Your feet are sensory organs. Each foot has 26 bones, 33 joints, and over 100 muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Every one of these joints, muscles, ligaments, and tendons is responsible for telling the brain where your body is in space, as well as other important sensory information your brain needs to know to help you move through this world. This type of information is known as proprioception. When the proprioception from our feet is off, we are more prone to spraining our ankle, falling, and other injuries.
Causes Of Poor Foot Proprioception
One of the biggest causes of poor foot proprioception is the wearing of shoes that are not foot-shaped. Think about it. When you are barefoot, your heel is level with your toes, your toes splay wider than the ball of your foot (or they should), and you can move your toes individually. An overwhelming majority of shoes on the market today present a different picture. They heel is higher than the toes, the tips of the toes curl up, the toe box is often narrow and rounded or pointed causing the toes to squish together and there is often some sort of artificial arch support. It would be like wearing really tight mittens on our hands all day and still wanting to benefit from the wide range of motion our fingers normally go through.
When our foot functions poorly, the rest of our body has to compensate. In order to paint a picture for you, take your most worn shoe and look at how much higher the heel is than the toes. Imagine taking a tall slender bookshelf the same height as you and inserting a block of the height of the elevated heel under one of the legs. How far over would this bookshelf lean? A bookshelf is an inanimate object and cannot adapt to the change in angle. As humans, we have a reflex that helps get our eyes level with the horizon. So now imagine you being that bookshelf leaning over and having to put the rest of your body in odd positions to get your eyes back to being level with the horizon. This is a big reason why people suffer from neck, low back, and knee pain.
Solutions That Will Support Correction
Going barefoot is the fastest way towards correcting the sometimes decades of harm we’ve done to our feet. Because we live in a society that deems bare feet as socially unacceptable, switching to a more natural form of footwear while in public is the next best thing you can do for your foot health. There are many benefits you’ll experience from making this small shift including reduction in foot deformities like bunions and hammer toes, decreased body pain, increased foot strength, balance, and motor control. Wearing toe separators will speed up the healing process for you. There are a ton of these products on the market. I suggest the product Correct Toes® because they are small enough to wear with your shoes. You can buy them from correcttoes.com.
Here are a few things to consider when purchasing healthy, more natural shaped shoes:
- Lightweight without arch support
In order to increase strength and mobility of your foot, choose shoes that are lightweight without artificial arch support or other supportive features.
2. Flat
Your heel and toes should be level so that your foot can distribute your body weight evenly. Any shoe that elevates the heel (even just a little) or that has a curl up in the toes is going to alter your foot’s natural ability to function.
3. Flexible
Hard and inflexible shoes act like a cast on the foot. Your shoes should allow your foot to move naturally through all of its ranges of motions. Remember there are 33 joints in each foot and they are meant to move.
4. Widest at the toes
If you look at a baby’s foot, you will see that our toes naturally splay out wider than the ball of our foot. It is the years of improper foot wear that have caused our toes to be narrower. Getting a shoe with a wide toe box will allow your toes to eventually return to their natural position. This helps increase blood flow and allows a wider base for balance and for stronger arch muscles.
As a chiropractor, I see drastic changes in my patient’s body pains when they switch to a more natural, healthy shoe. Trust me, when you make the switch you will never want to go back.
