Many people swear by barefoot shoes, but do they work for everyone?
When you first read about the benefits of wearing barefoot shoes (shoes with a wide toe box with a thin, flexible sole that’s completely flat from heel to toe), the theory behind them makes a lot of sense. It seems logical that we should allow our feet to work as nature intended by wearing shoes that are as close to being barefoot as possible. After all, most modern shoes have raised heels that put a lot of excess strain on different parts of our body, and they also tend to have narrow toe boxes that squeeze our toes together, which can lead to an array of foot ailments, such as bunions, Morton’s Neuroma, and hammer toes, to name a few.
But are barefoot shoes a panacea that can fix all of our foot and mobility-related problems?
Objectively speaking, I think everyone would benefit from wearing shoes with a wide toe box that allows room for their toes to splay. Wearing narrow-toed shoes has the potential to do a lot of harm and provides no material benefit I’m aware of, aside from aesthetic appeal.
Additionally, wearing shoes that are completely flat is probably a good idea for most people. Wearing elevated heels negatively affects your posture, which can lead to lower back pain and pelvic tilt, and can even distort your spine. It also creates an uneven distribution of weight, putting excess strain on the balls of the feet, further exacerbating the problems caused by wearing narrow toe boxes. But even so, some people have had their Achilles tendon shortened to such a degree from years of wearing high heels that they might never be able to wear completely flat shoes without pain or injury.
Now, what about the third attribute of barefoot shoes: the thinness of the sole? Many barefoot shoe enthusiasts maintain that thin soles are essential for proprioception (sense of body positioning in space) and for strengthening the foot muscles. Here we come to the point where I think barefoot shoes fall short for many people.
While the aforementioned benefits of thin soles may be true, wearing barefoot shoes does come with its own set of potential drawbacks. For example, they can increase your risk of developing stress fractures, lead to a loss of the fat pads on the bottoms of your feet, and create nagging foot fatigue that makes walking difficult and painful.
The single biggest complaint I see from people wearing barefoot shoes comes down to the lack of cushioning in the soles. There are those who claim that your legs should be absorbing most of the impact of walking and running, and that you must change your gait and do xyz exercise, while also allowing enough time to adapt to barefoot shoes in order to avoid injury. That might be all well and good for some, but in all honesty, how practical is this advice for the majority of people? It’s a big lifestyle change to commit to just to be able to wear thin-soled shoes, when in reality, a lot of people would probably see the largest improvement just by making the switch from conventional shoes to cushioned, flat shoes with a wide toe box.
It might be the case that if we’d been wearing barefoot shoes all our lives, our feet would be perfectly healthy and strong and we’d never have any foot-related issues. But that is not the reality for most people. Many of us have had our feet and gait altered from a lifetime of wearing conventional shoes and it would take a serious amount of reconditioning to be able to wear barefoot shoes without injury. And let’s face it, our early ancestors were not walking barefoot on concrete floors and sidewalks. They walked on a variety of natural surfaces like dirt, mud, rocks, and grass. Our feet are not adapted for the modern, hard surfaces that a lot of us are forced to walk on in our daily lives, and we should wear shoes that are tailored for the world we live in today.
Ultimately, I believe the ability to walk without pain is essential to our overall health and wellbeing, and if our shoes fail to provide that, we should ditch the shoes. Because if we’re too hurt to walk, what even is the point?