Look down at your feet. Among the varieties of heels, trainers and Converse, it can be difficult to tell which shoes will be a detriment to your body’s performance.
jesse hart | rawr High heels have been shown to cause foot, ankle and Achilles tendon problems. Running shoes, by contrast, extend their activity and health friendly design to everyday use.
Alan Nasypany, the director of the University of Idaho athletic training program, said shoes can have a huge effect on you body’s ability to cope with daily activities.
“Each person has an individual preference for what their body has for how their joints and their feet are supposed to function,” Nasypany said. “So, the shoes are artificial and created by people who don’t have the feet you have. So when you buy a pair of shoes, some people can fit into the average shoe, but most people struggle a little bit.”
Nasypany said new shoes shouldn’t hurt.
“There’s a myth about shoes, that they take a while to break in,” Nasypany said. “When you try a shoe on in the store, it should feel really good as soon as you put it on. You know you have a good pair of shoes when you don’t want to take them off.”
Most shoes are made for people who turn their feet in, or pronation, he said.
“If you have a foot that doesn’t pronate, it’s really difficult to find shoes for you,” Nasypany said. “They would buy those shoes, and it would make their feet and their body worse. Could be their feet or knees or back. Any of those parts.”
Nasypany said he has had patients who even suffer from headaches as a result of the shoes they are wearing.
“If you fall in on your arches, or roll out on your arches, it changes the way the bones work all the way up to your spine,” Nasypany said.
Building shoes
Shoes were first made from a wooden form said Sandra Evenson, director and professor of the School of Family and Consumer Sciences.
“A ‘last’ is created,” Evenson said. “Cobblers would take measurements of your feet — of each foot — and based on those measurements, they would carve a wood form.”
The shoe would then be built around the form.
Evenson said shoes didn’t have a division of left or right until around the 1700 or 1800s.
“Usually every company has their own standards last, from which they develop all the other sizes,” Evenson said, “and they build the styles around what they think their customer’s foot is shaped like.”
Inexpensive shoes, such as those sold by Payless ShoeSource, are meant to be trendy, and discarded as the trends change, so less focus is devoted to comfort, she said. Running shoes are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
“That’s where a lot has been done in terms of materials,” Evenson said. “A lot of exiting things are being done in terms of materials. The … cutting edge stuff is happening (in) performance sportswear.”
High heels
A recent trend Evenson has observed is the extremely high heels.
“A lot of those shoes are inexpensive shoes, and there’s not a lot of support built into them,” Evenson said. “A lot of a high heel has to do with where the heel is placed in relation to the rest of the foot.”
Evenson said heels that are placed inward on the shoe can carry more weight, but heels that are more outward toward the edge of the shoe can be more stable.
Heels that are set up on a platform are also better for the feet, Evenson said.
“And so it might actually be that if you took the whole platform off, you’d only have a two or three inch heel,” Evenson said. “Adding a platform is one way to get the height without the difficulty.”
Wider heels provide the ankle with more stability, she said.
Evenson said stores are beginning to carry inserts for heels that work to support the toes much like a ballerina’s toe shoes.
“You can get these little silicon or rubber pockets,” Evenson said. “I’ve actually seen those at Shopko for regular people for their shoes. You end up crunching your toes — if there was a way your toes could stay really straight, you would be better off.”
Brad Capawana, a doctor of podiatric medicine, said one change that can happen from wearing high heels long term, in both women and men who wear work boots with heels, is a shortening of the calf muscle.
“Which leads to pain in the Achilles tendon,” Capawana said. “When patients tend to go into a more flat shoe or start to walk barefoot — then they can start to get tendonitis.”
Capawana said the best way to wear heels is in short amounts of time.
“I would try not to function in them all day,” Capawana said. “Or if you work retail and you have to dress up, there are more sensible shoes that would be better for the foot.”
Capawana said generally, heels cause problems for people who already have a weakness.
“They increase the prevalence of those problems,” Capawana said.
Minimally supported shoes
Nasypany said he’s often asked if two shoes, or minimally supported shoes, are good for the feet.
“Most of the time we’d say they’re probably not very good, because we’ve gone our whole lives wearing shoes,” Nasypany said. “So most of us have grown accustomed to the support. So if we take that support away, then the feet take a long time to adapt to that.”
The unsupported shoe would be good for someone with good foot mechanics.
“But most people – we used to do screenings for athletes before the season, and we would find less than 20 percent would have what we would classify as normal feet,” Nasypany said.
“And so none of those 80 percent of people would really set up to do well barefoot or with minimally supported shoes.”
He said it depends on what the feet are accustomed to and it’s a fad.
Flip-flops generally have minimal support as well. Nasypany said students should start by wearing them for only a few hours at a time if they’ve worn shoes with more support all winter.
Stresses
Nasypany said extra stress on the feet would slowly strengthen the bones.
“If you do it too quickly, your bones will change and start to fail, and that’s where we see stress fractures,” Nasypany said. “If you’re used to having lots of support, and then you don’t have lots of support, those muscles will have to work a lot harder and they’ll get mad at you and you’ll have muscle strains.”
Shin splints can come from either too much cushion, or too little.
“You can either get it because you hit the ground really hard and it bumps, and sends a lot of vibration and stress to the bones,” Nasypany said. “Or they can be caused because your foot’s unstable and makes the muscles work harder and it irritates where the muscle is attached to the bone.”
Capawana said most foot problems become more severe slowly during time.
“It’s like listening to loud music,” Capawana said. “If you do it once or twice, it’s not going to ruin your ears. But if you do any of these things repetitively, over time, the wear and tear starts to show.”
Capawana said a basic athletic shoe is the best choice for students who spend a lot of time walking.
“Athletic shoes are meant for pounding and they’re designed (to handle many) miles,” Capawana said.
Joanna Wilson can be reached at [email protected]