Tuesday 7 January 2014

Barefoot Running Research: weeks 3 & 4 summary

The last few weeks has included Christmas and a week or so of illness. As such, the latter was the only stumbling block in the daily stretching and walking exercises. I reckon I only missed a couple of days, and managed to shift one of the barefoot runs from week 3 into week 4. I'd like to hope that the few days I missed with the intervention exercises won't impact the research. This week has been good, getting out for my walks, doing the stretching, plyometric exercises and such. The walk this morning felt good, I'm no longer feeling like I need a break from forefoot strike on the walk so there must be some muscular strength gains occurring. There won't be much change to the programme now, just a very gradual increase in the distance of the runs in the next few weeks, then an increase to 3 runs per week in the final couple of weeks.

Having done the exercises for 4 weeks now it just feels like a natural part of my day. I reckon that the habit has been well and truly fixed. In addition, and nothing to do with the research, or barefoot running, but I've also started some specific work to strengthen my shoulders. I have a natural tendency (as do most people) to have forward rounded shoulders so I've written myself a programme of stretches and strengthening exercises to work on reducing this imbalance. I'm doing these exercises on alternate days and will see how it goes.

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