After a new athlete has come to the Box 2 or 3 times and the shyness wears off they usually ask me how come I'm barefoot. My wife would love to tell you it's because I'm from Arkansas. And I'm a hick. That may be true but it isn't the only reason. I use to wrestle and kickbox and all of our training took place barefoot. So I got use to working out barefoot. When I went to gyms with, "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" it felt odd to work out with shoes on. So for no other reason than I liked how it felt I kept working out bare foot. Then I found out I wasn't the only odd little duck working out sans shoes. But all the other odd little ducks had some science and reason backing them up. The following are excerpts from a much longer article that starts to make the case for walking barefoot.
I would recommend Oly Lifting shoes for power lifting and the Olympic lifts. And some sort of shoe for Rowing and Burpees. (Go ahead try either of them barefoot. I'll wait. Soon as you get done taping up your bloody heel or toes I'll be right here.) Try working out barefoot. You'll move better.
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Try this test: Take off your shoe, and put it on a tabletop. Chances are the toe tip on your shoes will bend slightly upward, so that it doesn’t touch the table’s surface. This is known as “toe spring,” and it’s a design feature built into nearly every shoe. Of course, your bare toes don’t curl upward; in fact, they’re built to grip the earth and help you balance. The purpose of toe spring, then, is to create a subtle rocker effect that allows your foot to roll into the next step. This is necessary because the shoe, by its nature, won’t allow your foot to work in the way it wants to. Normally your foot would roll very flexibly through each step, from the heel through the outside of your foot, then through the arch, before your toes give you a powerful propulsive push forward into the next step. But shoes aren’t designed to be very flexible. Sure, you can take a typical shoe in your hands and bend it in the middle, but that bend doesn’t fall where your foot wants to bend; in fact, if you bent your foot in that same place, your foot would snap in half. So to compensate for this lack of flexibility, shoes are built with toe springs to help rock you forward. You only need this help, of course, because you’re wearing shoes.
Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of a painful tingling in the soles of their feet—what she calls “flip-flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.
Okay, but what about a good pair of athletic shoes? After all, they swaddle your foot in padding to protect you from the unforgiving concrete. But that padding? That’s no good for you either. Consider a paper titled “Athletic Footwear: Unsafe Due to Perceptual Illusions,” published in a 1991 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. “Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, ‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).” According to another study, people in expensive cushioned running shoes were twice as likely to suffer an injury—31.9 injuries per 1,000 kilometers, as compared with 14.3—than were people who went running in hard-soled shoes.
Admittedly, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea that less padding on your foot equals less shock on your body. But that’s only if we continue to think of our feet as lifeless blocks of flesh that hold us upright. The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.
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“If you can imagine a really big, insulated shoe on your foot, when you walk, you kind of stomp on your foot,” says Dr. Najia Shakoor, the studies’ lead researcher. “The way your foot hits the ground is very forceful. As opposed to a bare foot, where you have a really natural motion from your heel to your toe. We now think that’s associated with more shock absorption: the flexibility your foot provides, as well as a lack of a heel. Most shoes, even running shoes, have a fairly substantial heel built into them. And heels, we now know, can increase knee load.” Another factor, she points out, is that when your foot can feel the ground, it sends messages to the rest of your body. “Your body tells itself, My foot just hit the ground, I’m about to start walking, so let’s activate all these mechanisms to keep my joints safe. Your body’s natural neuromechanical-feedback mechanisms can work to protect the rest of your extremities. You have much more sensory input than when you’re insulated by a thick outsole.”
Read more: How We're Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take – New York Magazine
I can’t really think of any place which has a “no shirt, no shoes, no service” policy as a “gym”.
We who remember the 1960s and 1970s already know this. Going barefoot was a fad then, and many young people went barefoot in public places, stores, malls, etc. They gradually got used to it in the spring, and by summer could walk on the hottest pavement and anywhere they wanted to without pain or injury. And working out barefoot in a gym was normal. Weightlifters and bodybuilders worked out barefoot all the time. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger – he worked out barefoot in the 1970s. Somehow during the 1990s gyms became paranoid about liability and stopped allowing people to work out barefoot. And today’s young people have no idea that working out barefoot is much better, or even know it was done not too long ago.