The last word: Shoes are the enemy
Walking is easy. It’s so easy that no one ever has to teach you how to do it. It’s so easy, in fact, that we often pair it with other easy activities—talking, chewing gum—and suggest that if you can’t do both simultaneously, you’re some sort of insensate clod. So you probably think you’ve got this walking thing pretty much nailed. As you stroll around your neighborhood or your supermarket, worrying about the economy or your next month’s rent, you might assume that the one thing you don’t need to worry about is the way in which you’re strolling.
Well, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: You walk wrong.
Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, abused, ignored, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.
Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet, while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest.
One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”
Okay, so shoes can be less than comfortable. If you’ve ever suffered through a wedding in 4-inch heels or patent-leather dress shoes, you’ve probably figured this out. But does that really mean we don’t walk correctly? (Yes.) I mean, don’t we instinctively know how to walk? (Yes, sort of.)
“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.”
Perhaps this sounds to you like scientific gobbledygook or the ravings of some radical back-to-nature nuts. In that case, you should listen to Galahad Clark. Clark is 32 years old, lives in London, and is about as unlikely an advocate for getting rid of your shoes as you could find. For one, he’s a scion of the Clark family, as in the English shoe company C&J Clark, aka Clarks, founded in 1825. Two, he currently runs his own shoe company. So it’s a bit surprising when he says, “Shoes are the problem. No matter what type of shoe. Shoes are bad for you.”
I know what you’re thinking: If shoes are so terrible, what’s my alternative?
Simple. Walk barefoot.
Okay, now I know what you’re thinking: What’s my other alternative?
Galahad Clark never intended to get into the shoe business, let alone the anti-shoe business. And he likely never would have, if it weren’t for the Wu-Tang Clan. Clark went to the University of North Carolina, where he studied Chinese and anthropology. He started listening to the Wu-Tang, the Staten Island, N.Y., rap collective with a fetish for martial-arts films and, oddly, Wallabee shoes. As it happens, Clark’s father had invented the Wallabee shoe. “I figured this was my chance to go hang out with them,” Clark says. “One thing led to another, and we developed a line of shoes together. That’s what sucked me back into the industry.”
After college, Clark returned to England, where he started working with Terra Plana, a company devoted to ecologically responsible shoes, and started United Nude, a high-design shoe brand, with the architect Rem Koolhaas. Then, in 2000, Clark was approached by Tim Brennan, a young industrial-design student at the Royal College of Art. Brennan was an avid tennis player who suffered from chronic knee and ankle injuries. His father taught the Alexander Technique, a discipline that studies the links between kinetics and behavior; basically, the connection between how we move and how we act. Brennan’s father encouraged Tim to try playing tennis barefoot. Tim was skeptical at first, but tried it, and found that his injuries disappeared. So he set out to design a shoe that was barely a shoe at all: no padding, no arch support, no heel. His prototype consisted of a thin fabric upper with a microthin latex-rubber sole. It wasn’t exactly a new idea. It was a modern update of the 600-year-old moccasin.
Brennan brought his shoe to Clark, and after some modifications, they came up with a very flexible leather shoe with a 3-millimeter sole made of rubber and puncture-resistant DuraTex that they call the Vivo Barefoot. “There are no gimmicks,” Clark says. “It’s a back-to-basics philosophy: that the great Lord designed us perfectly to walk around without shoes.” Other companies have developed similar products: The Italy-based Vibram recently introduced the FiveFingers, a thin rubber shoe that even has toes.
The Vivo Barefoot represented a fundamental break from the dominant philosophy of shoe design. For decades, the guiding principle of shoe design had been to compensate for the perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift the heel. And because many people suffer from flat feet or fallen arches, we wear shoes with built-in arch supports.
Try this test: Take off your shoe and put it on a tabletop. Chances are the toe tip on your shoes will bend slightly upward, so that it doesn’t touch the table’s surface. This is known as “toe spring,” and it’s a design feature built into nearly every shoe. Of course, your bare toes don’t curl upward; in fact, they’re built to grip the earth and help you balance. The purpose of toe spring, then, is to create a subtle rocker effect that allows your foot to roll into the next step. This is necessary because the shoe, by its nature, won’t allow your foot to work in the way it wants to. Normally your foot would roll very flexibly through each step, from the heel through the outside of your foot, then through the arch, before your toes give you a powerful propulsive push forward into the next step. But shoes aren’t designed to be very flexible. Sure, you can take a typical shoe in your hands and bend it in the middle, but that bend doesn’t fall where your foot wants to bend; in fact, if you bent your foot in that same place, your foot would snap in half. So to compensate for this lack of flexibility, shoes are built with toe springs to help rock you forward. You only need this help, of course, because you’re wearing shoes.
Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of a painful tingling in the soles of their feet—what she calls “flip-flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. 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.
Okay, but what about a good pair of athletic shoes? After all, they swaddle your foot in padding to protect you from the unforgiving concrete. But that padding? That’s no good for you either. 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 are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).” According to another study, people in expensive running shoes were twice as likely to suffer an injury than were people who went running in hard-soled shoes.
In theory, barefoot walking should be easy to master. But when I put on a pair of Clark’s Vivos and took to the streets of New York City, the first thing I noticed was that each heel-strike on the pavement was painful. Soon enough I adjusted my stride to more of a mid-foot strike and I was rolling flexibly through each step. But then I noticed my feet were getting really tired. My foot muscles weren’t used to working this hard.
Once past that novice stage, though, I found I really like the Barefoots because they allow me to feel the ground underneath me—asphalt, cobblestones, the nubby yellow warning strips on the subway platforms. It was like driving a stick shift after years at the wheel of an automatic. Rather than coasting on cruise control, I suddenly felt as if in control of an intricate machine.
The Vivos aren’t the ultimate solution. They’re more or less useless in the rain or snow, and every time I wear them they make me feel like I’m off to dance in The Nutcracker. Let’s face it: I’m not going to wear Vivos everywhere I go, and neither are you. Even Galahad Clark still makes and sells regular shoes because, as he says, there is a whole host of reasons people buy shoes, and most of them have nothing to do with comfort. Weaning people off shoes, he says, is “a bit like trying to wean people off sex. It ain’t going to happen. My girlfriend loves to put on heels at night. Then the next day she puts her Vivos back on, to recover.”
What we all can do, though, is stop taking walking for granted and start thinking of it like any other physical activity: as something we can learn to do better. “The most important thing is to change up your shoes as much as possible,” says Amy Matthews, a New York yoga and movement therapy instructor. “And let your foot do the walking rather than your shoe do the walking.”
Feet are smarter than we give them credit for. Consider this: The sole of each foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on. We need to be listening to our feet. Not wrapping them in padding and telling them to shut up.
From a longer article originally published in New York. All rights reserved.
originally published in The Week 9 May 2008 & at
http://www.theweekdaily.com/
