Why you need to ditch your runners and put on your minimal weightlifting shoes on the gym floor.
Why are you lifting in runners?
It's 2022, most cyclists and running athletes who are seriously game, know that lifting weights forms the baseline for all your other activities. Even the fittest of endurance athletes, need to lift to protect them from injury and maximise their performance.
When it comes to partaking in the weightlifting based activity itself, did you know that our runners are best left at home?
Why so you may ask? The fact that there is an innate difference of forces at the foot when comparing running and weightlifting based activities, which may make you ponder how exactly your footwear choices influence your performance, at any fitness level. In this respect, running shoes are specifically designed for running. For instance, they have a foamy base that cushions your foot, acting as a shock absorber against the constant impact forces on your joints. Often also, these days the running shoes are designed with a very narrow toe base, that may in some cases help to stabilise the foot from rotation forces. Plus, many designs theses days the shoe is designed like a speed boat where the toe component is elevated more than the heel.
So why is are these features bad news when it comes to lifting?
Firstly, let’s tackle the cushioning. Whilst cushioning is great for running, when it boils down to weightlifting activities, your extra foam seriously hinders your neuromuscular connection to your lift. This is a posh way of saying that, in runners you will have a lot of trouble feeling what your foot is doing in the ground where the forces begin on any deadlift, squat and lunge based activity. This becomes problematic as we need to feel the tripod of the foot during our lift to recruit the right muscles in the lift, so we reduce chances of injury and increase our ability to progress our weights.
The narrow toe base
A narrow toe base style is very common design in most running shoes on the market today because it is seen as aesthetically pleasing. I can guarantee that your toes and feet won't be feeling good as you look, when subjected to such squished up treatment in your shoes even when running. For your compound lifting based activities, starters, lifting from a narrow base, is an incredibly unnatural way of lifting. If you are experiencing knee collapse, heel raise, lack of recruitment from your legs and glutes, back pain, hip pain knee pain on your big lifts, struggling to improve your 1RM's or hit new PR's ? These are issues issues can come down to stability or a lack there of, which emanates from feeling what happens from the ground up AKA from your foot level. If your foot is squished in a narrow toe base it will hinder your ability to splay your toes and push from the tripod or the axis of your foot, so that you can activate all of your leg; front, middle and back, therefore giving you power boost.
Your narrow shoes foot can have long term consequences also. They won't magically un-squish themselves from wearing narrow shoes long term. Your feet will adapt to the narrow shoe base over time and it literally can take months of barefoot or minimal lifting shoe wearing to fix the problems.
The speed boat style of running shoes
For all the same problems of lifting in running shoes, lifting in the boat style of shoes is going to throw you off piste, when it comes to your gym performance. The speed boat style of running shoes is where the design is so that the heel is heavily cushioned and the toes less cushioned. This is to minimise impact forces at the foot from the heel strike during running. When considering your compound lifts, this is problematic. This is because when you want the most out of your lifts, you need to spread the load evenly over the axis of the foot in order to create maximum impact.
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