all" advise (even like mine, run 180spm, or, don't heel strike) is just not helpful unless it actually addresses the specific cause of the problem. More often than not someone can keep their existing running form and something else is advised (stretching, strength conditioning, running speed drills to improve foot turnover and alter muscle activation, orthotics to activate muscles differently, etc. etc.).
I suspect you need an "eventually" before "naturally" there. You can't instantly transition from heel strike to fore/mid strike without causing a whole mess of problems.
Altra (who are merely zero-drop shoes, not barefoot) recommend a gradual transitioning over at least 6 months.
You mean shifting injuries from knees to heel tendons ?
One thing barefoot runners showed me is the static bounce starting point. Your gesture should be similar to that of landing from small repeated vertical jumps. When you find a balance in how the weight is distributed, you start to go forward.
edit: My conclusion, ignore any running form purists or blow hards. Throw some shoes on. Go run. Conservatively and following the laws of training. If you get hurt you can fix it and it usually doesn't suck (stretching, less running for a while, strength training). If you don't get hurt, you were better off not overthinking it :)
No, take off your shoes, and run around the yard right now. Tell me how you strike your feet.
Obviously if you've heel striked your entire life while running, you'll have to ease yourself into it. That's also not what I was responding to. Saying heel striking is OK, it is not. It's a bad habit formed by over padding sneakers.
This is blatantly unsupported by any evidence. If you want to run in most places people can easily run you have to wear shoes. There is no conclusive or even decent evidence that heel striking or non heel striking causes injuries. Barefoot running causes very different muscle activation patterns. It is much less efficient (biomechanically) requiring you to compensate very differently.
Find evidence that isn't anecdotes and is widely accepted and I will gladly change my mind. It is still an ongoing debate and the evidence in either direction is only moderate (in the direction of heel striking being fine, especially for folks running recreationally with a rather low load). Given the general lack of evidence it comes down to anecdotes and you can find those everywhere, people are crazy.
It depends very specifically on what sort of problems you develop. It is theorized that when you do suffer a lower limb injury using orthotics changes your muscle activation pattern (moreso than changing your form), which helps alleviate the issue. The rate of orthotics fixing problems after a specific injury is pretty high so it is more than just mumbo jumbo.
"70% of runners with lower limb injuries improve when they use orthotic devices (James et al. 1978; Bates et al. 1979, McKenzie et al. 1985; Gross et al. 1991)..." Noakes, lore of running. So clearly orthotics and what you put under your feet can have an impact and make things better (or worse, but probably better if someone knowledgeable about biomechanics can see your pronation and gait).
Ironically I used some orthotics as a teen. My feet are half flat, some "podologist" gave me curved soles. Didn't work on me. I don't refute the idea; I probably just needed a more comprehensive solution for a prolongated time to make a difference.
