Five Finger Vibram Shoes

Have you ever seen that someone wear five finger shoes around? And if you seen this sign, What feeling do you have first? It is that you want to own one pair of these shoes or you just think it’s so strange? No matter what idea you have, I think there has certain rationality for everything which could appear and exist. So it is five finger shoes. 

Essentially, the five finger shoes look like gloves for the feet and that means toes can move freely and enable you to see the shapes for the individual them. Think toe socks but made from the same material as wet suits and you're along the right lines. They certainly look unusual and stand out, and that's why you've probably encountered them yourself by now at some point. It is the essence part of the 'Five Finger' shoes from Vibram – they look so unique that as soon as anyone sees them they want to ask questions about them and that means that the owners end up effectively doing free marketing for Vibram. Even better news for Vibram is that many celebrities have recently started wearing the shoes and that includes everyone from Scarlett Johansson to Prince Harry. But why did these shoes appear? And why is it that they are supposed to be so beneficial for our health and our body? 

Here we will look at the benefits of the Vibram Five Finger shoes and precisely how they work – as well as whether or not they deliver on their promises. What Are the Five Fingers? Essentially the idea behind the Five Finger shoes are that they fit snugly around the foot and toes in the same way that a toe sock would. This means that the individual digits are able to move freely and that that the foot retains its original shape (Vibram the manufacturers describe it as a 'second skin'). At the same time on the bottom of the shoe is a very thin patented rubber that provides the protection and the grip that you would expect from a high performance shoes, but without severing that all-important connection between your foot and the ground. 

While your feet will be protected if you step on a stone or something else, you should still be able to feel the texture and the shape of the ground under foot. So stepping on a grassy field feels very different from walking down a cobbled street – and in that latter example you will be able to feel each cobble and contour through the bottom of the shoe. The idea behind this is to try and mimic the effects of going barefoot – and barefoot running itself is supposed to have many different advantages and benefits for your overall health. The problem is that to go barefoot would mean running around with nothing to protect your feet from shards of glass, cold puddles or piles of manure – whereas with Five Fingers you are well protected from all of those things but you still get the benefits of going barefoot. That's the idea anyway, and we'll come on to whether or not it works shortly. 

Benefits of Barefoot So the idea of the Five Finger then is to try and mimic the effects of running barefoot. In order to appreciate it then, you really need to know what the benefits of running barefoot are. So here we will look at that. Running barefoot is something that is gaining more and more popularity with time and it's something that more and more people are taking up. Proponents claim that it's much healthier for you, as well as resulting in better performance – and the idea makes sense from an evolutionary perspective; seeing as we evolved without shoes, surely we don't stand to gain anything by wearing them? Evolution means that our bodies adapt to the way we use them over millions of years and that means that our feet and our legs are designed to be used without shoes. 

Then look at what happens when you run on a slippery surface. If you do this in shoes then you won't have any 'feedback' from the ground telling you whether or not your feet are gripping and that will mean that you can easily try to launch yourself off of your foot and end up slipping over. If you are barefoot – or wearing vibram five finger running shoes – then you will be able to feel the ground underneath and know whether it's safe to jump or run. You end up far more sure-footed and much less prone to injury and this makes you less likely to hurt yourself. Likewise going barefoot alters our bio-mechanics. In particular this is because you don't have a large rubber heal protecting the bottom of your foot and weighing it down at the back, and this means that people end up running more on the balls of their feet and less on the heals when they use Five Fingers. 

This means they are leaning more forward and puts a more direct line of gravity from their body to the floor resulting in fewer leg injuries. At the same time it builds more muscles in the legs and in the feet. A great piece of evidence for the pros of barefoot running is to look at the primitive tribes that still exist without contact from modern man. They don't use shoes and they track animals for miles at a time still for food. All of them demonstrate the impressive ability to run for hours at a time at fast speeds without becoming out of breath and this suggests that we are doing something wrong by using big clomping shoes. 

In a word, wear a pair of five finger shoes, you will have a different feeling it give you.