Over the last year I spent some time learning and thinking about how our body moves. One problem is that our body did not evolve for our current environment. It seems that the most damaging habits that we have are: sitting for extended periods of time and wearing shoes with thick soles. The part about sitting is probably obvious for many people. The shoe situation is less obvious because it happened more recently. The biomechanics of walking and running in shoes with thick soles are very different than barefoot walking/running. The book “Born to run” got me into minimalist shoes more than 10 years go and I never looked back. More recently researchers like Daniel Lieberman and Irene Davis did experiments to show what was already quite obvious, barefoot running has less impact on the body than running in shoes with thick soles.
Another thing to consider is the overall biomechanics of the whole body. Many of us have imbalances between various muscle groups. Therefore we do not move in the best way possible and become prone to injuries. One approach that evaluates the whole body is called functional movement and it is promoted by Gray Cook. You can watch a good presentation he gave at Google. In Gray Cook’s opinion we need a systematic approach: first have a basic level of health, then evaluate and improve functional movement, and only after that move to fitness (amateur level athlete) and maybe even skills (professional level athlete). If we jump directly to fitness and skills we have a higher risk of creating even more imbalances in the body resulting in injury.
In my clinical practice I see patients with chronic pain after various injuries. I think one important question to ask is why they were injured in the first place. For example why would somebody get a herniated disk? Or knee osteoarthritis? I think most injuries are a result of the imbalance between tissue quality and load. Major factors that impact tissue quality are prediabetes/diabetes and obesity (through the metabolic consequences). Major factors that impact load are obesity and poor biomechanics. We need to address al these factors in everybody. Ideally we should strive to prevent injury. For example, a physical therapist or another trained professional should do annual well being evaluations in everybody and see what things can be improved to prevent injury.
In my own case I changed my diet to improve my health, I started to incorporate yoga to improve my functional movement and I am looking into better running techniques to improve my fitness.
Good resources:
- many talks by Daniel Lieberman and Irene Davis on youtube
- for running advice and training I like Mark Cucuzzella. Just watch how he runs barefoot in this video
- for whole body exercise a decent resource is Diamond Dallas Page Yoga