Ever thought about the shoes that you wear to the gym? Of course you have. Most likely you have shoes set aside for the express purpose of exercise use at your favorite health club or lifting facility. And what prompted you to select this specific footwear to be used to exercise? Shoes best suited for lifting? Performance enhancement? Exercise safety? Probably none of the above. Comfort and looks seem to be the main criteria associated with gym shoe choice. But if you are using barbells in your training, this is a mistake. Most of us would never consider wearing a pair of Bruno Magli’s to play racquetball. They are built to look good, not to perform well on the court. While this may be obvious to some, many of us will make an equally poor footwear decision and wear running shoes to the gym to lift weights.

Proper footwear in the gym is important, especially if you are lifting free weights. When we lift weights we want two things to happen: (1) all the force our body produces under the bar should contribute to moving the weight and (2) the weight needs to be controlled in a safe manner. Performing the basic lifts in a running shoe robs the trainee of a solid foundation from which to explode. The soles of the running shoes, the marshmallow, will absorb and dissipate a large amount of the force generated against the floor that should be directed towards moving the weight. A gel or air cell shoe is a great thing for reducing the impact shock that causes the repetitive use injuries associated with running. But in the weight room, shoes should provide for the efficient transmission of power between the bar and the ground. You can’t lift as much weight in the wrong shoes.

The second issue is control of the weight - and your body - while standing on an unstable surface. A buffer which is in between your feet and the floor will not move in a reliable fashion each time, adversely affecting the lift. This means that the subtle points of consistent good technique on any standing exercise are impossible to control. Because of the inconsistent surface, the probability of a weight lifting mishap and serious injury increases exponentially due to the difficulty in obtaining a good balance position.

Weightlifters and powerlifters have known this for more than 50 years, although the shoe choices available for their purposes were formerly quite limited. Until the 1970’s, combat boots, Chuck Taylor’s, and even patent leather oxfords (see old photos of Paul Anderson) were the shoes used for lifting weights. To be stable and perform optimally, a weightlifting shoe needs to be snug fitting, provide exceptional support, and have a noncompressible wedge sole with neoprene or crepe for traction against the floor. Most will lace all the way down to the toe for adjustment to individual foot width, and will have an adjustable strap across the metatarsal area for added lateral stability. With the entrance of Adidas and Kahru into the weightlifting shoe market in this country, weight athletes now had access to custom made athletic shoes designed specifically for the iron game. While these shoes were not pleasing to the eye because of their unsightly appearance, lifters didn’t care because they were happy with their functionality. There are more resource available at Buy Weightlifting Shoes

However, this created a crisis: Health clubs featured primarily exercise machines, at the expense of the old standby barbells and dumbbells. These machines were so comfortable to use that they nullified the importance of balance and technique, therefore halting the manufacturing of weight training shoes. However, in the last twenty years the appreciation of the barbell and dumbbell has started to resurface in exercise facilities everywhere. The only available manufacturer to fill the demand was Adidas, which put out several models suitable for exercising. Other major shoe brands like Nike, Puma, and Reebok began to experiment with weightlifting shoes. In addition, overseas and Canadian companies starting putting out a shoe to compete for the lifting niche, in addition to the U.S. company Safe-USA, which made a serious attempt to acquire market share. All these companies offer shoes that are designed for competitive weightlifting or powerlifting, but that are good for all basic lifts, especially the squat, given their exemplary support and incompressible heel design. A variety of powerlifting shoes with essentially flat soles and no heel lift, much like track flats or wrestling shoes, are also available from powerlifting equipment houses like Inzer (USA), and also work for basic exercise purposes. These shoes are less suited for squatting, since they require that you have better than average flexibility to squat in them, but they are excellent for floor work and standing exercises.

Is this just another pair of shoes to purchase? Does the cost justify it? Indeed, it does. Correct exercise performance results in higher weights lifted. Safe training yields fewer training injuries. This is just common sense. For as little as $40 for a pair of old-school Chuck Taylor’s or as much as $170 for the state of the art Adidas shoe, you can have the right shoe for the right job. You can find the best deals on weightlifting shoes here.The correct lifting shoe is critical for competition and avoiding injury, and you can purchase just such a shoe for far less than the cost of a popular jogging shoe.