Demolishing your goals never comes easily. Luckily, finding better strategies and avenues to attain them are sprouting up constantly. Shoeless training is an old practice making it’s way into the new wave. Here are some tips to get started and a few of the key benefits.

Improving foot and ankle stability

First off, your ability to perform begins at the base. Working from the ground up to improve your athletic ability is always a good mentality to maintain when trying to improve. Luckily, shoeless workouts aren’t necessarily barefoot. This allows for more versatility when you are selecting which addition work you’re going to try implementing into your workout regimen.

Ankle stability and weight balance will be really helpful to give you that intense workout you’ve been pursuing without putting too much damage into your ankles and your base. Through this practice, you’ll rely far more heavily on your body rather than your shoes and equipment.

What does shoeless training do for my workout regimen?

Shoeless training will certainly affect different muscles and areas in your feet. Also, you can see an improvement quickly in your balance and overall steadiness in weightlifting and strength training.

Cardio and impact activities

These can be a bit different in terms of results. You should try to build up slowly on this side of your training. Training barefoot in high-impact workouts like general cardio will result in damage to the soles of your feet if you aren’t careful.

When experimenting with shoeless training, you definitely want to give the first few runs a go with a partner. Even if you generally workout alone, having a partner for those first few steps is massively important to ensure you both develop strong habits. Speaking of habits, your increase lower body stability has a strong chance of developing into good body/mind connections as well.

Which workouts should I implement shoeless practice into?

Again, avoid high-contact workouts primarily. Outside of that, you can simply add the practice to your body weight squats, lunges, and others that have lower risk for you to potentially injure your exposed feet.

Injuries can come more easily of course since the foot is exposed, which is a bit of a risk as well. Although it may seem minor, the risk is something to be mindful of, especially early on.

Overall, there’s a great deal to be gained through experimenting with shoeless training. Come by GOAT Fitness and give it a try with one of our trainers today!