Rediscovering Barefoot Walking

I’d been feeling lethargic for months and so I signed up for a free self development course put on by Tony Robbins once a year. The program really did the trick and I was feeling inspired and energized but I knew it wouldn’t last if I didn’t commit to an ongoing strategy to keep my energy moving. I decided to take up jogging. I’d taken it up previously but my knees hadn’t coped. Back then I was still eating dairy, which I later realized was causing arthritic inflammation in my knees. I discovered this when I gave up eating dairy for other reasons and the arthritis went away. So I thought I’d give running another go. People warned me that jogging is hard on the joints but I actually felt like my body had gone soft and needed some jolting to somehow pull everything together tighter. I had noticed in recent years that when I jumped on a trampoline I could feel my kidneys flopping around in the back, rather uncomfortably. I remembered seeing martial artists strengthening their bodies’ resilience by repeatedly subjecting themselves to blows. It appears that the body can learn to pull itself together. Aside from exercise creating more muscle mass, it also increases bone density and a strengthening of the ligaments and tendons themselves as well as their attachments to the bones. Watching Olympic sprinters bursting from the starting blocks, I remember thinking, “my body would snap under that kind of pressure right now. I need to strengthen up”. So the long and short of it was that I decided to start running again. A week into starting, I joined a friend who had taken up jogging only a few years earlier. We got to talking about his shoes, which were a brand called Saguaros. They make “barefoot” running shoes. He explained the principle of barefoot running a little before observing my running style. “It looks like you’re heel-planting”, he said. He explained how modern trainers allowed you to land on your heel when you run and walk, instead of on the front part of your foot, as you would in bare feet. You simply can’t heel plant in bare feet because it’s too jarring. There are no shock absorbers in the heel and the shock travels straight up the leg, first through the ankle, then through the knee to the hip joint. According to some specialist, especially those who espouse the idea of barefoot running, this is the underlying cause of so many joint issues. The oversized spongy heel pads of conventional trainers attempt to ameliorate this shock but just end up enabling the wrong technique to continue.

Since that conversation I have been relearning how to walk. I say “relearning” because I, like a lot of kids of my generation, used to run around barefoot all day long. Most kids who do this have perfect walking and running technique. It’s when conventional footwear is introduced that the bad habits begin.

Initially, when I started to transition to the new way of walking, I wondered how my calf muscles were ever going to cope with the new demands. Because you’re effectively “on your toes” more, the calves do a lot more work. What I found out, to my surprise, is that the calves actually cope just fine. It turns out, they’re designed to handle the demand. Walking in this way is actually a pleasure. The best part for me is that when I’m walking correctly and engaging the correct muscles, I actually feel more youthful and have a more positive outlook. I can feel my posture is different. More balanced, more alert. When I studied Aikido years ago, their recommended foot position for being combat ready was exactly like a barefoot step, one foot slightly in front of the other and weight over the balls of the feet. They found that this enabled the maximum range of choices from which to respond to an attack. In a walking scenario that same readiness means that you’re able to make split second choices in response to uneven terrain which further reduces risk of injury and enhances confidence and the sheer joy of walking.
While I’m enjoying the transition to a barefoot style of walking and running, it hasn’t all been a “walk in the park”. Because I was learning a new way of moving, I literally tried to run before I could walk. As a result, I put too much strain, too quickly on muscles, joints and ligaments that weren’t used to the new work load, resulting in an archilles tendon strain. That put me out of action for 2 weeks, long enough to get the message that I can’t just expect the body to adapt to a new regime overnight, considering that I’d been operating in the previous mode for about 40 years.
So that’s where I’m at currently. I’m patiently building my capacity to walk longer distances using the barefoot style through my daily walking practice. I will graduate into running at some point, but I’m not too bothered when that will be because the correct walking style is already yielding so many benefits that I’m just enjoying every step of the journey.