Thursday, January 7, 2010

Barefoot is Good




Quote an example here, that you were to invite one of your friends for a jog in a rush, and it happened that the friend of yours was so willing to join you for the run. And so, he or she rushed downstairs, opened the door and getting ready for the jog by wearing that beautiful and nice conventional sport shoes which he or she just bought a few days ago. Under normal circumstances, what would you do? You would just wait for that friend of yours to tie the shoelace up, and then start keeping your feet busy would you not? But a latest study says otherwise.

Lately, researchers had conducted a study on the consequence on running with sport shoes as well as running with barefoot. The effect in running with shoes shown was that it actually exerted more stress to joints such as hip, knee and ankle joints compare to running with mere barefoot.

Dr. D Casey Kerrigan from Virginia had recruited 68 young healthy adults from general population in order to carry out the research. These 68 healthy young adults were consisted of 31 women and 31 men. These participants had no history of musculoskeletal injury and who often ran 15 miles a week with conventional shoes.

Researchers gave the participants pairs of running shoes, and they were instructed to run on a treadmill. Thye were also told to run on the treadmill with barefoot. The treadmill used had motion analysis system installed. From what they had analyzed, it appeared that when the recruited individuals were running on the treadmill with the shoes, there were increased torque at the hip, knee and ankle.

As a conclusion, the researchers suggested that though running shoes can protect and support the feet quite well, but on the downside, it added tensions toward hip, knee as well as the ankle joints, thus directly causing knee osteoarthritis.

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