Validation

I love being right. I mean, who doesn't love right?

I've had this personal theory that rotating shoes is good for you. Different shoes put stress on different parts of the foot, so I figured this would help lower the likelihood of an overuse or stress injury. Turns out.... I was right!

I clicked onto Runner's World this morning and saw this headline.

Researchers in Luxembourg did a study using 264 runners over 22 weeks. 

-116 were single-shoe wearers; doing 91% of their mileage in the same shoe, and ran in an average of 1.3 pairs of shoes during the study. 

-148 were classified as multiple-shoe wearers; runners in this group tended to have a main shoe, which they wore for an average of 58% of their mileage, but they rotated among an average of 3.6 pairs of shoes for their training during the study.

In the end they found that the multi-shoe wearers had a 39% lower risk of running injury than those who almost always ran in the same shoes. 

Sweet! The scientists basically had the same theory as I did about why this is so, saying "the concomitant use of different pairs of running shoes will provide alternation in the running pattern and vary external and active forces  on the lower legs during running activity. Whether the reduced [injury] risk can be ascribed to alternation of different shoe characteristics, such as midsole densities, structures or geometries cannot be determined from these results and warrants future research."

source

I usually only have 2 pairs of shoes in my rotation- 1 for the gym and 1 for running. This makes me want to toss in another pair for running.

Do you rotate your shoes? How often?