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Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: We’re not talking about long-distance barefoot running or even running in minimal shoes. We’re not even advocating you go run a mere two miles with bare feet. This is about kicking off your shoes—any kind of shoe—just for a few quick striders to encourage a sensory, neuromuscular effect that can have profound benefits for improving your body awareness, and therefore form and efficiency.
“When you stick a cushy membrane between your foot and the ground, you’re impairing a lot of feedback, which allows you to ignore a lot of the imbalances you might have in your gait,” says Jay Dicharry, physical therapist, biomechanics researcher, and director of the REP Lab in Bend, OR.
A lot of that comes down to proprioception, or your perception or awareness of the position and movement of your body in space, says Ian Klein, a specialist in exercise physiology, cross-training, and injury prevention at Ohio University and a volunteer track and field and cross-country coach at the college. “If you’re barefoot, you can really feel where your foot lands in relation to your center of mass, what muscles are being contracted, whether you’re maintaining your arch,” Klein explains.
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Short bouts of barefoot running, then, can provide just enough stimulus to clue you into those imbalances, work on improving them, and—here’s the whole point of this exercise—translate those learnings over to when you put your shoes back on.
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How Barefoot Striders Can Help All Runners
Running barefoot for short periods is great for self-gait modification, says Dicharry. “It’s a cue,” he explains. “When you run barefoot, you start to pay attention to things about your form that you may not have noticed in shoes.” Then, when you’re on your longer runs, you can tell when you’re zoning out and reverting to less efficient habits.
One of the biggest issues barefoot running can help with is overstriding. “The vast majority of runners contact the ground too far in front of their bodies,” says Dicharry. When you put a big, cushioned sole on your foot, that’s no big deal. But when you take away that cushion, it hurts. “If you contact too far in front of you, you’re adding to the amount of load at every single joint,” explains Dicharry.
Take knee pain, for example. Knee injuries account for 28 percent of injuries in runners, according to recent data published in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. “Just having your foot hit the ground closer to your body automatically decreases knee pain by up to 37 percent,” says Dicharry.
Another issue is pronation. It’s hard to really feel that heel to toe rolling motion or your foot’s inversion or eversion when you’ve got a giant cushion under your foot. Somewhat of an inward tilt of your foot is normal, but “sometimes, when they take their shoes off, runners will realize the majority of their weight is on the inside or outside of their foot,” says Klein. That kind of over- or under-pronation can lead to a myriad of issues, from plantar fasciitis, IT band friction, piriformis syndrome, knee pain, shin splints, and stress fractures.
“Barefoot striders allow you to really feel where your weight distribution is, which can be very beneficial when you then go back to a shoe and can't feel it—but your brain now knows where that imbalance is,” says Klein.
How to Incorporate Barefoot Striders
If you’ve never run barefoot before, start on the grass. Sure, you can run barefoot on concrete (and many runners do), but “you’re used to having a softer surface underfoot,” says Dicharry. “The idea is that you get this ‘softness’ from the ground, not the shoe.” Otherwise, head to the track. “A track is already a softer surface, and it’s generally clean and obstacle-free,” says Dicharry.
When you do striders is up to you. Klein has his runners do them after easy workouts. “The key is doing them when your muscles feel fresh, and you feel like you can give the mental effort it takes to do the stride properly,” he explains. You could do it before the workout, he adds, “but then you’ve risk tweaking something and then stressing it too much during the workout and causing further issues from there.”
Dicharry prefers doing striders before a workout to wake-up the feet. “I usually recommend runners do a brief warmup, kick off their shoes, then do some barefoot striders, then put your shoes back on and get your quality effort in,” says Dicharry. Your quality effort could be a speed workout on the track, but also be a tempo run or a long run.
Four to eight barefoot striders of about 40 to 60 meters (walking back in between) twice a week is enough to keep that level of proprioception at a high-enough level that it doesn’t disappear when you put your shoes back on.
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What You Need to Know About Injury Risk
A generally healthy runner is unlikely to experience any issues by incorporating some low-volume barefoot running strides into their weekly routine, says Dicharry.
That said, you should also do a general assessment of your foot strength, lower leg muscle strength, and calf tightness. “Being barefoot puts a much higher demand on the calf and lower leg muscles,” he explains. So if you’ve got a profoundly weak or uncoordinated foot/ankle complex, you’re asking for injury whether you’re in a shoe or barefoot.
“For as much as we work to strengthen our core, hips, and knees, people don’t do squats for their feet and ankles,” says Dicharry. Strengthening your feet and ankles takes targeted efforts and overloading certain tissues. Running 60 meters four to eight times twice a week, even barefoot, isn’t going to cut it in terms of building foot strength.
If you tend to be more injury-prone, you should consult a physical therapist or someone who specializes in running before ditching your shoes. (And, obviously, if you’ve got a raging case of plantar fasciitis or Achilles issues, it’s not the time to jump into barefoot strides.)
At the very least, you should at the very least be walking around barefoot regularly—while making a conscious effort to pay attention to your foot movement—before jumping into barefoot striders, says Klein. “Then, slowly add in that speed, and hopefully your brain and body keep making that conscious effort even though the demand is higher and higher for the nervous system.”
