» How do you like my new five fingers shoes?

How do you like my new five fingers shoes?


Those are vibram shoes which you can get directly from the site or on Amazon. If you walk in the streets with them the first feeling you will have is as if you ride a segway: people look at you in a weird way and you feel, mmmm, ridiculous. I am actually considering wearing them on my segway just to complete the picture.

Passed that feeling, they are supposed to be very good for your body since they force you to walk or run with your whole foot touching the ground on its whole surface instead of from the heel to the toes. In other words they force you to walk without hitting the ground at any point or you won’t feel very well.201003181312.jpg

It goes very well with chi-running and chi-walking that I just started learning and it’s a totally different way of running relying on those principles:

-a good posture
-leaning forward slightly with your feet aligned behind you and never going in front of you (that’s when you hit the ground and create an opposite force)
-increase the cadence of your strides so that your legs touch the ground more often and therefore decrease the impact of gravity (chi-running trains you to run with a metronome between 85 to 90 strides per minute which is much higher than we normally do, it feels really weird but is definitely much less efforts)
-touch the ground with your entire foot instead of “heel-toes” you can experiment that on a beach, your steps must not create craters in the sand but show a flat step which happens only if the forces are distributed on all its surface
-chi-running advises to run with minimal shoes, the inventor of the technique, Danny, has a very good list

If it’s studied at Harvard, it can’t be wrong :-) I am definitely going to try to run barefoot like…. tonight

What’s also interesting is how those Vibram shoes spread: word of mouth. I am an early adopter but it took me 6 months to get them, I first saw Tim Ferris in them and blog about them, then the uservoice founder Richard White, my friend entrepreneur Scott Rafer (who also had the five fingers socks) and even Google’s co-founder Sergei Brin at TED. That is too much peer pressure not to try so here we go.

My wife finds them so ugly and ridiculous that she wants to divorce, I will keep you posted.

If you buy a pair I advise you to get one size less than usual, mine are too wide I need to send them back.