Around 2009 there started a trend within the running community towards barefoot running. The craze was to dispose of the arch supporting and padded athletic shoes as they were considered the main cause of most of the injuries that runners had been getting. The fad was supported and touted by a lot of so-called gurus, websites, community forums as well as books. It was heavily offered as the response to almost all of the issues that runners experienced. It was approximated that up to around a quarter of all runners dabbled with the reasoning behind barefoot or minimalist running at the time. Despite most of the rhetoric and claims made for barefoot running, the science and research did not support these claims which were being made. For most of those athletes that tried it, the advantages failed to materialise, and so they returned to running in what they were used to be exercising in. Athletes gradually dropped interest in it and regardless of all the hype and the amount of promotion which was directed at it, the craze began falling by end of 2014 and these days it seldom rates a mention with the exception of historical terms and also […]
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