Shoes, Shoes, and More Shoes

Friday, December 18, 2009

Here at CrossFit Toronto we often have discussions regarding footware.  Especially among newer trainees (but also with more seasoned athletes) we often see what we refer to as “marshmallow” shoes, or “airbags for your feet”.  That is, those high-priced, over-designed, and marginally useful “running shoes”.  Instead of being useful for training in, these types of shoes encourage poor running technique, and also provide unstable training surfaces, thus negatively impacting all heavy lifts.  We will talk about proper running footware another day; today we focus on shoes for weight training.

To perform them properly and consistently, all heavy lifts need to be done while wearing stable footware.  Proper lifting footware does not compress, shift, or otherwise deform during the execution of a lift.  Even the minutest of compression or lack of stability during a lift will alter the movement pattern being executed sufficiently enough that each lift will be subtly altered (sometimes not so subtly).  So, what are our choices?  The following is the standard list of shoes we recommend that all of our trainees look to acquire, in order of utility:

• Converse All-Stars / Chuck Taylors (or similar)
• Olympic lifting shoes
• Vibram Five Fingers

Regarding O-lifting shoes specifically, here is some advice from a couple of people who most certainly know what they are talking about, Lon Kilgore and Mark Rippetoe:

http://www.exrx.net/WeightTraining/WeightliftingShoes.html

Workout

Power snatch 3-3-3 reps

rest 5 minutes

Complete 3 rounds for time of:

• 9 Overhead squats (65% of bodyweight)
• 15 Box jumps (24″)