Researchers at York University in Toronto have found that exercise may help people with asthma. At least those adults whose asthma isn’t fully controlled by meds.

In a study published online June 7 in the European Respiratory Journal,   researchers took 36 sedentary adults with asthma symptoms that were only partially controlled. Half were put on three months of supervised exercise — jogging, walking on a treadmill, pedaling a stationary bike three times a week, strength training once a week — the other half went about their sedentary lives. At the end of the three months of supervised exercise, that half of the control group continued to workout on their own. At the end of both the three month and six month periods, the exercisers reported improvement in their overall quality of life, especially the parts of it that, during their more leisurely days, had been affected by their asthma.

The researchers were quick to caution that exercise can also trigger asthma attacks, though that didn’t happen during the study, though one exerciser in the study did suffer an asthma attack during the study which resulted in hospitalization, though the attack did not occur while the person was exercising and did not appear to be exercise related.

Read more here.

* * *

Fallen and can’t get up? Odds are if you exercised you wouldn’t have fallen in the first place.

That according to a report conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and published in the July issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which came to this conclusion after analyzing data from folks taking part in the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study from 1970 to 1989, with a follow-up survey in 1990.

Of the 10,615 participants in the study, aged 20 to 87, 20 percent said they had fallen in the previous year. Twenty percent of the 10,615 participants, aged 20 to 87, said they had taken a spill in the previous year. Of those, 15 percent said they fell while walking. (Women were 2.8 times more likely than men to fall while walking.) In analyzing the statistics, researchers found that people who exercised about two hours a week reduced the risk of falling.

Falling results in an estimated 8 million emergency room visits and 19,000 deaths annually in the United States. They are the leading cause of injury among people aged 65 and older in the U.S.

Read more here.

* * *

Finally, the American Council on Exercise’s Workout Watchdog investigates whether electronic muscle stimulation technology pioneered by the Soviets in the 1960s can really lead to a firmer bottom while you watch TV.
Click on Getting To The Bottom of EMS.

We weren’t thrilled by this study from Indiana University that found that people with neat houses tend to be more physically active. Nearly 1,000 residents of St. Louis between the ages of 49 and 65 had their health evaluated as well as the tidiness of the interior and exterior of their homes. Finding: Those folks who kept up the inside of their homes tended to be in better shape. But was there a chicken-and-egg thing at work here? “If you spend your day dusting, cleaning, doing laundry, you’re active,” said NiCole Keith, one of the researchers. Some people may not be inclined to “take 30 minutes to go for a walk, but they’ll take 30 minutes to clean.”

Learn more here.

* * *

Occasionally, we run across a no-duh study, such as this one out of the University of Alberta, which found that the benefits derived from a “traditional aerobics program” exceed those from a walking program. Of 128 “inactive” guys and gals between the ages of 27 and 65 who were divvied up and enrolled in the aforementioned classes over a six-month period, the sweaty aerobics types “showed significantly greater reductions in”:

• Systolic blood pressure (that’s the top number in your blood pressure reading, which represents the maximum pressure exerted when the heart contracts).
• Rating of perceived exertion (your RPE represents how hard you’re working).
• Ventilatory threshold (point at which respiration becomes more difficult during progressively harder exercise).
• Peak VO2 (measure of how much oxygen your body can take in and use).

Also not surprisingly, the “adherence rate” for walkers (92 percent) was higher than for the aerobics people (77 percent). Moral: Work harder, reap more benefits but also run the risk of getting burned out and quitting.

Learn more here.

* * *

Worried that stress is stressing your cells and making them age faster? A study from the University of California San Francisco finds that as little as 14 minutes a day of vigorous physical activity can keep the shoelace tips of your DNA from coming apart and letting your genes unravel. That’s a lay interpretation, those “shoelace tips” being the “telomeres,” or ends of your DNA that can become frazzled by stress. Exercise hard and those telomeres stay the same length, keeping your genes and chromosomes stable.

Learn more here.

Green exercise? Really pressed for time? Is carving out 60 minutes a day to work out, as recommended by the National Institutes of Health,  beyond the pale of your schedule? Even 30 minutes broken into bite-size 10-minute segments isn’t doable? According to a study in the current issue of the American Chemical Society’s “Environmental Science & Technology” journal, just five minutes of “green” exercise a day can improve your health — your mental health, at least. Study authors Jules Pretty and Jo Barton say 10 studies involving 1,252 people in the United Kingdom found that just five minutes of gardening, hiking or other pursuits in a green setting decreases your risk of mental illness and improves your sense of well-being. Read more here.

Photo: Just five minutes a day behind the gardening trowel can lead to a happier you.

Exercise helps cholesterol. A recent study from the University of Nevada Las Vegas doesn’t come as revelation, rather affirmation. According to HealthDay TV *, 20 men enrolled in a daily 45-minute exercise class over a 20 year period all experienced lowered cholesterol. The men, all sedentary at the start of the program, experienced improvement in their LDL, HDL, total cholesterol and in their triglycerides. They experienced the most improvement during the first year of the program, but continued to witness improvement over the 20 years. The exercise class included stretching, muscle building and aerobics.

Are weight loss camps effective? Wonder if those summer camps for kids with weight issues actually work? At least one does, according to a study by the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Dr. Nadim Kanafani, assistant professor of pediatrics at the school, studied kids ranging in age from 10 to 18 at Camp Jump Start, a residential weight-loss camp in Imperial, Missouri. The kids did physical activities, participated in group educational sessions and ate three main meals and two snacks a day, all approved by a registered dietitian. The structured environment and peer support helped the kids lose weight (eight pounds, on average), reduce their Body Mass Index (by an average of three points) and improve in various physical pursuits. Read more here.

National Physical Activity Plan. We, the people, now have a National Physical Activity Plan, which was announced last week in Washington. Now, this being a bureaucratic plan it’s hard to tell specifically what the plan is. The “Recreation” component, for instance, calls for government to “Enhance the existing parks and recreation infrastructure with effective policy and environmental changes to promote physical activity.” (More swingsets?) Under “Transportation/Planning,”  there’s a call for “Local, state, and federal agencies [to] use routine performance measures and set benchmarks for active travel (walking, biking, public transit).” (Um … ) I’ll share specifics as I’m able to ferret them out. Or, do your own ferreting here.

You don’t have to be like Lance. You don’t need to win the Tour de France seven times, break the course record for the Leadville 100 or dabble in triathlons on the side to feel good about yourself. This according to a study out of the University of Florida that found that folks who don’t exercise with a major goal in mind can feel just as good about their body image as people obsessed with training. This, the study finds, as 60 percent of American adults are dissatisfied with how they look, a figure that has more than doubled in the past 20 years. Read more here.

And you won’t find Lance in the Giro d’Italia … but you will find the Big 3 Classic, which began Saturday and runs through May 30, on cable, on Universal Sports. If you have Tivo or similar recording capabilities, the Giro makes great background for your workouts — even time on the dread trainer. (If you don’t have cable/Universal, you can follow the race here.) Lance’s Team Radio Shack, btw, is next in action at the Tour de Picardie in France.

• Don’t have a stroke. And if you’re a woman, you’ll be less likely to have one if you walk two hours or more a week at a “brisk” pace. This according to a study published in “Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association,” which found that women exercising at this level were 37 percent less likely to have a stroke of any kind than sedentary types. Further, these brisk-paced walkers had a 68 percent lower risk of suffering a hemorrhagic stroke and a 25 percent lower risk of suffering an ischemic stroke. The exact relationship between walking and reduced stroke risk is unclear. The study was conducted as part of the long-term Women’s Health Study, a long-term study of 39,315 female health professionals who are predominantly white and whose average age is 54. Read more here.
• Diet alone isn’t enough (again). More research, this time from the Oregon Health & Science University, shows that cutting back on calories alone isn’t enough to lose a significant amount of weight — you’ve got to exercise, too. In this latest affirmation of the need for diet and sweat, the school studied 18 female rhesus macaque monkeys. The monkeys were put on a high-fat diet for several years, then put back on a low-fat diet with a 30 percent reduction in calories. After a month, they exhibited no significant weight loss. During that time as well, the reduction in calories caused the monkeys to become less active. Another reduction in calories a month later saw the monkeys slack off even more. By comparison, a group of monkeys fed a normal monkey diet and trained to exercise for an hour a day on a treadmill did lose weight. The study offers further support to the belief that when the body receives fewer calories it tends to conserve what it’s getting. Read more here.
• Pregnant women don’t exercise enough. A study at UNC-Chapel Hill finds that fewer than one in four pregnant women get enough exercise — “enough” being at least 30 minutes a day, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or 150 minutes a week, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Physical activity during pregnancy … may help prevent gestational diabetes, support healthy gestational weight gain and improve mental health,” according to Kelly Everson, research associate professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and author of the study. The most common form of exercise for the moms-to-be who did exercise: walking. Read more here.
• Don’t let being critically ill keep you from exercising. Exercise even benefits the critically ill, according to a study done in the medical intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins. 57 critically ill patients were put through 30- to 45-minute exercise sessions, which “included any combination of either leg or arm movements while lying flat in bed, sitting up or standing, or walking slowly in the ICU corridors.” The exercise both sped up recovery times and cut in half the amount of prescription sedatives required per patient. Read more here.

Weight training-related injuries up If you use free weights don’t drop them, especially on yourself. A just-released study conducted by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital finds that injuries from weight training increased nearly 50 percent between 1990 and 2007, largely the result of males dropping weights on themselves. The study, to be published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, found that of the 970,000 weight training-related injuries recorded during that 18-year span, 82 percent were suffered by males, 47 percent by lifters age 13 to 24. Ninety percent of the injuries involved free weights, 65 percent involved the lifter dropping said free weight on their person. Read more in this Science Daily post. (Similarly, injuries from rock climbing and the use of ladders and hot tubs were also up.

Soccer reduces risk of falls and bone fractures Playing soccer is good for a host of reasons you might not have suspected, according to the current Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. Research in these articles shows that playing soccer regularly can, according to a report at ScienceDaily.com, increase “both bone mass and bone density, cause a significant improvement in standing postural balance and improve muscle strength. Together, these effects reduce the risk of falls and bone fractures.” Read more here.

The 10-course Last Supper The more recently the Last Supper is depicted, the bigger the meal becomes, according to an analysis of 52 of the most famous paintings of the Last Supper from the book Last Supper. Analysis done by Brian Wansink, John S Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, and his brother Craig, professor of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College, reveals that the more recent the painting, the more food on the plates (not to mention that the plates themselves are two-thirds bigger). Specifically, the entrees were 69 percent bigger and the bread portions 23 percent bigger. The paintings analyzed span 1,000 years. Read more here.

Tuesday’s meeting, attended by 16 parents, teachers and health agency reps, was generally upbeat. There was a considerable exchange of ideas: parents from Rolesville Elementary talked about their morning walking club for students, a parent from Martin Middle School described a walking club for parents dropping off their kids in the morning, mention was made of the popular Rocket Run at Fuquay-Varina Elementary. There was talk of successful rewards programs that substitute throwing candy at the kids when they do something good to awarding them bracelet charms or taking a walk with the principal. (The latter struck me as curious as the walks I recall taking with my principals weren’t what would typically be described as rewards.) It’s obvious that the Wake County PTAs recognize and are responding to the childhood obesity epidemic. (Sobering fact of the day: 67 percent of adults in Wake County are either obese or overweight, as are 34 percent of the county’s 2- to 4-year-olds, 45.5 percent of the 5- to 11-year-olds and 46.6 percent of the 12- to 18-year-olds.)

The lone pall of the morning was cast when the topic turned to school lunches.  A Wake kindergarten teacher became apoplectic (or as apoplectic as a kindergarten teacher can become) describing what passes for lunch at her school. The parents were quick to pile on. Perhaps the only thing that makes less sense than giving an 8-year-old one day a week of PE is serving them an all-yellow lunch (corn dog and fries). The mood dimmed even more when AHA’s Laura Bridges said this will be a difficult problem to overcome as long as school cafeteria’s have to pay for themselves, a situation school officials don’t seem eager to change. As long as the cafeterias have to rely on foods that are sugary and laden with fat — but are tasty and thus, sell — the situation isn’t likely to change.

So who would have guessed that the answer to this problem may come from the very companies that profit from the situation.

Yesterday, PepsiCo announced a global policy to stop selling full-sugar soft drinks to primary and secondary schools by 2012. Granted, the move comes as a growing number of school districts — among them Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Philadelphia — have already banned sugary sodas.  Plus, PepsiCo competitor Coca-Cola earlier announced that it, too, would stop selling full-sugar sodas in schools — unless parents requested them.

PepsiCo’s it’s a well-intentioned move nonetheless, and one that purveyors of other snack-type foods, which are sold in school vending machines and cafeterias, should heed, especially in light of a just-released study from the UNC-Chapel Hill. That study found that American kids now eat three snacks a day, on average, and that those snacks account for nearly a third of all calories consumed by kids on a daily basis. (The study surveyed 31,000 kids ages 2 to 18 over a two-year period.)

Most popular were salty, high-fat snacks. Cakes and cookies were popular, too. All these can be found in most public school cafeterias. PepsiCo is already enjoying a PR boost from yesterday’s announcement. Snack food makers could benefit likewise by offering only baked chips, for instance, or cookies and snack cakes with reduced sugar and fat.

One parent at Tuesday morning’s workshop said the school cafeteria issue is really a non-issue. “If you take out the junk food and just serve them healthy food, they’re kids, they’re hungry! They’re going to eat it.”

And they will.

The report examined 40 studies. Average age of participants, 50; 59 percent were women, and on average they worked out three times a week for 42 minutes at a time over a 16-week period. Anxiety symptoms were reduced by 20 percent for those who exercised. That’s especially significant, the report found, because people who are stressed are less likely to follow a prescribed treatment regimen. Read more here.

* * *
Alas, if you want something to be anxious about, try cutting back on your current exercise program. As I was researching Tuesday’s post about exercising more and more and more, I came across another study resulting from the 19-year-long National Runner’s Health Study. This study found that if you exercise and decide to cut back — over the winter, say — that any weight you gain as a result may be more difficult to lose than weight you already had. The phenomenon is particularly problematic for men who run less than 20 miles a week, then take a break, and women who run less than 10 miles a week.

Probably not what you wanted to hear as a colder-than-usual winter comes to a close and you’re contemplating getting active again.

1. Eat dinner as a family (at the table, not on TV trays assembled in front of the “Family Guy”).
2. Make sure your preschooler gets at least 10.5 hours of sleep a night.
3. Don’t let them have more than two hours of screen time a day.

According to a survey of parents of 8,550 4-year-olds, kids who adhered to the above three practices were 40 percent less likely to be obese than their slacker counterparts who sucked down their mac & cheese in front of a dusk-to-dawn Dora marathon.

“One of the things that’s potentially useful about recommending these routines, if they’re suggested as part of obesity-prevention counseling, is that they may have other benefits, too,” says the study’s lead author, Sarah Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology in the College of Public Health at Ohio State University in Columbus. “We don’t know if it’s the routines per se, or if it’s the parenting associated with these routines or something else correlated with these routines, but we do know these routines are associated with a lower incidence of obesity.”

That could mean instead of fast food in front of the TV, the tots are eating home-cooked (and presumably healthier) meals at the table, they’re off wearing themselves out at the playground rather than being babysat by cable, and instead of staying up late wired by too much TV and chemical-laden food, they’re passed out from a day on the jungle gym.

Read more about the study here.

“Taking this kind of study and dispensing advice is risky business,” exercise physiologist Ross Tucker wrote last week on his Web site, The Science of Sport. “As a friend pointed out yesterday, the media’s interpretation of this study will be a ‘stimulus plan for physical therapists and podiatrists’.”

“I wouldn’t advise anyone to throw out their running shoes and just run barefoot,” cautions  Michael Sharp, a certified athletic trainer with the The Athletic Performance Center in Raleigh.

Rare is the individual who can shuck their shoes and go totally barefoot overnight. The vast majority of us, they say, should proceed with caution.

The Nature study — “Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot runners versus shod runners” — found that runners wearing high-tech running shoes tend to land on their heels, barefoot runners on their forefoot. A forefoot strike, according to the study, reduces the loading rate and peak impact force, both of which are thought to lead to greater risk of injury. The study, led by Dr. Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, was quick to note that further research needs to be done to see if landing on the forefoot does in fact reduce the likelihood of the foot, knee, ankle and hip injuries common to runners.

“Switching could lead to a variety of other injuries,” says Sharp. That, he says, is because running barefoot and changing how your foot lands will tax a whole new set of muscles, muscles that will be subject to the same overuse injuries responsible for most runners’ woes. Thus, it’s generally recommended that if you’re intrigued by running barefoot, you ease into it.

Sharp suggests you find a soft surface relatively free of puncture-wound inflicting debris, the beach, for instance, or better still, a football or soccer field. “At the end of your regular training run, do some barefoot [strides]. Maybe start with four, work up to six or eight. Go the length of the field, then jog back to the start and repeat.”

Tim Clark, a running coach in the Raleigh area, says he hasn’t bought into the barefoot-or-nothing (pardon the oxymoron) camp, but agrees that doing some barefoot running, especially for strides and cool downs, can be beneficial and therapeutic. “An unrestricted foot plant and push-off strengthens the feet and lower legs, and improves overall foot/ankle flexibility.”

In fact, that’s seen as the main benefit of running barefoot: that by offering a more honest reaction to the running surface it allows the body to build the muscles best able to deal with the demands of running. You don’t necessarily need to run barefoot; minimalist shoes that allow your foot to react to the surface can do the trick.

A couple caveats from the barefoot running community.

One, listen to your feet. “The feet are like the canary in the mine; if they hurt, chances are something else will too if you keep going,” says Josh Sutcliffe (pictured), who went barefoot in July and has logged 500 miles sans shoes since. Shoes take away the canary. By learning how to run barefoot, I’ve learned how to avoid the pain by making adjustments in real time to the way I run.”

Adds Amelia Kirkland, a triathlete and triathlon coach in Moore County, “From a coaching perspective, I’d tell my clients to try it and if it hurts, stop.”

Two, barefoot running may not be a universal cure. “I don’t think it’s an everyman’s thing,” says Mickey Fongzales of Durham has been running since middle school, initially for utilitarian purposes (“My parents wouldn’t give me rides and I didn’t have a bike”) now because she just enjoys it. People who are overweight/obese, for one, might be wise to stick with shoes.  The lack of cushion to absorb some of that excess weight could create stress issues, says former personal trainer who says she once qualified as “clinically obese.”

Perhaps more importantly, she says running barefoot may not be for people who aren’t in touch with their bodies. “You have to have good body awareness,” she says, touching on Sutcliffe’s “canary feet” hypothesis. It’s not just a matter of paying attention to avoid injury, but to improve your technique and performance as well.

Even Lieberman, the Nature study author, agrees that running barefoot or in minimalist shoes isn’t for everyone. Asked what he would advise in the wake of his study, he replied, “People should have fun and do what they want.” He, too, cautions against making a wholesale transition to running barefoot.

“My big worry is that people are extremely likely to develop Achilles tendonitis if they transition too fast. It is vital, absolutely critical,” Lieberman adds, “to transition slowly and carefully and not all at once.”

Sharp, the athletic trainer, said another injury concern with switching too fast is plantar  fascitis, or irritation and swelling of the thick tissue on the bottom of the foot, a common source of heel pain.

The incentive, though, to incorporate some degree of barefoot running to a running routine is strong. Considering that 40 percent to 60 percent of runners are injured in any  one year, the allure of running injury-free is huge.

And while most barefoot runners say they run for fun, not for competition, there’s evidence that running barefoot can make the competitive even moreso.

“I’ve been taught from USA Triathlon, my coaching certification, that all your power for running should be generated from the pelvic girdle, not from the legs,” says Kirkland. “And running barefoot seems to enforce that, at least for me.”

Why? It’s easier on his body.

To non-runners that may sound crazy. To a lot of runners it sounded crazy until Christopher McDougall made a compelling case for shedding your high-tech, high-price running shoes in “Born to Run.” Since its publication last year, “Born to Run” has been a must-read in the running community, especially among the estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of runners who are injured every year.

McDougall himself was a statistic, having aggravating his cuboid, “a cluster of bones parallel to the arch that I hadn’t even known existed until it reengineered itself into an internal Taser.” One of the nation’s top sports medicine experts told him to quit, to ride a bike instead, that the human body wasn’t designed for running. McDougall wasn’t ready to give up that easily. Besides, it didn’t make sense: “ … why should every other animal on the planet be able to rely on its legs except us?” And why did some humans have absolutely no problem going out and running day after day? McDougall embarked on a quest to see if there wasn’t some way he could run injury free. He found his answer in the barefoot and sandal-clad Tarahumara runners of Mexico’s Copper Canyon.

Actually, he didn’t find answers so much as examples. The Tarahumara were capable of running extraordinary distances — 100 miles or more at a time — with no shoes, or minimalist footwear at best. They were able to run late in life, into their 80s and 90s, and they were able to do it virtually injury free. Last week’s study in the journal Nature — “Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot runners versus shod runners” — shed some light on why this might be.

Like similar studies in the past, the study lead by Dr. Daniel Lieberman with Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, found that barefoot runners tend to land on the forefoot, shod runners on their heels. What the Nature study added to the discussion was that running barefoot and landing on the forefoot reduces both the loading rate and peak impact force, both of which are thought to lead to greater risk of injury. Thus, the study suggests that people who run barefoot or with minimalist shoes such as the Nike Free have fewer injuries.

Hayden and other local runners say they didn’t need a study to tell them that.

“I was always battling some sort of injury after another,” says Hayden. “I have feet as flat as pancakes and am also an over-pronator.” To solve his problems he was told to invest in pricey motion-control shoes, such as the $130 Brooks Beast, a shoe that broke down quickly and had to be replaced every 400 miles.

“But the shoes did nothing to prevent the injuries or the sore knees,” he says.

Research lead him to barefoot running. He stuck his toe in tentatively, tacking a quarter mile of barefoot running to the end of his training runs. As he built up calluses, he extended his barefoot mileage. Before long he was running 8- to 10-miles a day barefoot, donning shoes only for his weekend trail runs (“I still haven’t been able to run barefoot on rocky, rooty trails and am not sure if I ever will.”). In October, he ran a half marathon barefoot. During his barefoot tenure he’s had no injuries.

“Running barefoot forces you to run with good form and gives you immediate feedback if you’re running wrong,” says Hayden. That instant correction of bad form is what prevents injury, he says. You don’t necessarily have to be barefoot for that to happen.

Josh Sutcliffe: Injury free since shucking the shoes.

That, agrees Josh Sutcliffe of Madison (“45 minutes straight north of downtown Greensboro”) is the crux of the issue. Sutcliffe started running in 1999, was soon doing respectable 23-minute 5Ks. In 2003, he developed ITB  — iliotibial band syndrome, or pain and inflammation of the outer knee — and went looking for help. His search led him to the Web site of barefoot running guru Ken Bob Saxton. Last March, Sutcliffe finally gave barefoot running a try; since July he has run 500 miles sans shoes. He, too, has been injury free since.

“My bare feet teach me how to run smoothly by providing instant feedback about the conditions of the surface I’m running on,” says Sutcliffe, who keeps a blog on barefoot running, barefootjosh.com. “You don’t need to be barefoot, or even in minimalist shoes, to alter the way your foot lands. But if you don’t understand how to be smooth, my guess is you’re still risking injury, regardless of what part of your foot hits the ground first.”

Nike's Waffle Trainer: The shoe to have in the mid-1970s.

In “Born to Run,” McDougall says our distraction from this smooth, natural way of running began in the early 1970s with the introduction of the modern running shoe, specifically Nike’s Waffle Trainer. Born on the waffle press of University of Oregon running coach Bill Bowerman, the shoe had a cushy heel that encouraged runners to foresake the forefoot strike favored by humans the previous 2 million years in favor of a stride-lengthening heel strike. This sudden heel-strike business was new to the foot, the ankle, the knee and assorted other body parts that have responded, McDougall writes, by breaking down.

Triangle-area running coach Bob Dannegger says another recent study, published in the December issue of PM&R, the journal of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, supports that notion. “They concluded that increased joint torques at the hip, knee, and ankle were observed with running shoes compared with running barefoot.” However, he adds, the study did not determine whether that increased torque led to injuries, “but it’s highly probable it eventually would for many runners.”

Determining whether that increased torque does lead to injuries, most agree, is the next step in vetting the merits of running barefoot.

The Science of Sport Web site cites a study in Cape Town, South Africa in which runners had their footstrike patterns altered to more of a barefoot style with two weeks of training. A biomechanical analysis found the forefoot strike did indeed lower the impact force and created less stress on the knee. Yet after two weeks of running using the new forestrike approach, 19 of the 20 study participants were injured because their calves and ankles couldn’t handle the sudden change.

“If you wish to guarantee yourself an injury, then go out for a 2km run barefoot on a hard surface, and you will be asking your calf muscles and Achilles tendons to do work that for perhaps 30 years they haven’t had to do, writes Ross Tucker, who has a Ph.D in exercise physiology and runs the Science of Sport site with Jonathan Dugas.

“It’s intriguing,” Tucker writes of the Nature study, “and certainly does suggest advantages to barefoot running. It is not the last word, but rather the latest word in this debate.”

Tomorrow: Intrigued by running barefoot? A look at how to make the transition or incorporate it into your running routine.

Sources: HealthDay, an online publication of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health; The Science of Sports Web site; Biomechanics of Foot Strikes & Applications to Running Barefoot or in Minimal Footwear Web site, by Dr. Daniel E. Lieberman, Madhusudhan Venkadesan, Adam I. Daoud and William A. Werbel.