Are Cushioned Running Shoes Bad for Your Feet?

13/11/2024 Bretta Riches Why Cushioned Running Shoes Are Bad 14

Unfortunately, one of the big reasons cushioned running shoes are bad for your feet is the design of most running shoes is too narrow and too stiff to allow the feet engage at a basic level. This is how foot strength fades with long-term use of such footwear of which weak feet makes running more stressful on the body, and makes it difficult for the feet to adapt to new levels of training.

Are Cushioned Running Shoes Bad for Your Feet? YES!
The extremely narrow and inflexible fit of the conventional running shoe completely counters the shape of the human foot, eventually causing a weakened, irregular, narrow foot shape. Its very relevant to know that the unergonomic design of these shoes actually adds more stress to the foot by preventing the foot from naturally expanding and physically engaging properly, which not only causes painful foot ailments, such as bunions, Morton neuroma, collapsed arches, tissue loss and plantar fasciitis, the thick underfoot cushioning also makes it impossible for the foot to feel the ground. As it turns out, a lack of ground-feel when running is directly correlated with poor balance, abnormal foot postures (over-pronation) and higher rates of displaced mechanics, such as a heel strike landing, over-striding and a low step rate, all of which are tied to producing the most damaging impact loads as compared with forefoot running.


Another major way conventional running shoes cause injury to the feet is by reducing widespread nerve activity in the foot/ankle complex. This effectively prevents the feet and also the leg from having a less functional role at engaging lighter, more controlled landings, causing runners to not only strike the ground excessively hard on the heel, and not on the forefoot, but also generates more downward impact and footstep instability as compared with running barefoot or in barefoot-like shoes, where the increased feel of the ground makes the nerves better at conveying spatial, pressure and other forms of movement information to the brain (shown below).

Why Barefoot is Best

One majorly false assumption is our feet are naturally weak and need constant protection with cushy shoes. However, several landmark studies (reference below article) over the last decade shows that you will always get more positive results by actually wearing less on your feet! In fact, going barefoot more often and spending more time in barefoot-like shoes are the most proven gateway strategy to clinically undo years of irregular movement patterns and functional weakness in the foot-ankle complex caused by traditional footwear. 

Barefoot Running Benefits
What makes going barefoot more often so effective is that in order to strengthen the intrinsic muscles deep within the foot starts with strengthening the nerve supply in the foot, which starts with activating the nerves lining the bottom of the foot. This can only be done by being barefoot because the full feel of the ground was found to be only way to trigger increases in muscle tone which directly leads stronger soft tissues and muscles throughout the foot. At the same, full feel of the ground, and therefore, enhanced nerve activation in the foot, enhances stability perception by activating reflexive mechanics that improve the neural control of movement.


As for running, you will always run better barefoot because the heightened sensory input directly triggers neuromuscular and reflexive responses that gives you a level of mechanical corrections and precision not able to occur in a thick cushioned running shoe. This is because the pronounced effect being barefoot has on enhancing the flow of sensory information through the feet to the brain is an ultimate mechanical re-calibrator.

Barefoot Running Benefits
Unlike cushioned running shoes, running barefoot does the best job at pushing your foot strike mechanics into a more safe range by facilitating a forefoot strike, which is well on record for making you significantly less prone to injury than heel striking.

Cushioned Running Shoes Main Cause for High Impact Heel Strike

Many experts are beginning to settle on the fact the brain has difficulties maintaining the proper foot strike pattern (i.e. forefoot strike) in thick cushioned running shoes as these shoes misdirect the foot to land with a high-impact, unstable heel strike (shown below) over a low-impact, highly controlled forefoot strike (see here what a proper forefoot strike looks like).

Thick Cushioned Running Shoes Main Cause of High Impact Heel Strike
The more padding under the heel than the front of the shoe, the more likely you’ll land too hard on your heel. Its the dramatic heel-to-toe offset of a running shoe

You have a very limited capacity to run with safe form in cushioned running shoes because the thick underfoot cushioning blocks ground-feel, which de-activates or severely under-stimulates the foot’s nerves that are responsible for processing the cutaneous and vibratory plantar cues. A major consequence of these sensory deficits  are motor and sensory neuropathy symptoms:

  • Motor and sensory neuropathy are characterized by deficiencies in ground-feel, resulting in a loss of perceived vibratory and cutaneous stimuli on the bottoms of the feet, a loss of joint position and movement detection, and reduced acuity of movement perception. In simple terms, the less your feet can feel the ground, the more reckless your running mechanics are likely to be.

Confirming reports of thick cushioned running shoes being the net contributor to high impact, injurious mechanics came from a study by Deursen & Simoneau in J Orthop Sports Phys Ther, revealed protective footwear is commonly prescribed to unload the foot in individuals with motor and sensory neuropathies, however there does not appear to be any supporting evidence proving that shoe cushioning is actually useful in ANY capacity. Contrary to naïve intuition, protective footwear is the origin of the problem.

  • Ground-feel is incredibly vital in running because the sensory receptors in the feet have strong connections with multiple specialized anatomical pathways devoted to biomechanics!

More importantly, ground-feel has a major evolutionary significance because many nerve fibers go back and forth between the feet and the old pathway of the brain, the brain-stem (the stalk that emerges from below the brain and continues as the spinal cord). This pathway helps you reflexively orient and move your lower extremity without thinking about it.

  • Good ground-feel depends on the source of the signal from the plantar (the under-foot) surface whereby barefoot or wearing barefoot-like shoes is the only enhancer of plantar  (underfoot) cutaneous and vibratory sensations, which is the only way a runner can properly perceive the landing surface, and therefore, land most safe and functional.

In contrast, runners who wear protective footwear run blindly, in a sense. because the cushioned underfoot materials significantly diminishes cutaneous and vibratory sensations, causing movement perception to be significantly degraded, especially when running.

  • Another compelling example of this comes from a study by Robbins et al. which confirmed that protective footwear caused a loss of cutaneous, vibratory and pressure sensations by reduced ground-feel sensibility.
  • The result, a loss of ground-feel at the foot is synonymous to motor and sensory neuropathy. The consequence, a runner will exhibit staggered, rushed and high impact movements with compromised postural stability with a greater chance of tripping and falling, and inappropriate footfalls, in the form of a hard-hitting heel strike.

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And lastly, given that ground-feel is diminished in cushioned footwear, the researchers argued that orthotics would also be an extra challenge for the maintenance of balance and low-impact running form. Orthotics is just another added layer that blinds the feet.

The Take Home Message

Proprioception is as old as humans are which is why we run with great difficulty in the absence of it. Because proprioception is heavily interconnected with the brain-stem, blocking it undermines health on a wide scale.

Protective footwear is the main external trigger for reducing ground-feel, thereby contributing to motor and sensory neuropathy and influencing the tendency to injure during running by causing a runner to run with reckless form. After all, the high injury rates in habitual shod (shoe) populations indicates that there are no upsides to protective footwear.

Finally, vital and rapid improvements in running form is the absolute hallmark of running barefoot or running in barefoot-like shoes. Previous work on running-related injuries demonstrated that barefoot or pure minimalist activity are optimal intervention strategies, especially for fixing posture deficits. Because the proprioceptors are more stimulated under these conditions, they are more likely to bring immediate relief to runners who struggle with movement impairments.

In light of all this, here are all of the other evidence-backed benefits of barefoot running! And, if you’ve enjoyed my post, you’ll love the content on my YouTube channel, here, where I show why forefoot running works and why heel strike running hurts!

References:

Deursen RM and Simoneau GG. Foot and ankle sensory neuropathy, proprioception, and postural stability. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther, 1999;29(12):718-726.

Gandevia SC and Burke D. Does the central nervous system depend on kinesthetic information to control natural limb movements. Behav Brain Sci, 1992;15:6141-632.

If you’d like, you can support Run Forefoot and help keep it going by making a donation in any amount of your choosing:

Or, you can support Run Forefoot by shopping at the BEST Barefoot Shoe Brands, and be sure to bookmark these links 🙂

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P.S. Don't forget to check out the Run Forefoot Facebook Page, it's a terrific place to ask questions about forefoot running, barefoot running and injury. I'm always happy to help!

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