Weightlifting shoes are brilliant. They provide a stable base and security at the bottom of your compound movements. They reach their full potential on a squat because of a clever design feature. The slight decline gradient from the heel to the toes is a clever way to disguise ankle mobility issues. The downward slope effectively reduces the range of motion your ankle has to move through.
But my issues with this is two-fold:
1- Ankle mobility restrictions that are disguised in strength training, may still lead to an athlete coming unstuck out on the track/court/field of play where footwear is impractical to provide the same disguise in the form of angled insoles. The theory is that training should carry over as much relevance to the real world. Squatting in weightlifting shoes before maximizing someone's natural mobility simply serves to paper over the cracks. Because of how much ankle mobility affects dynamic landing, and injury risk is greater in athletes with reduced dorsiflexion (Malloy et al., 2014), it is paramount that weightlifting shoes are used only once an athlete has maximized their ankle dorsiflexion. This ensures that when they are no longer getting the benefits of a sloped insole during a competitive situation, they have minimized their injury risk.
2- This leads me to my other issue which is that using additional equipment to squeeze an extra 0.5% out of their performance should only be used when everything else has been evaluated. It is tempting to look for what I call the ‘passive’ strategies for improvements in performance. You don’t see a sprinter worrying about what shoes they are going to wear for their 100m race before they have learned to maximize their start, leg drive, power output. There are other factors that makeup performance that are considerably more important in delivering successful outcomes. My argument is that should these be utilized, you will see a lot more gains in your performance.
So weightlifting shoes can be a useful tool in the weights room. But ensure they are not being used to disguise other issues. If you or your athletes have not yet maximized ankle range of motion, you are increasing the chance of injury. This is where any good strength and conditioning and injury reduction routine should start.
Citations:
Malloy, P., Morgan, A., Meinerz, C., Geiser, C. and Kipp, K., 2014. The association of dorsiflexion flexibility on knee kinematics and kinetics during a drop vertical jump in healthy female athletes. Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy, 23(12), pp.3550-3555.
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