Why is walking in bad/old shoes considered unhealthy, but walking barefoot isn’t?
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Shoes wear unevenly and because of this puts unnatural pressures on your foot affecting your entire posture which can damage muscles and other connective tissues all the way up into your shoulders and neck.
Walking barefoot only puts bad/unnatural pressures on your musculoskeletal system if you have a deformation like flat foot.
Humans evolved to walk barefoot, so that’s fine. Very smart engineers designed human shoes (certain styles, at least) to be ergonomic and comfortable when not worn out, so those are fine as well.
Badly worn shoes don’t fit into either of the categories above. Also, the parts of your shoes that wear out the most are the parts that receive the most distress, which means you need the most support in those places, which means worn-out shoes give you little-to-no support in the places where you need the most support.
Ergo, walking barefoot or in newer, well-designed shoes is good, and walking in worn-out and/or poorly-designed shoes is bad.
Walking barefoot is the most natural thing you can do. We as humans do not walk barefoot enough and I believe is the reason for most foot problems. In no way is it bad. Unless the terrain is unsafe of course.
Definitely. More people need to regularly walk barefoot and in barefoot shoes like Vibrams. And actually uneven, rough, or hazardous terrain can make you more anti-fragile. Of course, avoid broken glass, nails, etc lol
Take your shoes off and run in a park or through your yard. You will notice you run up on the balls of your feet and your weight is forward.
Shoes generally shift everything towards the heal. Literally changes the mechanics of how you run. So when the shoes are worn all that pressure is hitting your body in a way it’s not designed to handle.
Barefoot running shoes attempt to switch the mechanics back to the balls of the feet
Humanity was designed to walk barefoot, we’ve literally been doing it for most of our existence as a species. Now as a “mostly” intelligent species, we’ve also figured out how to do an even better job of walking through mechanical means, shoes. Unfortunately that only works when those shoes are well maintained, if they don’t fit, parts are broken or worn away, things like that, you will unconsciously adapt your walking to fit those shoes, which can screw up your feet, your posture, your walking mechanics, and lots of other things
When you walk barefoot your foot strikes are more controlled. You’re not striking heel first (usually). With shoes you tend to do that. Which is not good for your feet. But if there’s enough support and cushion it can negate a lot of that detrimental force.
When you walk on your feet you naturally and very very quickly find the right way to walk. Because it hurts if you don’t, and hurts exactly where you shouldn’t be hitting the ground.
Go walk barefoot outside now. Try going over a bit of gravel. You’ll slow right down and stop heel-striking immediately.
Shoes fuck that all up and mean you never learn how to walk or run as your body is evolved to.
It’s not clear to me, and I could be wrong, that walking barefoot can be considered generally “good”. All these other comments saying we evolved to walk barefoot is true, except for the fact that the human body did not evolve walking on pavement. Which most of us have been doing our entire lives. Causing the deformities, mentioned by other comments, requiring the use of special orthotics.
There is a lot of anecdotal advice given on other subs and YouTube etc of people pedaling the ideas that “barefoot saved my feet” who may or may not happen to make affiliate money off the shoes they promote. And though there may very well be many people who experience positive results from barefoot, this kind of thing will always exist as misinformation for the people with real problems that can’t be solved by removing your shoe.
This is probably the wrong sub, but right or wrong, I would love for someone to point me to the science on this. Instead of just saying “we evolved this way” because we didn’t.
because walking in general is dangerous, walking is just moving your center of mass to a place that allows you to fall in a way that also propels you forward
so for example an 80kg human exerts much more than 80kg of force on each step, but the body is able to handle that force with minimal effort because your leg bones align perfectly with the force in the moment of impact, after a ‘fall’ you just have to use your muscles to lift yourself back up to fall again, this uses less ‘energy’.
if you wear bad shoes the force you exert each step will not be aligned perfectly therefore using more energy, burdening your muscles, bones and soles of your feet with more forces than needed. Why barefoot is not bad because we’re designed to walk barefoot.
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