FREE GOES BACK TO ITS ROOTS from wisepowder's blog

FREE GOES BACK TO ITS ROOTS


Do you remember what you were doing in 2004? A young Eliud Kipchoge came 3rd in the 5,000m at the Athens Olympics, as did Tirunesh Dibaba (wow, read that again). Nike were busy dropping the first ever Nike Free 5.0; a shoe designed to replicate the benefits of barefoot running in a safer environment (The hero colourway was blue/yellow if you’re old enough to remember it).To buy more NIKE FREE FLYKNIT 4.0 with cheap price, you can visit shoesnewest official website.

If you’re not old enough to remember the Nike Free in 2004, you might think you know what Free is all about, but let me catch you up.

Back in the early 2000’s, a team of Nike designers including Tobie Hatfield (Tinker’s brother, if you’re wondering) met with Stanford’s coach at the time, Vin Lananna, who apparently fed back that he thought Nike had stopped thinking of the foot when designing running shoes. The Stanford teams were doing occasional sessions barefoot on golf courses at the time, something Lananna thought crucial to their success.

This led the design team to start from the ground up (pardon the pun) on an innovation that would work with the foot, not against it, and promote a natural range of motion, thereby increasing strength in the foot and the muscles around it (Think about the era we’re talking about here – running shoes were big and heavy and stiff).

Why does this matter? There’s a bunch of reasons, but we know that allowing muscles to extend through a fuller and more natural range of motion is going to lead to stronger muscles, and I can’t think of a time when someone has asked for weaker muscles.

Consider the training environments of East African runners; so much of their running is done on rocky dirt roads, through uneven fields, and on tracks that are substandard compared to what we run on. This environment naturally lends itself to increased foot strength, balance, and flexibility. Do East Africans win races because they have stronger feet than their competition? No, but there is something to be said for the way they cover ground.