Bare Foot

I wanted to write something a bit more grounding, so here my thoughts on why we should wear shoes less.

The oldest shoes that we know of, dating back to 3500 BC,  were found preserved in sheep dung in Armenia. Nobody knows how much further back shoes go, but I can’t imagine any group of humans surviving a frozen winter without them, making shoes an ancient and possibly pre-human technology. They keep our feet warm, dry and safe from the elements, but they do come at a price. Nowadays most shoes are designed in ways that work against the bio-mechanics of the foot.

Each foot is comprised of 28 bones. One quarter of all bones in the body are below the ankles. There is the heel or the calcaneus bone, upon which sits the talas, which functions as the hinge of the foot. The instep is composed of the cuboid on the lateral side and the navicular which is medial. In front of them is 3 rectangular bones called the cuneiforms. These 5 bones have joints that glide off each other allowing the foot to modify their shape to the ground beneath them. At the distal end of the foot, we have 5 fingerlike tarsals bones allowing us to grip the ground. Our 4 lateral toes have 3 phalanges a piece while our big toe has 2. Where the medial tarsal meets the big toe there is usually but not always 2 sesamoids (small like sesame seeds) bones which perform a similar function in the foot as the patella (kneecap) does in the leg. Every day we stuff all these bones into shoes, restricting their movement and depriving them of sensory information, they evolved to receive.

When we look at shoes most will have some elevation of the heel. Heels originally were developed as a way to secure one's foot in a stirrup while riding a horse. Aside from giving us the illusion of being taller, we can speculate that any status that came from riding horses were imbued in heels. Now of course when we see people wear cowboy boots we do not assume they know anything about horses, but elevating ourselves on heels (even small ones) does still provide a certain sense of social empowerment for many people. This causes much physical strain though. If you were to stand up perfectly straight in 2-inch heels you would be at about a 70-degree angle from the ground, You would also fall over, so to do this you need to rearrange your body to accommodate your shoes. Some combination of keeping your calf in a shortened position, while anteriority shifting your pelvis, and hyperextending your ribs is required to maintain balance. These unnatural gait patterns happen as a way of compensating for almost all shoes we wear, as almost all shoes have some heel elevation, even if they are not “heels”.

The toe box at the other end of the shoe is often too narrow, splinting the toe bones together. Due to the rigidness of most soles the toes box in most shoe also elevate the toes as to allow the shoe to rock on the ground. Without this rocking, we would be jamming our toes constantly as we walk. This narrowing and elevation not only misalign the toes, but it also eliminates our toes role in creating stability. Proprioception (how we know where the body is in relation to itself)  is still not fully understood. It is believed to be a combination of the Golgi receptor in the tendons that measure the angles of a joint and stretch receptors in the muscle belly that lets us know how contracted a muscle is. Our toes have evolved to have dense quantities of these nerves as they are how human keep balanced. The flexor hallucis muscle (our muscle that pulls the big toe down) goes from the bottom of our toe across the bottom of our foot crosses over from the medial side of the ankle to the lateral side of our leg connecting about half way up our fibula (the thin supporting bone in the lateral lower leg). Meanwhile, our digitorum flexor longus connects at the end of our 4 other toes goes along the bottom of the foot crossing from the lateral to the medial side of the leg, connecting halfway up the tibia (the medial bone of our lower leg). These muscles cross each other in order so we are able to pull our weight side to side by engaging one of these 2 toe flexors. This gives us the ability to make last minute micro adjustments to our gait, without with walking on uneven terrain would be much less graceful. The more we walk in shoes the more these abilities atrophy.

As well as restricting all the subtle movement of the foot, shoes insulate our feet from so much of the sensory information they need. Each of our feet contains around 200,000 nerve endings, making it along with our hand and our lips, one of the most nerve rich area of the body. Afferent (sensory) nerves travel from the feet to the brain relaying information such as pain, pressure, and temperature.  Efferent (motor) neurons reply back to the feet sparking all the subtle movement we need to walk. As these neuromuscular pathways fire and wire in the space between our feet and brain they create the foundation of our movement pattern. Any modification to one's foot placement will create a wave of subtle muscle realignment throughout the body. Hips, shoulders, arms and neck muscles will move to stay in balance with our feet. I am personally reminded of this through an old injury where I broke my big toe on my right foot. My flexor hallucis muscle went unused for many weeks so it has a tendency to be lazy if I am zombieing around not paying attention to my body.  This causes me to walk on the lateral edge of my foot, as there is no muscular force pulling my big toe down. In order to compensate for this, my whole body will begin to twist counter clockwise causing all sorts of structural misalignments, letting me know (through pain) that this one muscle needs to be re-engaged.

Our feet evolved to traverse uneven and unpredictable ground. I  believe any comprehensive health strategy needs to include some form of barefoot activity. If this is the first time you are challenging your feet to something more complicated than a flat floor there are some caveats. Unless you are looking for an endorphin buzz stay away from gravel and rocky surfaces. Grassy field or a sandy beach is best to start a barefoot practice on. In time I do feel it beneficial to gradually push yourself self to navigate rougher terrain.  Nocioreceptors (neurons that process pain) are slower than mechanoreceptors (neurons that process pressure) making it possible to feel and correct a misstep before we are jolted with a pain impulse. The human nervous system allows us to process sensation and modify our behavior before we experience pain. Learning to walk unshod has honed my awareness to this biological reality.  This practice can also translate into other parts of our lives where it's easy to conflate pressure with pain. Be aware that by starting such a practice you are using muscles that have may have been dormant for a very long time. It’s easy to overdo it. We are more susceptible to injury when we are engaging muscles in new activities.

For these reasons I encourage everyone to explore this part of the human experience. To develop our neuro-muscular coordination in our feet, to increase diversity of movement in our body, to improve our proprioception and balance. These are the reasons that enticed me to go down this path myself some years ago. What I learned after walking (sans shoes) down this path is that not only do shoes disconnect ourselves from our body, but also we become disconnected to the environment.  As footwear protects us from ground level danger we become less aware of those dangers. Over a few years I noticed a synthesia between my visual and my tactile awareness that lets me know how and where to place my feet. The more I engage in barefoot walking the more this sense develops. Without a barrier between our soles and the earth we naturally pick up electrical and bacterial information from where we stand. Without this feedback it is easy to numb ourselves to how environmentally uncoordinated we can be. It's common to see broken glass, litter, and even needles on many street. If it was not customary to wear shoes, would we still be so tolerant of such debris? It's hard to say. We vacuum, sweep and mop our inside floors where we don’t perpetually insolutate our feet. We know intuitively when we need to clean our homes. Its interesting to ponder whether we would extend this intuition out into our collective home, our collective floor, if we weren't always separated from it.

                                                                                               Anthony  Bruni