3. Sunglasses

Sunglasses are another thing that is meant to be good for you that can actually be bad for you and the logic is quite easy to follow:
I. Sunglasses make things seem dark.
II. When things seem dark your irises open wider to let more light in.
III. The wider your irises are the more harmful UV radiation is let into your eyes.
IV. This is bad :(

I must add in a little proviso though: most good quality sunglasses include some form of radiation shielding to deal with this problem. These sunglasses are actually probably good for you. But cheap ones are never good for you and if you’re unsure then ask your optometrist.

2. Boxing Gloves.

It is a common misconception that boxing gloves are there to protect people’s heads from damage. Actually, as most martial artists already know, boxing gloves are actually worse for your head than bare hands are.

Let me put this in a way that is unambiguous: if you are going to be fighting someone it is better for you if your opponent wears nothing on their hands rather than boxing gloves. You might get knocked out more easily, and there will be more blood, but you won’t die.

The truth of this isn’t hard to see, if you are willing to look. In Mixed Martial Arts (or ‘MMA’) the gloves that are used are thin and light. In bare knuckle boxing no gloves are used at all. Neither of these sports experience many deaths in the ring. In fact in the highest profile MMA competition, the UFC, there has never been a single death in a ring.

But on the other fist there is boxing, where half a dozen or so fighters die in the ring, every year, in the United States alone.

Boxing gloves are not there to protect the head, they are there to protect the hands. This allows boxers to carry on dishing out punishment, and beating each other in the head, long after any normal person would have stopped, either because their opponent had been knocked out or because their fingers have started to fall off.

These extended beatings can cause the brain damage that leads to Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or a complete loss of physical co-ordination.

Getting hit in the head causes brain damage. Of that there is no question. But what really, really causes brain damage is constant, repetitive beatings to the head. If one is wearing light gloves or no gloves then a few solid shots will generally knock someone out. It’s only in boxing that we see people soaking blows to the head, round after round, until they die :s

These facts have been known for decades. So one might ask why things haven’t been changed. This is the wrong question. A better question would be: why the FUCK has the thickness of boxing gloves actually increased over the years?

It seems completely unintuitive until one remembers that professional boxing regulations have nothing to do with protecting the fighters and everything to do with making money. You see friends the tens of millions of dollars that the boxing industry makes every year come from advertising revenue. And there is nothing that an advertiser hates more than a knock out.

Think about it.

The advertiser has paid millions to flight their ads between rounds. They have paid for 10 rounds of ad coverage. So if the fight ends in the 5th round then they have lost millions of dollars in ads that will never be shown. For this reason advertisers and fight promoters have lobbied hard for boxing matches to last longer and longer, and thus become more and more dangerous, year after year.

The fact that these people, who supposedly love the sport, can bear witness to the degeneration of Muhammed Ali, and thousands more like him, and still defend the boxing status quo, is a testament to human beings’ ability to rationalise impossible contradictions.

One might then ask why the UFC doesn’t do the same thing? I think that the answer is a complex one. UFC fans tend to be purists, who bitch and moan whenever any rule is changed. They also tend to have a larger and more vocal online presence than boxing fans so promoters don’t want to rile them up. And part of the popularity of MMA is in the fact that fights can end in an instant. In fact I would say that there is nothing UFC fans like more than a sudden turn around. Witness Anderson Silva’s last fight to see an example of this.

Lastly, MMA is not yet as popular as boxing, and it relies on its few superstars to be draw cards for the sport. For this reason safety regulations are vitally important in the UFC. In boxing promoters lose money if a fight ends suddenly. In the UFC promoters will lose money if one of the top fighters has to drop out because of injury.

You can probably tell that I’m a fan of MMA and maybe that makes me biased. But there is no way to be biased about death, and the comparison on those grounds is pretty unambiguous.

1. Running Shoes.

You heard me: running shoes are bad for you.

I’ve saved this for last because it is the most controversial and because it affects pretty much everyone in the first world.

The story goes like this. A few years ago some researchers went to the major “sports” shoe manufacturers and asked them some questions:
I. Are you saying that your shoes improve performance or prevent injury?
II. If you ARE saying that then could you please share with us any of the scientific research you have gathered that proves these claims?
III. If you are not saying that they boost performance or prevent injury then exactly what the fuck are your ads even about anyway?

The shoe manufacturers did not respond. So the researchers investigated for themselves and what they found was pretty damn horrible. Not only were running shoes not good for you but they actually increase your chance of injury. More than that the more expensive a shoe is the worse it is for you!

In fact at the moment 60 to 80% of all runners suffer from some sort of running-related injury. And this for an activity that we have evolved to do properly and efficiently.

Because running shoes actually undo all that evolution, and force us to run in an unhealthy way.

Picture in your mind the classic running stride that you see in shoe commercials. The heel comes down. The shock gets absorbed by the thick rubber soul with air pockets. Lastly, the ball of the foot comes down and springs the person forward. Smooth, economical and safe.

Unfortunately, this is complete bullshit.

When people run barefoot they run far more on the ball of the foot, which makes sense because the extra joint allows the foot to absorb more shock that otherwise would be transmitted directly from the heel into the ankle.

Running shoes, with their massive heels, force you to put your own heel down first and thus they force you into an unnatural stride that places more stress on the joints.

So what do the more expensive shoes do? They have even thicker soles to try and absorb the impact, that you are only taking because you are wearing thick soles in the first place.

It’s unnatural, bad for you and it hurts your performance.

This makes me wonder: how much faster would the Olympic running records be if the athletes hadn’t been handicapped by expensive shoes that actually decrease their performance?

It’s a bit of a mind fuck, isn’t it?

And there is another problem. Running shoes have been around for so long that pretty much all of the research on running has been done on people wearing them.

Thus, almost all of the research on correct sports technique assumes that running shoes are correct, and that the incorrect stride that they impose on you is actually the correct stride.

So almost all of the scientific evidence on running is completely against me. All I’ve got are the handful of researchers doing research on barefoot runners and my own experiences of how running shoes have hurt my own performance.

So let me settle this debate with a question: Would you rather use a foot developed by evolution over tens of millions of years to generate maximum performance with maximum safety? Or would you rather wear a shoe designed by a focus group to be easily sold for maximum profit?

[Standard Disclaimer: this post was entirely my own opinion and was not paid for in any way, directly or otherwise, by anyone or anything that stands to gain in any way from the ideas expressed herein.]

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