Was just thinking about the gym guy who said it's a safety issue. Dropping a barbell on your barefoot probably could explode your toe, but he seems to be under the impression (delusion?) that VFF's are like body armour. Also, in all the years of trolling these forums, I've yet to see a thread or even a single post mentioning a BFer with hook worm.
Well, if you think about it... Say you were barefoot and dropped a barbell on your toe. It would explode all over! Say you were wearing VFFs and dropped a barbell on your toe. It would explode inside the shoe. Ha!
Way to represent Alan et al.! I thought the article was fairly neutral, as far as these things go. When journalists write about stuff they've only had a day or two to become acquainted with, they almost always adopt the two-sides-to-the-story trope. It makes writing hastily a lot easier if you frame the story that way. My house is full of excessive skin transfer I guess, but somehow we keep the pestilence at bay. After the excoriated flacks build up sufficiently, the skin slag becomes almost indistinguishable from shag carpeting. I don't know how someone can deal with others' sweat everywhere at the gym but get squeamish about bare feet. I guess it's the common misperception that feet, shod or bare, are just naturally gross, when in fact it's keeping them inside shoes and socks all the time that make them way. Alan, did you get that stud build from yanking impacted wisdom teeth? Shod or bare, how often do people drop free weights on their feet? I've been doing weights on and off for 30 some years, and have yet to drop anything anywhere. If you're doing an exercise to failure, you get a spotter. On the whole, I would think doing weights barefoot is much safer, because you have better balance and stability, especially for things like power cleans, squats, and deadlifts. I think I mentioned it once somewhere. It was during the raining season in Mozambique, and I had to rush out to divert water from my house during a downpour that had turned my sandy street into a gushing stream. My understanding is that the parasite is dormant when the sand is dry but becomes active when the sand is wet or moist. Shoes probably would've helped, but I spent most of my time bare or in sandals during that time. I also cut off a big chunk of my big toe on some sharp bamboo in Sulawesi. Those are the only two real mishaps after spending a good part of my adult life barefoot.
Hookworm has been conquered in the U.S. through sanitation, but the public wants to believe it's demise is related to shoe wearing. They also want to believe athletes foot comes from going barefoot, when in reality it is due to shoe wearing. I'll hit Jason "Toe is going to explode" Carrell's club around 4:00 p.m. today and see what happens. Wish me luck!
I was enjoying lifting barefooted also, until I was reprimanded and exiled to the lower level treadmills - no free weights down there. So now I lift with the VFF's so that when my toe expodes it will be contained... Should this be a new paragraph? I'm kinda concerned about my post's grammar and sentence structure and all, since reading some of the above comments. Carriage Return Seriously, lifting barefoot is just one more opportunity to desensitize my feet and at the same time get the feedback from all the nerve endings God created us with. (yes, Merriam-Webster says you can now end sentences with with). Damn the Health Club Rules!
For the one who convinced me to run the 5K rather than skate it since I had worked up to twenty minutes of 12 minute mile pace barefoot running? I'll even footprint stamp a print addition as well as write "To my coach"!
As with most things related to barefooting, I've written blog posts about it. Here's "Hookworm": http://ahcuah.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/hookworm/ And here's "Hookworm Revisited": http://ahcuah.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/hookworm-revisited/
At Jason Carrell's gym stretching barefoot on floor right now. Neither of the two owners, Jason and his brother had seen the article. Front desk guy that snapped the feet pic just brought the article to them in their office. Start a bet pool going?
If they give you any crap, just tell them you brought a ton of free advertising and media to their company.
Opps, I guess I had a different species of roundworm--possibly the species Mansonella streptocerca?--not hookworm. He lived in my foot for two months before an Italian doctor gave me some anti-parasite medicine that killed the little bugger dead in his tracks within a couple of hours. Before that, I suffered through numerous local remedies, including snail piss, with no success. Very itchy. The locals thought it was funny that the stupid white man who didn't wear shoes would get something like that.
If you were to have had your skin opened, would you have seen it crawling around in there, or is that something different.
