Are Your Running Shoes Causing You Pain?
Are your running shoes causing you pain or even injury? In short, most likely not. This is a very common thing I hear and we're often very quick to blame something small like our shoes for why we're having pain. So if it's not the shoes, why are you having pain with running? Some people will say running form but I disagree. The most common reason for pain or injury with running is poor programming. Like Taylor Swift famously said "It's me. I'm the problem, it's me." So let's stop blaming our shoes for our own mistakes.
But what do I mean by poor programming?
The most common example of this is doing too much too quickly after doing not enough for too long. These are the people that go from never running or running a couple of times a month to running several days a week out of the blue. These people did nothing to prepare themselves for that volume of running and didn't build up slowly and I can almost guarantee something is going to go wrong in their training.
Another example is the runner that has been training a ton without any recovery days or cross-training. They continue to perform and train at such a high level and high volume without some sort of exercise diversity or recovery days and will most likely experience some sort of pain or injury. Now the tough truth about this runner is that if you want to be competitive and perform at that high of a level you’re going to get injured at some point and there's nothing to do to prevent it. The only thing they can do is overcome it and come out the other side stronger and more resilient.
When do running shoes cause pain or injury?
There are some rare times when running shoes can contribute to a problem. One is you're used to one type of shoe and you switch to a completely different kind of shoe when you aren't used to it. An example is a runner switching from a shoe with large amounts of support and cushion to a very minimalistic shoe. Making a change that dramatic without slowly building into it can cause a problem. But once again it's not only the shoe’s fault.
I hope this blog has helped answer some questions or maybe even busted some common myths about running shoes.
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Until next time,
Dr. Andrew Schneider DC, ATC
