In the three years since it was published, Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run has single-handedly ignited the barefoot running craze. The bestse

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In the three years since it was published, Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run has single-handedly ignited the barefoot running craze. The bestseller argues that heavily cushioned shoes don’t prevent injuries – they lead to them because they encourage a style of running in which people take large strides and land on their heels, sending impact forces shooting up nike air max 180 their legs.

The athletic nike air max 97 shoe market in Canada is worth approximately $1.3-billion, about 30 per cent of that going to running and jogging shoes. The U.S. running shoe market is worth approximately $6.5-billion. The minimalist category makes up about 15 per cent of that, according to Matt Powell, an analyst with SportsOneSource, which tracks retail sales data. Sales of minimalist shoes are up about nike air max command double over last year, he says.

“If you’re a shoe company and you’re not addressing this, I think you’re crazy,” says Mark Cucuzzella, a physician and owner of Two Rivers Treads, a minimalist running shoe store in West Virginia. Every major nike outlet store manufacturer, whether it’s Nike, Saucony, Adidas, New Balance or Brooks, now offers minimalist running shoes. Many of them are marketed as shoes that runners could wear a few times a week while reserving their traditional shoes for other days or longer runs.

At Nike, which introduced the Free, a minimal trainer, in 2004, the “less is more” philosophy has spread beyond running shoes to other styles.

“As recently as four years ago, it was not uncommon for a basketball shoe to be 15 ounces. Sometimes we’d have 18-ounce basketball shoes. They were really like a big athletic boot. And because we realized that every player does not necessarily need all that protection … we started seeing shoes that would get down to 12 ounces, even 10.5 ounces. A couple of years ago, that would have been unheard of,” says Scott Myers of Nike Canada.

In the 1970s, at the dawn of the running boom, the only cheap nike air 2012 shoes shoes on the market were little more than racing flats. But as the sport grew in popularity, shoe companies began adding cushioning. The more padding there was in the heel, the more shoes could absorb impact forces, the thinking went. But the more the heel was lifted off the ground, the more technology had to be applied to the mid- and forefoot of the shoe. By the 1990s, shoe technology had become sophisticated enough to create a style for every kind of runner – stability shoes, neutral shoes and, the most cushioned of all, motion-control shoes.

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