Published October 25, 2026 03:05AM
For the last few decades, debates about how to improve running form have often gone something like this:
Enthusiast: We can all learn to run better and more efficiently! You just need to [stop landing on your heels / increase your cadence / switch to barefoot shoes / sign up for my six-part webinar / etc.].
Skeptic: But scientists tested that, and literally everyone got less efficient when they tried it.
Enthusiast: That’s because they didn’t give it enough time! Of course you get less efficient initially, because it takes a while to retrain your neuromuscular patterning. After a year, I bet they would have been more efficient.
Skeptic: But everyone quit after four weeks.
Enthusiast: Well, don’t blame me when they get shin splints.
There’s some truth to both sides of this debate. Our brains and bodies are extremely good at saving energy and eliminating inefficiencies, so most reasonably experienced runners have converged on a running form that’s efficient for their unique body. If you ask them to change just about anything (cadence, a.k.a. step rate, is the most well-studied example), they’ll typically get less efficient, meaning they’ll need to burn more energy to sustain a given pace.
On the other hand, it’s also true that learning new motor patterns takes time. When you’re trying to execute a new action, it requires your explicit attention and you’ll probably be inadvertently contracting some muscle fibers you don’t need and wasting energy. Over time, the new pattern will become second-nature—and, in theory, might end up becoming more efficient than how you started.
Vanishingly few studies have actually tested this proposition, though. That makes a new paper in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, from a research group at the University of Liège in Belgium led by Guillaume Abran, particularly interesting. It offers some intriguing evidence that the enthusiasts are right—but with an important skeptical caveat.
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What the New Study Tested
The researchers began by recruiting 140 runners and dividing them into three groups. One group received four sessions of “running retraining,” focusing on teaching them to increase their cadence by 7.5 percent, avoid landing on their heels, and generally try to run “softly.”) A second group was given a pair of minimalist shoes: the Merrell Trail Glove 6 for trail runners, and the Topo Athletic ST-4 for road runners. The third group was the control group, assigned to do a few minutes of generic stretching three times per week.
The main outcome measure was running economy, based on a treadmill test that quantifies how much energy you’re burning at a given pace. They also measured running biomechanics and foot/ankle strength after two, six, and twelve months.
They recruited 140 runners knowing that there would be lots of attrition due to injuries and other drop-outs over the course of the year. In the end, they had 18 people in the running retraining group, 19 in the minimalist shoe group, and 24 in the control group. There weren’t any obvious differences in how many people dropped out of each group.
Here’s what the running economy measurements looked like, with lower numbers indicating better efficiency. CG is the control group; MG is the minimalist group; RRG is the running retraining group.
The headline is that, yes, just as the enthusiasts predicted, running economy improved dramatically over the course of 12 months. By the end, the running retraining group was ten percent more efficient, and the minimalist shoe group was nine percent more efficient. That’s a huge gain—better than supershoes!
But there’s a caveat. The control group also improved by five percent, which in statistical terms was indistinguishable from the improvements in the other two groups. Revamping your form or switching to minimalist shoes works… but so does, you know, running.
Making Sense of the Results
When you see that “just running” (plus some perfunctory stretching) improved running economy by five percent, you have to wonder who the runners were. The inclusion criteria stipulated that they needed to be averaging at least six miles a week for a year. The actual average for the runners they recruited was between 12 and 16 miles per week. That’s not a lot, and it explains why all three groups were able to make big efficiency gains after a year of regular, monitored training.
The harder question is whether there’s any meaningful difference between the control group and the other two, even if it wasn’t statistically significant in this dataset. You can argue it both ways. My personal take is still that the most reliable way to improve your running form is to run a lot over a long period of time. You could also try adding strength training or plyometrics, both of which have consistently been shown to improve running economy.
It’s worth acknowledging that most people who switch to minimalist shoes or revamp their running form aren’t primarily motivated by efficiency. They’re hoping to reduce their injury risk, a claim for which the evidence is similarly mixed. Abran’s new data isn’t enough to prove that we should all adopt one of these approaches, but it does make a broader point about the importance of patience. If you’re trying to change how you run, by whatever means, you probably need to give yourself a year before deciding whether it worked.
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