alkahest wrote:Hey I recently joined the board and have been spending time reading through your journal. I've gotten lots of great info, inspiration, and ideas from reading it. Keep it up!
First off, welcome to the board, mate! This is such a great compliment - thank you and thank you for reading! I'm glad you were able to gain something from my long-winded ramblings. If you have any questions about anything, don't hesitate to ask.
Mini Forklift Ⓥ wrote:Here's my 2c (FWIW)...
DL's - great to lift barefoot, or at least with a shoe that puts you as low to the ground as possible. You can buy some deadlift slippers, they don't cost much and are mostly legal at meets.
Squats - ideally you want to lift in either a squat shoe or a heeled shoe.
The benefit of squat shoes are that they have a wooden heel, this serves two purposes: a) the heel raises you slightly higher and opens your hips through the movement, slightly increasing your felxibility (great if you have tight hips and/or calves b) The wooden heels means you don't get any loss of power from when you start driving back up. With a normal rubber soled shoe you lose power on the ascent as the force is compressed into the rubber, therefore this translates into a loss of power (small I know, but you want all the advantage you can get). You might as well put yourself in the strongest position from the start
I was hoping you'd have some advice/knowledge to share on this topic.

The first point you made about increasing flexibility is something I didn't know but am extremely pleased to know. After doing some research I found out that Chucks are bad for knee travel so that was my main reason for wanting to find something more appropriate but, as someone with tight hips, too, the fact that squat shoes help with that pretty much solidifies my decision to pick up those Adidas in the near future. Thank you for your input!
I haven't lifted barefoot since the beginning of October when I joined my gym. However, there's no "explicit" rule against it so maybe I'll try out barefoot deads this week to see how they feel - even if it's just for my warm ups since I might not be inclined to do so with heavy weight just yet.