> We recruited 12 healthy men (mean age 27) who had several years of sports background and who ran with a heel strike pattern

I wonder how much of this has to do with possibly not-that-well-trained runners and or gait inefficiencies.

All elite marathons are now won with big cushy shoes. But those runners might be forced to wear them so it’s hard to come to any conclusions from that.

But at the very least if it was way less efficient to have highly cushioned shoes I think we would probably see that at the top level.

The study is also suspect because overall running efficiency changes drastically between trained and untrained runners and it doesn’t seem like they accounted for that.