Can You Change Your Posture With Your Shoes?

We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about shoes, other than as a fashion statement or in terms of an activity. We have running shoes, hiking boots, high heels, boating shoes, flip flops. We primarily wear shoes to protect our feet from sharp objects on the ground and dropped bags of groceries from above. We don’t think about what the shoe does to our feet.

Humans were not born wearing shoes. Nor were they born with car keys in their hands, but very few 16 year olds understand that. Shoes have a purpose, and several things can interfere with that purpose. Heels, for instance. Does anyone really think that 3 inch high heels are good for your feet? Yes I know they make your legs look great, and you appear taller and thinner. The bad news is, they alter the natural erect state of the body column. In other words, your posture is now out of alignment. All your weight is on the balls of your feet, meaning  your feet at less stable. The hips are no longer in line with the spine, which is no longer in line with the head. Because of instability, there exists tension in the body that wasn’t there before, and tension (stress) kicks up cortisol, which adds to weight gain. Oh wait, if you take up smoking to combat weight gain………..

If the shoe does not flex forward to backward, it creates inflexibility where the ball of the foot attaches to the toes. So that walking gait you have when you are barefoot is now restricted. If the toe of the shoe contains a slight incline up (like many sneaker-type shoes), it causes metatarsal stress symptoms. The toes do not relax. If you spend all day in shoes that do not allow your toes to relax, they will have trouble relaxing when you remove your shoes. It creates a bad habit for your feet. Toes need to relax with the rest of the body.

Finally, If the shoes do not flex forward, backward, and sideways, the tactile sensory nerve endings in your feet cannot feel the floor through the shoes. The foot moves as a whole, not as individual bones working together. But your foot isn’t a whole. It has 26 bones that need to move to give you a sense of sure-footed walking. Your brain has no sense of how stable your footing is on the floor. That is also added stress to the body, and there’s that cortisol response again.

I know that certain situations demand steel toes and other specific minded footwear. I have high heels that I occasionally wear. When I return home, I kick off my shoes, rub my feet, and move my feet as much as possible. I go barefoot as much as I can.

We were born barefoot. Being tactile with the ground grounds us, and improves our posture. People with better posture live longer.

That’s Aging Intelligently