Dr Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has been studying the growing injury crisis in the developed world for some time and has come to a startling conclusion: 'A lot of foot and knee injuries currently plaguing us are caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate (ankle rotation) and give us knee problems.
And here is a strange quote:
If anything, the injury rates have actually ebbed up since the Seventies - Achilles tendon blowouts have seen a ten per cent increase. (It's not only shoes that can create the problem: research in Hawaii found runners who stretched before exercise were 33 per cent more likely to get hurt.)
It's just an article, certainly not a research paper. There are liberties taken with comparisons and facts....the old "statistical survey of 1." But probably worthwhile to do some extra reading if you are a runner. It certainly is unlikely a suprise to anyone that the running shoe industry is based on marketing, not "peer-reviewed studies"..:)
However, I do think some of this is diagnosis-related. For instance, take Basketball today compared to 25 years ago. How many coaches/commentators lament that sports athletes no longer "play through the pain"? Is it instead that the trainers/doctors/etc have learned more about sports-related injuries and how to prolong the careers of athletes?
