I have had the Vibram five Fingers for a couple of years, and have worn them intermittently for running, more frequently for gym workouts.  Despite what most people intuitively think, the shoes and barefoot running in general, result in less overall impact force than when running with thick, cushy, motion control shoes. Lieberman’s findings in the study help to prove this and include:

• The fossil record suggests that humans not only evolved as endurance runners, but that they evolved to run long distance landing on the forward part of the foot.
• The vast majority of runners wearing thick running shoes land on their heels
• Barefoot runners typically run on their forefoot
• The peak force generated in a barefoot runner with forefoot impact is 3 times less than that generated by a shod (shoe wearing) runner landing on the heel.
• This reduction in force may have public health implications by reducing number of running-related injuries. Future studies need to see if this is true.
• Since the advent of motion control running shoes in the ’70s, running related injury prevalence has not declined.

For those of you who want to learn a bit more about this stuff but prefer a good adventure story to dry science, you might want to check out Born To Run, by Chris McDougall.  It’s written by a journalist who had chronic running related injuries that didn’t respond well to treatment.  Frustrated, he learned of forefoot striking styles of running, changed his stride and went to the deserts of Northern Mexico to learn how to run better from the indigenous Tarahumara Indians in the Copper Canyon. The book culminates in an ultra-marathon race between several of the top ultra-marathoners from the US pitted against the Tarahumara, clad in their homemade leather sandals.  Good reading!

Having just returned from a few days in NYC, and 3 lovely runs through Central Park, I once again found that running is also a great way to see an area that you are visiting.  A few days after returning from New York, the Health section of the New York Times ran a nice article about knees and running.  Check it out, it’s worth the view. The gist of the article is that in those without history of knee injury, running actually seems to help maintain health of the cartilage in the knees.  In my own case, 15 years post-ACL surgery, I am conducting a bit of scientific research on whether specific ways of running are not only tolerable, but helpful to post-surgical knees ;-)  I’ll let you know how that turns out!

The video here today is from that article and shows a few exercises to help with knee tracking and stability.  Some of these exercises look a bit familiar as we showed similar versions on previous videos.  Others highlight some basic, good pointers on squat mechanics which are incredibly important and should not be sped through.  Watch and listen and groove the proper form on the squat to help your hips and knees.  Although I’m a bit more picky than the trainer in the vid about keeping the knee behind the toes on the squat, overall, these are good exercises.  Happy trails, and I’ll see some of you at Hood to Coast in a few weeks!

Some of the questions that you have had in response to my post can best be answered by Dr. McGill’s video, so I decided to post it directly here. Hope you find it helpful. Please comment below if you have any questions or thoughts we can flesh out. Be Well!

Today we go over the Stir the Pot advanced ab exercise that was discussed today in the blog in the NY Times health and fitness section. Author Gretchen Reynolds, interviews professor Stuart McGill, a renowned back pain researcher from Canada, who takes on Pilates, personal trainers and the copycat bodybuilding culture of ab exercises that have grown out of misunderstandings of the back pain literature over the years. He takes issue with the oversimplification of the so-called Queensland group of researchers that noted changes in one particular muscle in the abs, the transversus abdominis, in back pain sufferers. Many of you have been exposed to this material in the common cues to “press your low back into the floor” as you start to work the abs.

McGill cites recent literature, in addition to his own work, that suggest that the time to reconsider “hollowing” and flat spine ab exercises has passed. The way to build healthy backs is to fully engage the entire core and improve the interaction of the individual core muscles into sustainable movement. Make sure to post any questions or comments below and I’ll respond as necessary. Be well.

Dr. Snell

In the last posting, we learned a bit about how prolonged sitting can result in shortening of the hip flexors. The psoas (so azz) muscles are attached to the front of the lumbar spine, way back behind your guts.  They cross the front of the pelvis, and attach way up high to the inside part of the thigh bone.  They’re the muscles that lift your knee up toward your chest when standing.  When their resting length is shortened in response to too much time in a chair, the hip extensors (gluteal or buttock muscles) are inhibited in their function due to Sherrington’s Law (see last blog posting “Move Your Butt…Introduction to the Hip-Knee Connection”). Czech neurologist, Vladimir Janda, termed this imbalance the “lower cross syndrome”. This process can have nasty ramifications on the hip and knee in athletes, resulting in ACL injury, ITB friction syndrome, patello-femoral tracking disorder, hip bursitis, and sciatica.

The way out of the box is to vary our body positions regularly. How regularly?  Ergonomics research suggests we should perform 20-30 second microbreaks every 20 minutes we are stuck in a chair.  This video shows you a few quick exercises to help stretch the hip flexors and strengthen the gluteal muscles in that amount of time.  If it’s tight buns you’re after, these are a good start.  In that case, spend 5-10 minutes on these about 5 days/week.  In the future, we’ll post more videos of more advanced exercises for the hip to help decrease knee/hip pain, improve athletic performance, decrease injury risk and help make your jeans fit a bit better!  Enjoy, stay active, and leave comments or questions below rather than emailing me directly so I can respond to them and we all can benefit from the discussion.

Dr. Snell

Remember, don’t perform the test if your back is currently hurting or you will get false readings.  Instead, work up to it with the exercises at FixYourOwnBack.com.  Once you are pain free and have a bit of training under your belt, then perform the test.  If anything is unclear, feel free to comment below and we will try to clear things up or link you to an information source that should help.  Be well and stay active!

In contrast to what we have taught our patients in the past, we now do not use these test postures to train the weak muscles.  Instead, we use a Reverse Pyramid method of reps and sets, employing the exercises you should already be familiar with at FixYourOwnBack.com.

After the first video outlining the test, be sure to check out the second video that shows how to train the deficient muscles to make you better. Cheers.