Run This Way (And You Won’t Get Hurt)

Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run, writes in the New York Times magazine about what he calls “the one best way” to run. What he means, he says, is “not the fastest, necessarily, but the best: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down.” That one best way is, unsurprisingly, the technique that McDougall and an increasing number of of exercise physiologists have been touting for a few years now, a barefoot-style–if not barefoot- of running in which the ankle of the forward foot never extends beyond the knee, and the forefoot strikes the ground before the heel. The one best reason to go over to the “one best way” to run, says McDougall, is the enormous diminishment of stress on the body. The author claims that  Daniel Lieberman, chairman of Harvard’s human evolutionary biology department, found that barefoot runners land with almost zero initial impact shock, while heel-strikers, by comparison, collide with the ground with a force equal to as much as three times their body weight. Watch the video below to see what McDougall is talking about.