vibram (VEE-bram) five fingers
 

http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/

anyone tried these yet? yes, they look rediculous, but i'm really getting into the whole barefoot running concept. enough so that i ordered a pair of the VFF bikila's from citysports.com.

saw these on the news last night, tons of people at my gym use them but like if you drop a weight your kinda fucked

My buddy and I looked into getting these. They are a bit weird and take a bit of getting used to. I would recommend trying them out before actually buying them; you can find them at MEC.

They're cool, but I didn't pick them up because I didn't really think they felt great on my feet. My buddy did and he spent some time running in them. I think running on any hard surface is not good for these shoes because after running about 5 or 6K on the track, he got some blisters from them.

you definitely have to ease into them. from what i've read, 5 minutes per running session and gradually increasing week by week. lots of injuries reported by people trying to do too much too soon.

i don't think they have nearly as much potential benefit in the gym as they do on the track. i'm still educating myself on barefooting, but the idea of running totally barefoot is quite interesting. also that using less cushioning (or none at all) under my feet may actually be beneficial to my moderate knee pain is totally opposite from my conventional thinking - for those unfamilair, running barefoot forces you to take shorter strides and land on the balls of your feet with your knees bent much more than with shoes where most people land with a heel-first strike. heel strikes occur with little to no bend in the knees which translates into eventual knee problems. youtube and google for more info...

Makes perfect sense for me. Humans weren't meant to run with huge sponges attached to their feet, nor were we meant to run for distances longer than a few hundred meters at a time. Barefoot will force us to be more human :thumbsup:

i use em for running, and they're better for that. for lifting weights, chucks/purcells are pretty much the exact same.

just dont run on concrete

humans are anarobic creatures. we were ment to throw things at animals, not chace them for 50 miles.

I see quite a few people using these during the Grouse Grind.

on another note...shox are really bad for you...
it unbalances your whole body puts a lot of pressure on your calves

How much do those sell for?

Berz out.

you can knock off ones on dealxtreme :D

nike 6.0 are probably the next best thing to these.

berz...$85 at MEC

They say you're supposed to start with 6.0, work your way down until you're using "Nike Free" which simulates bare feet. "1.0" would be totally barefoot. I think the gradual idea is good, but potentially expensive

depends, there are several models. i ordered the bikilas from citysports.com for $99usd shipped to blaine WA.

i disagree. i think the opposite is true and we have just become lazy.

according to my research, and this artisic rendering of early human...

http://static.open.salon.com/files/c...1256319995.jpg



... you will note early man has a club. presumably for bonking food on the head to kill it. he also appears to have a large upper body in comparison to his lower body. one would suspect this is an evolutionary developement to, infact, HELP with the bonking on the head. it seems he has developed into a short chase with a big swing kind of creature. had early man been a chaser, you would expect to see more of a lean body type over all, helping with endurance running.

your artistic rendering has poor running form. look at that heel strike - ouch!

Oh boy, not another one of these arguments. Staying out of this one for once :D

reviving an old thread and obviously you were at least half joking with your post, but here is a fascinating rebuttal nonetheless..

Nor were we meant to run on concrete.

The odd thing I find about barefooters, they are trying to de-evolve and go back to what humans were originally evolved to function like back in Africa. Except the environment we are in now is obviously vastly different than Africa, it would make sense that our bodies and techniques must also evolve around our environment also. Evolution itself is all about changes and adaptations occuring due to changes in the environment. I am sure not everybody in the early days had ideal barefoot running capable bodies. The ones that did not, died off. If they didn't just die off, it's probably not THAT important of a survival trait.

it's a lot easier to run barefoot on concrete than it is on most trails.