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Back in the day shoe selection was simple. Probably wrong, but simple! If you had a pronated foot type you got a motion control shoe. A more neutral foot type went in a neutral shoe and a high arched foot got a cushioned shoe.
This was all fine until people started to study it. Research found that a pronated foot type was not associated with running injury and prescribing shoes based on this was ‘overly simplistic and potentially injurious’.
We moved on and started to get comfortable with comfort. By that, I mean many of us now use comfort as the main guide for running shoe selection. But this too has wilted a little under the spotlight of scientific scrutiny, as we discussed in our recent video.
Research does have a habit of going full circle and two key studies now appear to be moving us back towards using foot type and pronation to guide shoe selection. We discuss this research in our video below and what it means for shoe prescription in clinic.
Have you seen our new webinar series on ITBS? Access it HERE.
The two main studies we discuss in the video above:
Malisoux et al. (2016): https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/50/8/481
Willems et al. (2020): https://www.jospt.org/doi/10.2519/jospt.2021.9710
