In 2011, two years after his book Born to Run launched the barefoot boom, Christopher McDougall offered a clarification. “The ‘one best way’ isn’t about footwear,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine. “It’s about [running] form.” Rather than simply ditching their shoes, people needed to learn how to run better. No one, after all, assumes that we’re born knowing the best method of swinging a tennis racket; we need to be taught technique. Why should running be any different? There was a problem, though: no one could agree on what the ideal running form looked like, or even what elements mattered. Research was needed, and scientists around the world got busy.
The results of those studies have been trickling in ever since, but with findings that are often hard to interpret and sometimes contradictory. In search of clarity, a team of leading biomechanics researchers from around the world decided to pool the existing data. They focused on running economy—a measure of efficiency, like gas mileage for a car, that quantifies how much energy you burn to maintain a given pace. The results, published…
