I searched this, but couldn’t find that this was discussed.
In Mens Journal this month they have an article called: “Buy Running Shoes for Comfort, Not Pronation”
“If your shoes work for you, keep them.
The next time a clerk at a running store asks you to step on a treadmill to measure your stride, don’t take his or her advice too seriously. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that pronation – how your foot comes into contact with the ground as you run, rolling inward (overpronation), outward (underpronation), or straight over the big toe (normal pronation) – may not influence the chance of injury. Danish researchers gave 927 novice runners neutral shoes, regardless of their pronation, and followed them for one year. They found that runners faced the same risk of injury regardless of the shoe. “Novice runners are better off choosing shoes based on comfort rather than foot type,” says study leader Rasmus Østergaard Nielsen. This means that if you’re happy with your shoes, there’s no need to switch them to ones that are engineered to support a certain type of pronation. But if you’re running in minimalist shoes and have pain, you might want to switch to supportive ones.”
Am I late to the party? that’s drastically different then what I have been told before…
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From what I have heard some pronation is ok and correcting it causes problems. I run about 50 miles a week and I would agree with shoes being comfortable as one of the most important factors. I prefer a neutral shoe even though I do pronate. But I have seen some runners who pronate so badly their ankles almost hit the ground…I’d have to think they need support
I also recall a study done by or for the US military finding that selecting shoes based on your arch does not prevent injury and may in fact increase the risk. I recall the study was done to evaluate the success of a really spendy “foot mapping device” that the military was using to select shoes for recruits.
Similar conclusion, if the shoe is comfortable, you should wear it.
it is dispiriting, but all the evidence is that we really don’t know what causes running injuries…
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1439399
“The association between running injuries and factors such as warm-up and stretching exercises, body height, malalignment, muscular imbalance, restricted range of motion, running frequency, level of performance, stability of running pattern, shoes and inshoe orthotics and running on 1 side of the road remains unclear or is backed by contradicting or scarce research findings.”
Dr Sheehan had a lot of success treating knee injuries from overpronation with orthotics, which led to a whole lot of ‘stability’ shoes in the late 70s/80s. http://www.georgesheehan.com/essays/essay21.html
These did in fact work better than what we had before that, I benefited from these shoes: but nowadays I run in neutral cushioned shoes, which provide enough stability for my mild overpronation.
I think the neutral shoes of today are better stability shoes than the old horrors from the 70s…
There’s a lot of evidence that the body adapts itself very efficiently to different shoes and running surfaces. YMMV. As Dr Sheehan observed we are all an experiment of one, it is still the case…
pick your shoes based on how they feel. never let a store or expert try to dictate what you should be running in.
flat feet? pronate? You might still like racing flats or nike frees best or other totally non supportive neutral shoes best (I do, and I pronate supposedly and have flat feet)
The action of the foot isn’t the cause of the injure but used to sell the shoes, ie. support or no support shoe.
Every athlete I train that goes to a running store is told they need support and is marketed towards the more $$$ shoe.
The knee and hip alignment to support any foot postion is much more important and not looked at properly.
Every impact your foot should do a slight pronation to absorb the impact like a shock, but the injured are using to do with where your body wt is placed over that shoe I.e. behind the foot or outside the foot.
The running gait is so much more than what is going on at the foot when it strikes the ground. I’m no expert, and I didn’t even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I have been reading a lot on the subject lately. From what I understand, excess pronation in the foot can be a compensation for deficiencies elsewhere, so for some people using a stability shoe to stop pronation can have unintended consequences in other parts of the body.
The foot is a beautifully constructed support system. Pronation is natural…I was pissed when I found out how many times I was told the wrong info at running stores.
Thank goodness the cycling movement patterns for the feet are not so complicated!
We see excessive pronation as a problem in bike fit when the foot locked into the pedal in a way that is not neutral cause knee and hip issues up the kinetic chain.
Shoes sized by arch line and toe ray length coupled with Bike Fit wedges as needed and sometimes a foot bed and you are good to go.
When I joined the Marines in 1986 we had a choice of 1 running shoe, I remember it was from Brooks. The Drill Instructors looked at what we brought with us and told us either to keep what we had or buy the Brooks shoes.
When I first started running again in 2003 the local store put me in a pair of Brooks Beasts, I think they were the right shoe for me at the time. I eventually moved towards a stability shoe. In 2007 I was at the Endurance House in Madison WI and they checked my gait with high speed video wearing racing flats. They moved me to neutral shoes which I still wear today, I thought it was odd cuz I have very flat feet. The guy there said that doesn’t matter. So he moved me to basically a little cheaper shoe.
In contrast, my buddy has normal arches and ran in neutral shoes was moved to stability shoes and ran without pain afterwards.
The talk about running stores just selling shoe on foot type isn’t always true. Some really do care and have experience in doing so. With that said we also have a responsibility to choose our shoes wisely. Test things out slowly and find what works best for us.
Probably a simple rule… If you’re running a lot of miles now and not having issues, then no need to change. Buy what’s comfotable and you seem to run well in. Buy new shoes when you start getting soreness or when the tread wears out… for me that’s at about the same time.
That being said, I’m looking to change things up a little. I seem to run well in more neutral shoes racing, even the HIM distance despite trianing in more of a moderate stability shoe. So I’m going to try soemthing different.
I also had toyed with changing to a midfoot strike, but I think I’m asking for trouble to get away from what’s natural to me. Plus I was looking at photos of the top finishers at my last race and it looks like I’m seeing a heel hitting the ground first on the guy that had the fastest run split. Also looks like he runs with a longer stride/ lower turnover too. Imagine that?
I’m not responding to you in particular, but your post illustrates much of the problem going on here:
There is movement in the foot that goes beyond simple pronation. For example, that pronation mechanism may be caused elsewhere in the chain. This is my issue: I have such rigidity issues in my big toe that I have to “pronate” in order to get any flexibility down out of my ankle at all. Therefore, stability shoes to correct that “pronation” issue is going to cause me problems.
Now, there’s also a difference between pronation rates, amounts, and causations. It’s the pronation rate that you need to be concerned about, and usually will manifest itself in rather specific medial injury. But you need to be analyzing more than just the foot as a static; you need to look from the head to the toe to discover what may or may not need correcting. And it may very well go beyond shoes.
Do we, as an industry, sell too many stability shoes? Definitely. But do they have their purpose for some runners? Again, definitely.
Every athlete I train that goes to a running store is told they need support and is marketed towards the more $$$ shoe.
I once got the peek into the back room at a RoadRunner Sports store. They had a whiteboard with a list of all the salespeople and a tally of how many inserts they’d each sold. It was a competition.
Are you sure the runners were landing on their heels moto? Hard to tell with most photos. I just searched youtube for “slow motion footstrike”. I thought this video was a good example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsUfo_jHQ60
Its easy to blame running stores and their employees for being part a giant shoe selling conspiracy but I think the real problem is political correctness in telling someone they are fat. Weight is the crucial factor in determining how much force novice runners are putting on muscles and legs when they run. Telling people they need high cushioned shoes because they are overweight doesn’t sell like telling people they need supportive shoes for pronation ext. From my experience many running form problems at the novice level are also affiliated with weight and its carry-on affect to range of motion. There are certainly exceptions but not as many serious ones as a lot of people seem to believe. I think if it became politically acceptable to really talk about weight and running shoe choice (Stop the treadmills and bring in the scales in the stores!) more people would get in the right shoe.