If you haven’t heard, the minimalist footwear industry has taken a turn for the worse. Shoe sales aren’t booming like they used to, and companies are starting to add more material to their shoes to stay with the current market trend. After all, that’s what it’s about—the trend. It’s the shoe company’s job to sell shoes. If shoes with more padding and more support are selling, well, you’d better order some more EVA.
The trend doesn’t shock me at all. Actually, I’ve been surprised by the number of people who wear “barefoot” shoes, especially the ones with five individual toes. If “Healthy People = Barefoot People” is accurate, as I wrote a while back, then there really should not be too many people wearing truly minimalist-style shoes. After all, our overall health is not improving as a society. As I discussed in that article, your feet are a great reflection of your overall health. So the more health problems you have, the more your feet will reflect that, and the more shoe you will need to support your failing body.
Minimalist is not just walking around in less shoe—it’s about your body’s ability to adapt to the environment, including the surface, regardless of whether you’re standing or walking on tile, concrete, stone, grass, or hardwood. A well-adapted body is a healthy body. A healthy body can handle less footwear or none at all on any surface if the environment is safe.
Follow the Fad or Follow the Research?
Do you need research to tell you what you should be doing? If you truly believe that less footwear support and cushion is beneficial to your body, then you couldn’t care less what the latest and greatest research says. Remember, too, that the research is often funded by shoe companies and their study participants are termed “healthy” because they have no known disease and don’t smoke. They’re often considered fit because they exercise a few times a week and have no current injuries (daily aches and pains don’t count). Hopefully you don’t want to compare yourself to these average folks.
People follow the fad and the media. If five-toed shoes are hot, then let’s all wear them as we grab our gluten-free bagels and soy latte. It’s the cool thing to do. If you really understand how beneficial something is to your health, the fad doesn’t matter. You were hopefully eating eggs when your doctor told you it would result in high cholesterol. You were using salt when the media warned it would harden your arteries. And you were staying away from hydrogenated fats when everyone was told margarine was the food of the future and butter was dangerous. So now that the minimalist industry is going backward after only a few short years, are you going to stick more cushion in your shoes or stick to what you truly believe in? After all, there’s really not a whole lot of funding for the barefoot walking/running movement because there is no money to be made; don’t expect some mind-blowing, beneficial barefoot studies to pop up anytime soon.
You Ain’t Wearin’ Minimalist Anyway
So what really constitutes a minimalist shoe? Is it a 4mm or less drop? Is it a certain width in the toe box? Is it a shoe that a leprechaun can fit into? There isn’t a set criterion for a “minimalist” shoe, or even the ones that claim to be “barefoot-style” shoes. Shouldn’t a barefoot shoe be just that—barefoot with no shoe?
Without naming names—ah, screw that—let’s talk about Hokas and the many other “minimalist” running shoes that are far from that: Most are maximalist shoes. I completely understand that if you can hop into a Hoka and run again, it’s a beautiful thing, but perhaps you should be asking yourself, “Should I really be running if I need these devices on my feet?”
I’ve said before that most people should NOT run because they are broken: their health and fitness are poor, their mechanics are poor, and they don’t move well. So if that’s you, why would you want to go and run when you can’t perform basic, essential human movements like walking, squatting, and balancing? Running is too far advanced for you, and putting on a shoe that gives the false illusion that you can perform is just like taking a sleeping pill and thinking you’re getting the benefits of sleep. Yeah, you fell asleep, but you really didn’t go through the proper sleep cycles necessary for a restful night; you cheated the system, and it’ll catch up with you eventually. Step back and learn the basic mechanics before you run.
Saucony Kinvara and Virrata, Brooks PureFlow, and all the other “feel the ground shoes” out there that many think are minimalist are not even close to my definition of such. Being zero-drop with a +15mm stack height or a 4mm drop and a crazy amount of cushion and motion control is a far cry from letting your feet move as they are designed to do. I know they make a lot of people feel good when they’re able to step into a trendy barefoot-style shoe while drinking their kombucha tea, but your shoes probably aren’t much better than whatever you were wearing before you stepped on the trend train.
My definition of a minimalist shoe is one with <10mm stack height, zero-drop, a firm motion-free and cushion-free midsole, and enough room to allow your toes to splay. But regardless of what I think, the idea here (well, one of them anyway) is that less is usually better. If you can’t get away with less, you need to ask yourself why.
More Footwear Just Delays the Inevitable
Everyone is going to break down at a certain point. Muscle imbalances occur when the nervous system reaches the maximum amount of stress it can handle (different for everyone and always changing in each individual), and then fatigue, pain, and possibly an injury set in. Many distance runners feel that more of a shoe is better because it allows them to run farther without pain or injury. I understand this concept, but I also think that if you need a shoe to support you at a certain distance in training or in a race, then maybe you shouldn’t be running that distance in the first place. After all, more shoe, just like an orthotic, is not going to truly correct any imbalance; it is just going to support the imbalance while altering other aspects of your body, like your proprioception and, therefore, your muscles, tendons, and ligaments will pay the price. So if you can’t run 20 miles without Hokas, you should run much less. Something to think about.
Remember that shoes are for protection only. And of course I can see style at times; you don’t need to be some barefoot hippy that shuns all footwear all the time because they’re evil. (But if you’re into that, good for you, hippy.) You might not want, and maybe in some cases you’re not allowed, to go barefoot, but you should be able to. You should be able to walk with only a few millimeters of material between you and the ground of any surface for any period of time.
If you always need foot support, then you’ve got problems, or you’re doing more than you’re currently capable of. Wear the footwear you need to as you address why you can’t wear less, but don’t do more with more footwear—that’s the completely wrong idea. Minimalism and barefoot are about injury prevention and treatment, as well as performance, regardless of what new and exciting research The New York Times might come out and discuss tomorrow.
If you follow the trend, you will be wearing more of a shoe next year than you were last, and you’ll miss the health and fitness benefits without even knowing it because fewer and fewer people will be talking about it.
