I let out a little cheer when I read You Walk Wrong in New York Magazine. I love to go barefoot – I do it as much as possible indoors year round and during the summer go barefoot outside, as well. In my neighbourhood, growing up, we ran around without shoes all summer and it still doesn’t really feel like summer to me until I can go outside with naked feet. (I think one of the reasons I fell in love with yoga was the no shoes aspect of it!)
My husband disputes some of the claims in the article, but I have to say, when I thought about it, I realized my feet hurt most when I come in from a walk/run wearing my very engineered running shoes with custom orthotics inside. Conversely, I’ve been wearing these mary-janes (mine are red) with the very simple Nike Free sole while on holiday for the last two weeks, doing lots of walking, and my feet feel great. So I think there is something to this:
“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.
Bonus: Article on asana for your feet in the latest issue of Yoga and Joyful Living (scroll down for PDF article)
5 Comments
May 3, 2008 at 11:34 am
Lianne — no surprise I found this interesting too, especially with my experience with Jonathan Fitzgordon’s walking program. I’m going to look for the MJ’s. I’m wearing some unstructured MJs as I type.
May 3, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I grew up mostly barefoot, and usually wore very unsupportive shoes (the $3 fake-Keds). In college I took up martial arts and would run barefoot. Until I got PF. That certainly doesn’t disprove anything, but it also makes sense that perhaps not every foot does well bare.
I like the idea of going barefoot. Perhaps my yoga-influenced feet would help prevent another bout of PF. I kind of like these: Sprint.
May 7, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I read that too and was totally convinced, except that I don’t like to go barefoot, even in my house. So I bought a pair of those Vivo shoes mentioned in the article, which were absurdly expensive. I really don’t think they are much different, functionally, than a pair of cheap thin-soled sneakers. Almost as bad as the price was that the company shows up on your credit card statement as “Forever Nude” or something like that. And — I haven’t actually worn them other than to try them on and walk around the house.
May 25, 2008 at 6:46 pm
lianne, hi!!
i was just talking to karen and she wanted your details so i sent her a link to your site.
hope all is well with you. e mail me so i can e mail you back.
i too love a nudey foot – ’specially on the beach!
loulou xxx
May 26, 2008 at 10:12 am
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