Josh Leeger - The Best Book on How to Barefoot Run

By Charlie Reid

The closer you are to nature to what is absolutely natural (not man-made nature) the healthier youll be. The Centenarian Culture, who lived in a natural setting, exhibited low stress, local-natural diet, high levels of activity throughout the lifespan, most goods produced locally. Discover your movement potential by rooting yourself into the ground with your own feet without the use of shoes and orthotics.

We believe the highest mark of a human being is that persons ability to create or accomplish something out of nothing. Movement, either barefoot or in minimalist footwear, is an expression of this paradigm and is central to our personal choice to explore our own bodies and the possibilities they hold. We already know what orthotics and expensive footwear can do, but what can you do when you take them off? You are enough without shoes, and we hope this is just one step in your journey to a healthier, happier self.

Some Potential Reasons To Go Barefoot:

• Increased balance.
• Better body awareness through a more reactive foot/ankle.
• Better posture (elevated heels and shoes distort the bodys posture)
• Potential decrease in plantar fasciitis and foot-related pain.

Barefoot is the number one way to enter into the sphere of health! Its very positive. People get into pain cycles because theyre disconnected from their bodies. Be aware of how you sit every day. Be aware of your movement habits (or lack of movement). After several of our clients injected barefoot movement into their day it began to open up other things in their life like eating better and sleeping more. The fantastic thing about any health practice is that once you start to improve one area of your life, things begin to improve in other areas of it.

Have fun, dont be overly exuberant, work within yourself, and use the tools in this book to help guide your barefoot/minimalist footwear journey.

By Josh Leeger

Way back in our history, something shifted to give our distant ancestors a greater advantage. We started to walk on 2 legs exclusively, gaining the ability to use our hands separately from our feet.

What caused the shift? We cant say, but we look at chimpanzees and other close relatives to observe their bipedal activity.

Chimps and other hominids typically dont walk on two legs for long periods of time. However, they will use a two-legged stance to reach for food. As species adapt to swinging between branches, the body changes and adapts to demands placed on it by a new posture (Sylvester, 2006).

Similarly, for us, morphological changes over time (use-patterns, biomechanical efficiency, mutation or other factors) were almost certainly part of our adaption process. All told, this wasnt a short series of simple steps to bipedalism. It was a long stumbling road with fits and starts that led to the first bipedal ape, or humans. (Preuschoft, 2004).

Humans are known for their creativity and ingenuity. If we imagine early humans, we think of animals that constantly recognized potential in their environment. They developed new tools, tried new things, figured things out.

Once we began walking upright, all of our load was focused onto 2 points our feet. Not only that, but we began to cover all types of terrain. It probably wasnt long before we figured out that we could reduce injuries from sharp sticks, rocks or other natural features by covering our feet.

Evidence shows that the use of footwear goes as far back as 24,000 years. One researcher provides a very good, if highly technical, overview of the effects of footwear on the foot primarily on the increase of the arch and the decrease in the robustness of the big toe, especially of the lateral foot. The evolution of the modern foot is related to the use of footwear. This process continues to a very large extent with the advent of the modern running shoe with its over-sized wedge heel (Trinkaus, E., 2005).

By Josh Leeger

Barefooting is a full-body way to enter into the sphere of health and has positive impacts on total wellness. The sphere of health is the many ways toward improvement of physical, emotional, spiritual and communal health.

When you address one part of this sphere, your consciousness wakes up and you begin to pay attention to other components of the sphere. When you take your shoes off you get better sensory feedback from your environment and can start to regain function lost from years of wearing shoes. This affects your physical health in a positive way. Barefooting is a way to enter the sphere of health then branch out and make positive changes in other areas of your life.

It is our belief that the body is the most beautiful piece of machinery ever created, and the foot is surely one of the human bodys greatest features. We cannot make arguments saying that taking off ones shoes will lead to decreases in foot pain, better balance, more efficient running, etc, although weve seen plenty of anecdotal cases of this from our clients, friends, and colleagues. There is something very liberating about taking off your shoes. Remember the joy you felt as a child when you ran down the beach towards the water, or played in the front yard in the sprinklers?

For us, barefooting was a personal choice. As health and fitness coaches, we always look at current research, new training methods, techniques and equipment. However, over the years, weve noticed that the simplest solution is usually the best. Weve heard time and time again about the benefits of choosing the right footwear and the right orthotics, but the foot is an adaptable structure like the rest of the body. What if a barefoot movement practice, over time, strengthened the foot, thus influencing the rest of the bodys function?

So, we started taking our shoes off, working out, walking, running and hiking all barefoot. This seemed to lead to better balance and coordination, as well as pointed out flaws in technique during different exercises (this isnt something we can prove in a lab if you want the data, it just isnt there yet). The next step was our clients. We had our clients take their shoes off, and what we noticed was nothing short of awesome: balance, strength and coordination all improved!

This makes sense, especially considering how thick and unstable some shoes are. They distort the bodys ability to send feedback from the ground up. Taking our shoes off and proposing our clients do the same was an exciting expedition, exploring the possibilities of a life lived without overly-supportive footwear.

However, we discovered that it wasnt exactly that simple. Indigenous cultures used to travel barefoot their whole lives. They began as barefoot infants and continued to remain so throughout their adult lives. Most of the rest of us have grown up with shoes. That isnt necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that needs to be balanced. The reality is that barefooting should be a mix of both.

Everybodys journey is going to be different; everybodys going to start at a different pace. Check with a physician first. If you have severe foot issues or dysfunctional feet, then start at a slower pace. If you have loss of sensation, nerve damage, or diabetes, going completely barefoot may not be a good option for you. Some people have more functional feet. Perhaps theyve played soccer since they were 6. Theyre going to have good foot function. But you have to earn that functionality before you push the envelope.