A relatively recent study featured in Nature suggested that the feet of people who habitually run barefoot strike the ground in a way that tempers impact and smoothes the running movement. Previous research suggests that people who run barefoot first land on the front or middle of their feet (“forefoot strike”), before they lower their heels and move their body weight to the backs of their feet before shifting forward again. Enter the spongey, springy running shoe in the 1970s, as in the picture on the left, and instantly runners were able to land on their heels before shifting forward (“heel strike”), thereby bypassing the forefoot strike. The introduction of running shoes profoundly changed running gaits. Daniel Lieberman, the first author of the article that appeared Nature and a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, said of heel-strike running, “the stiff landing hurts.” Read more at Lieberman’s Harvard webpage dedicated to barefoot running or in the journal Nature…
View By Topic:
Exercise
Beware! Those vitamins you are taking may be undermining many beneficial aspects of the exercise you drag yourself out of bed to do. We know that exercise promotes longevity and decreases type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance. Recently, data indicated that exercise-induced oxidative stress decreases insulin resistance and causes an adaptive response promoting our internal antioxidant defense capacity. A 2010 study found that consuming antioxidant vitamins (Vitamin C and E, by mouth) prevented these health-promoting effects of exercise in humans. Read more in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…