High Heels Are Horrible For Your Feet

I came across an article in NY Mag a few weeks back that propelled me to write this post.(1) In the past six months to a year, the way we treat our feet has risen to the forefront of the health world. So what’s the big deal anyway? It turns out that the shoes we wear are pretty bad for our feet. Shoes change our natural gait. And I’m sure no one needs any convincing that most of the shoes women wear are just all bad for the feet and legs, especially high heels. Sure, they look good, but they are hell on your joints and feet.

Think about how you walk. Leg straightens, heel drives into the ground, roll over from back to front, lift, repeat. Shoes are designed to ensure that you don’t end up in pain from hammering your heel into the ground over and over again. If you think about that - driving a straight leg into the ground, bony heel first - it’s obvious that you couldn’t do that for very long if you were barefoot. Other design features of shoes, like a curled up toe, are also unnatural from a barefoot perspective. Your toes curl down, not up. And that’s just the normal shoes. High heels could be the worst thing ever designed for feet.

If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. …This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.

But surely all of that padding in athletic shoes is good, right? We have to protect our feet from the elements and the ground, don’t we? Perhaps not.

Consider a paper titled “Athletic Footwear: Unsafe Due to Perceptual Illusions,” published in a 1991 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. “Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, ‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).” According to another study, people in expensive cushioned running shoes were twice as likely to suffer an injury—31.9 injuries per 1,000 kilometers, as compared with 14.3—than were people who went running in hard-soled shoes.

The real reason you need those shoes with thick padded heels is because your running is as wrong as your walking. When you run, your heel should not be the first thing hitting the ground. The arch of the foot is like a spring, but it can only be used if you run in a more toe-heel-toe manner.

Barefoot Walking

What it comes down to is that your feet evolved without shoes. They are highly sensitive, with some 200,000 nerve endings (one of the highest concentrations in the body), capable of transmitting lots of information about the ground that you’re on.

“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad.

In fact, the feet are so sensitive and important in feeling the ground during locomotion that we appear to compensate for the padding in shoes by hitting the ground harder, in effect forcing the foot to feel the ground.

They found, to their surprise, that the impact on the knees was 12 percent less when people walked barefoot than it was when people wore the padded shoes. ….
Steven Robbins and Edward Waked at McGill University in Montreal found that the more padding a running shoe has, the more force the runner hits the ground with: In effect, we instinctively plant our feet harder to cancel out the shock absorption of the padding. (The study found the same thing holds true when gymnasts land on soft mats—they actually land harder.)

The study authors indicate that going without shoes is the way to have fewer foot problems, a notion that makes plenty of sense. But they also acknowledge that for hygienic reasons, shoes are necessary in public areas.

Now that\'s a bare foot

Enter the new lines of barefoot shoes. A few weeks ago, I headed down to Red River Gorge, a bit east of Lexington, KY, for a couple nights of camping with the guys. Our camping trips usually entail some hiking on Saturday and I had no shoes suitable for hiking. So before the trip, I set a plan to go pick up a cheap pair of hiking boots, but reading this article rekindled an old thought to get into some “barefoot” shoes. I first heard of the Vibram Five Fingers when I saw the video of our buddy Mark Sisson wearing them for his sprints. I looked into them for my own sprint training, but, rightly or wrongly, I decided I needed something with at least a little forefoot padding as sprinting on concrete seems that it would be pretty rough on an unpadded foot (I ended up getting a pair of Asics road flats, so I did at least avoid the big heel and overpadding of most running shoes). I found a store locally that sells the Vibram shoes and picked up a pair of the KSO (stands for “Keep Stuff Out”) Five Fingers, designed for outdoor sports, to wear for the hiking.

Frankly, I love my Vibrams. They fit like a glove. There’s no slippage, no tight spots, or anything of the sort. They are possibly the most comfortable shoe I’ve ever worn. Hiking up rocky trails in The Gorge and strolling through the woods, they’ve treated my feet just fine. You can really feel what you’re walking on: gravel, mud, sticks, etc. The gait is slightly different and it takes a bit to realize that you can’t stomp the arch of your foot down on a rock while walking. Stride length is shorter and, while still landing on the heel somewhat, the landing point is more forward, allowing me to change my mind mid-step if the ground is loose or a rock is sharp. The natural tendency is to actually push off with the toes. Here’s a good visual of a natural stride. The second article below discusses gaits a bit more in detail, though my gait in Five Fingers isn’t quite “fox walking” as he describes it.

Unfortunately, Five Fingers aren’t quite professional. But a company called Terra Plana makes a line of both casual and dressier shoes that, while not being completely “barefoot” as in the Vibrams, allow the foot freer motion and a more natural gait. It’s too bad they cost an arm and a leg. For athletes, there are also various styles of the Nike Free, which are a move towards barefoot if you aren’t quite ready for the Five Fingers.

But what’s it matter anyway? It’s just your feet. Aside from the benefits of keeping your feet healthy, which it would seem for a bipedal species is pretty important, think of the benefits of not ramming your heel into the ground. The shock that your knees, hips, and lower back endure day-in and day-out will diminish. It sounds like it bodes well for overall health to me.

So how ’bout you? Have you tried, or are you planning to try, any of the new “barefoot” shoes?

Sources:
(1) You Walk Wrong
(2) Learning to Walk


If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)


Print This Post Print This Post

Tags: , ,