10/04/2025
So some honesty about being barefoot and perhaps controversial take, maybe???Basically, 1) I walk about barefoot cos I’m a lazy bastard; I get my s**t together and walk out the door and just don’t consider putting my shoes on cos I don’t have to and I’m just to lazy to bend down and put them on. There is said it. Im a lazy c**t. 2) the longer I’ve been mooching about barefoot (since around 2011/2012) the more the words of and chris sritharan from my first AiM course back in 2018 ring in my ears that I won’t be doing it long term, it won’t actually do me good. Well after years of running long distances barefoot, extolling the virtues of it on everyone, just cos I do it, and the discovering through that actually my feet are just hyposenstive (very un sensitive) and that is WHY I am able to do it.I’m now happy to admit that really, I wasn’t right about it. It can feel fu***ng wonderful mooching about in grass and in fields without shoes and can potentially offer benefits but the majority of the time life is lived on hard concrete, stoney, flat ground which our nervous system just doesn’t actually like.There is a reason changed his mind after running with the Tarahumara tribe. They are some of the best runners in the world and still they run with a form of shoe as this allows their nervous system to not spend its whole time s**tting the bed worrying about what’s coming and instead on where it wants to go. The whole conversation around barefoot shoes is a very loaded one these days. I prefer a shoe that doesn’t pinch my feet which is why I prefer a wider toe box but I spent all last year in skate shoes and had zero problems. Brands like vivo are fu***ng crazy expensive for something that I’m not totally convinced really changes a huge amount. Focusing on doing some work through the foot is far more important/beneficial. The research shows around a 60% improvement in strength of the foot but in the same way that hip thrusting huge weights improves glute strength, that doesn’t necessarily change the ability of the body area to work in gait (its also completed in collaboration with vivo so there’s that 🤷♂️🤣)
