How Bad Are Shoes For Your Feet? Dansko Good Foot Wear Made For Walking

If you really want to know how bad shoes are for your feet and are looking for foot wear made for walking, then look no further. Most shoes are not made for walking but for fashion. Shoes can cause serious damage to adults' and children's feet. Having danced on pointe shoes as a professional ballet dancer for over two decades, it has taken me several years of intense research and practice to get my own damaged feet back to near-normal again. My findings are worth sharing with anyone who suffers from bunions, hammer toes, flat feet, or any other damage caused by shoes (or hereditary factors). I shall also try to clear up certain myths about shoe wear and explain why high heels are the worst shoes to wear with the reservation that it's quite OK to dress up once in a while.

Side Effects of Shoes

Like ballet pointe shoes or Chinese foot binding, high heels and many other shoes can seriously deform your feet. Some shoes should carry a government health warning. A good posture cannot be achieved unless the base, the feet and ankles are strong and healthy. The type of shoes you wear directly affects the health of your feet. When the foundation (your feet) is crumbling, the building (your body) crumbles and eventually collapses.

In a previous installment of the EasyFitness Series we discussed correct foot placement and toe alignment. Before moving any further up the body with the ankles, knees, pelvis, torso, spine, shoulders, neck and head, I had to write this hub on shoes. If you want to correct a bad posture and be better equipped to carry your body, then avoid bunions and hammer toes. As I had to do, as an extreem case, you too can begin to reverse the damage and stop the situation worsening as you grow older.

Why Do We Wear Shoes?

The original function of shoes is to protect the feet from harm and weather. We learned in the previous episodes that the bigger and broader your base, the stronger and more grounded your stance will be. If your toes are squashed together and not allowed to spread out as they are designed to do, to give maximum balance, then the weight of your body is being shifted backwards onto the heels alone. This means that when you are walking or standing you are prone to being very easily knocked over. It therefore stands to reason that the shoes we wear should not interfere in this endeavour. Not even for the sake of fashion. Don’t squash your feet into tight shoes or you will be more likely to lose your balance.

In the aristocratic circles of China old women used to break little girls’ toes, fold them under and bind them to prepare them for a “privileged” life at the palace, as one of the Emperor’s wives. Crippled for life, hardly walking and certainly not being able to run away from the Emperor, these young girls were assured, by this cruel custom, a future life of wealthy slavery.

How much self abuse is still being practiced today in the name of culture, fashion, image, fame or prestige? For me, shoes are as much of a nuisance as corsets, wired bras, garters, hairpins, earrings, ties, belts, buttons, bags, piercings and tattoos, all trying to but failing to appease the consumer's lack of a healthy self image and deep seated feelings of insecurity. So OK it's fun to dress up for a special occasion but wearing high heels as a norm??? Read on and discover that high heels are, in a different way, as silly and damaging to your body as the kind of abuse women imposed upon themselves centuries ago. Like waist tightening until they could no longer breathe and gracefully fainted at every occasion.

The Truth About High Heels

• The body weight is carried too far forwards, placing the ankles, knees, hips and spine out of alignment. You are, in fact, shortening the length of the baring capacity in the foot.
• Increases pressure on the forefoot.
• Creates unnecessary tension in the calf muscles.
• Shortens the Achilles tendon which hurts when walking without high heels.

If you find High heels sexy just bear in mind that they project an image of vulnerability. That image has got women where they are today: the weaker sex, at the mercy of a more able-bodied man who helps them wobble out of taxis, on their stilettos, clutching onto his arm and a handbag.

Side Effects of High Heels

• Morton’s neuroma – a thickening of tissue around a nerve between the 3^rd and 4^th toes which can cause pain.
• Bunions – bony growth on outside of the big toe joint.
• Hammertoes – toes are bent at the middle joint through lack of space.

If you can do a proper "relevé" (rising up very high on your toes) as described in a previous hub in the EasyFitness series, then you don't need high heels. Jus walk along normally on flats, trainers or flip-flops and then, when you know you might be observed by some interested (and interesting) male, just pretend you want to grow taller to see something far away and bingo, you're up there on your perfect "relevé" giving you the exact look high heels create without the pain or harm done to your feet. It's good practice too. I often do it, standing in queues, to rise above the crowd. Silly? So be it.

When you go out to buy your next pair of shoes consider the following:

Before trying to squeeze your foot into a new shoe hold the sole of the left shoe against the sole of your right foot (or vice versa) and judge for yourself if the new shoe’s surface area would take the shape of your whole foot.

A well fitting shoe has enough room for the toes to spread while sharing weight bearing in walking, jumping and running. Such a shoe is hard to find. Even most of the exorbitantly priced trainers lack a proper foot shape. A shoe salesman will tell you that good shoes have to "support" the feet, or they will "spread". Ask yourself: Why? Your feet do not need support if they are allowed to do their job unimpaired.

Con trick - The only reason the shoe salesman (the footwear industry) propagates such nonsensical information is to make people's feet so uncomfortable in their shoes that they need to keep buying new ones. Wake-Up!

And Here Is Another Myth:

Shoes will hurt until you “break them in”. Sorry, you are not “breaking in” a shoe, if a shoe hurts, it is the shoe that is, slowly but surely, breaking your foot with severe reprisals in the form of bunions, hammertoes and poor stability. As soon as you start wearing shoes with discretion and remember all the points discussed in my EasyFitness series of Hubs, you should, within a fortnight or so, have changed the way you use your feet to created a good foundation for better posture and balance. Then, and only then, can you even begin to think about jogging and any other popular fitness trends performed in an upright position. Failing this, you will only aggravate the damage already caused to your poor feet by shoes. Sorry!

Children's Shoes

Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway: When buying shoes for children the above considerations should be taken even more seriously.

If most mass produced shoes are still not made for comfortable walking, then people resent walking. Yet everyone seems to be into elegance and style. What they fail to understand is that elegance and style is not made in a shoe but is the result of how well you can carry your body with grace, fluency, good timing, and an appropriate physical response to what is going on around you. So it figures that nothing you put on our body for the sake of elegance and style will work unless your body itself is elegant and stylish to begin with. True elegance and style can only be achieved with Physical Intelligence. Elegance and style are in your body, not in your shoes.

This is the 3rd hub in the EasyFitness series where you can find all 20 episodes I have written so far (last updated 12 June 2011) on Physical Intelligence, Body Awareness and Weight Loss.

Read Next: The Feet You Walk On

SUE ADAMS

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