Is running/jumping on balls of feet okay?

fevre

Hi, I'm a total newbie to exercise as a whole (though I live in NYC so I do a lot of walking) and I decided to start with Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred... so far it's great, but I noticed that whenever there are jumping jacks, jogging, or jumpropes she does them with her feet landing flat on the ground, but when I do it my natural inclination is to be standing with my heels off the ground, more on the balls of my feet. It feels difficult to make my foot come all the way down when I land.
However, thinking it was better form, I tried to make myself run/jump with my whole foot (toes and heel) touching the ground, and after a couple of days of this I noticed a bit of muscle strain in the muscles around my ankle. Today I exercised again with my feet moving as they naturally would, standing/landing on the balls of my feet, but when I went to shower afterwards I realized that my right ankle is now sprained. I'll be keeping off of it for a while and sticking to pilates until it's better, but I guess my question is... is it okay for me to be running and jumping on the balls of my feet like that? It seems like I've definitely learned it's a bad idea to try to force my ankles down the other way...

Xiaolongbao

Given the shoes she wears you can't really tell which part of her feet are hitting the ground.

I do Jillian barefoot and I run wearing minimalist shoes so I definitely always land on the ball of my foot. It works for me, just did my longest run ever (14k) yesterday and I'm willing to bet that in the hour and a half it took me that my heels rarely touched the ground.