Is This the End of hiking boots ?

Is This the End of hiking boots ?

Check this out I bet you've never seen ahiking boot do this that is crazy I didn't 

even know how you could call that a hiking boot so there's two types of hikers.

There's the boot lover who tends to prefer a more structured heavily rigid supportive boot like this one and then there is the hikers like me that tend to wear trail runners and prefer something more lightweight and minimal but there is one thing that we all have in common and that's we'd all rather be out hiking in the mountains.

I'm going to be sharing with you a couple of things that you can do off trail to make sure that you are preparing your feet for the trail so you can get out there and enjoy the mountains and I'm also going to be giving you my first impressions of this boot the vivo barefoot tracker and talking about why I believe this style of boot is really the future of hiking boots so before we get into it I want to point out that this is not a sponsored or paid review I reached out to the company and I asked them to send me the boot because I really think it's worth a discussion point because of the style but also it's pretty sexy looking boot and I wanted to pair.

I'm a keen hiker but also a strength coach and over my time coaching people I've really been trying to figure out what it is that leads us down the path of injury you know is it our choice of footwear is a lack of strength and conditioning in the feet or is it something else entirely and the one thing that I keep coming back to is this barefoot minimal style of footwear along the way I've become more interested in what constitutes a strong foot I began to encourage barefoot training in my gym because the research showed that that was the best way to passively strengthen muscles so what does barefoot Footwear actually mean it seems like a bit of an oxymoron well I'm going to cover as I talk about this but what I think constitutes a barefoot or minimal style of footwear and this is also what the researchers identified as being minimal style Footwear that they

did the research on so I think there's really four things that constitute a minimal or barefoot style so the first thing is a wide last you know our last is the outside of the boot 

here it is the footprint of the boot itself so the one thing you notice immediately about the bottom of this shoe is that it is very flat you don't see that typical arch support that you would generally see in a typical hiking boot and certainly not with the sole OTPs 520 

The other boot that I have here so the theory with this is that rather than the shoe supporting your foot and particularly your arch you are training your own muscles and your own supportive structure of the foot itself to be self supportive rather than having to rely on the boot and what that leads to is a stronger more independent system that's able to look after itself and in the end of the day 

I think that would lead to less injuries and certainly the evidence and the research tends to indicate that so are there any drawbacks to having a wider shoe not really I mean the only thing is that they to look a little more goofy and a little less stylish but if you're like me and you tend to prefer function over fashion and it shouldn't matter too much to you.

So the second thing that constitutes barefoot minimal style Footwear is that they are thin so you'll notice this has a lot less structure and a lot less material at the bottom of the foot when compared to the solo and I know you're thinking especially if you're a boot lover one of the main reasons that you buy boots is for protection but I feel like this is plenty enough for me and often I find thatwhen I'm wearing a thicker heavier more supportive hiking shoe like 

the Isola is that I can't feel the ground beneath my feet figuratively speaking so I'd like to be able to feel rocks to a certain extent I like to be able to feel the ground change as I move over it and obviously you don't want to feel every single rock underneath your foot but you certainly don't feel that when you're wearing this boot I think there's the perfect amount of protection provided with this boot but not so much that you can't get that.

sensory information from the ground which is so important the third thing that constitutes barefoot Footwear is that they are flexible I mean that is crazy I didn't even know how you could call that a hiking boot so having a flexible shoe like this enables your foot to move more naturally rather than being restricted by the structure of a very rigid boot and for my experience wearing minimal shoes like this that means better connection to the environment that I'm walking over it means less Falls and at the end of the day less likelihood of being injured

I find that when I wear really heavy rigid hiking boots I end up slipping and falling more often they just make me feel clumsy they are very cumbersome at times and of course there's certain times though you would want to have more protection and more structure but more often than not I'm looking for something light something nimble something that enables me to go fast and to be able to feel the environment that I'm walking over so the drawbacks of having a more flexible.

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