How Cushioned Heeled Running Shoes Actually Cause Heel Injuries

Running shoes with a thick raised heel were found to cause heel pain and injury in runners who heel strike as compared with running barefoot or in minimalist shoes, which are flat barefoot-like shoes intended to help you avoid heel strike and help you engage a forefoot strike, which is associated with the lowest impacts at the heel, thereby doing more to prevent heel injuries.

How Cushioned Running Shoes Actually Cause Heel Injuries
In turns out, the thicker the cushioning under the heel relative to the front of a running shoe, the more likely you’ll end up landing heel-first with excessive force that cannot be fully absorbed by the shoe or your heel pad. As a result, more impact penetrates the heel, resulting in pain and injury as compared with running in flatter shoes or running barefoot both which discourages a hard-hitting heel strike and encourages a forefoot strike tied to less all-around impact levels.

Strong interferences about this came from a study by Jimenez-Munoz et al., in the Journal of Sports Science which investigated the effects of running barefoot vs running in shoes on foot strike.

  • The researchers found that a higher heel strike angle was more frequent in running shoes with a higher heel height, whereas barefoot running resulted in a significantly flatter foot strike that resulted in less impact forces drilling into the heel. This is because a flatter foot placement at landing increases the surface area for more even force dissipation.
How Forefoot Running Prevents Heel Injuries
A forefoot strike landing results in a larger surface area of contact that begins at the front of the foot, providing more surface to evenly spread impact on. In fact, impact pressure spreads best with this landing configuration because there’s really no point throughout the foot that gets a hard landing delivered to it, while the heel encounters the least amount of impact, which is why heel injuries are incredibly low in forefoot running, but not in heel strike running.

Their results are perfectly in line with past reports which found that 70% – 85% of runners who wore cushioned heeled running shoes were heel striker (Hasegawa et al. 2007), and sustained numerous injuries.

Their results are also consistent with other reports which have found that a forefoot strike landing is commonly adopted when a shod runner runs barefoot (Hamill et al. 2011) as its most comfortable on the entire foot, namely the heel. This suggests the heel pad is not well-adapted to landing heel-first when running since its always highly sensitive to injury when a heel strike landing is employed, even in a running shoe with maximum heel protection.

Finally, its not just an injurious heel strike landing that cushioned running shoes cause, here are the growing list of injuries that cushioned running shoes don’t prevent but actually cause!

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References:

Hamill, J., Russell, E. M., Gruber, A. H., & Miller, R. (2011). Impact characteristics in shod and barefoot running. Footwear Science, 3, 33 – 40.

Hasegawa, H., Yamauchi, T., & Kraemer, W. J. (2007). Foot strike patterns of runners at the 15-km point during an elite-level half marathon. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 21, 888 –893

Jimenez-Munoz et al. Influence of shod/unshod condition and running speed on foot-strike patterns, inversion/eversion, and vertical foot rotation in endurance runners. J Sports Sci, 2015;33(19):2035-2042.

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2 Comments

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