I’m sure a lot of people probably anticipate that a minimal footwear book by the author of multiple books on natural movement and foot health would go something like “Minimal shoes are amazing. We should all be wearing them all the time and we’d all be healthier. The end.”
Surprise! You will not find such a broad-stroke recommendation here. In fact, I’m writing this book because the opposite might be true: an incautious change to minimal footwear could very easily result in injury and further disease. I am, of course, a huge fan of minimal shoes, and I do think that everyone should be working towards eliminating conventional shoes from their closets. However, wearing minimal shoes without creating or prolonging injury and disease can require hundreds of steps (pun intended) along the way.
Our lives are crazy busy, and we like things to be laid out for us in simple steps. But this current culture of reducing necessary steps for health to five-foods-five-exercises-five-minutes-a-day lists means that important physiological guidelines get ignored in favor of being published in a magazine or on a website. I’ve been asked to create this kind of list many times—and yes, I’ve done it. Unfortunately, despite being initially helpful, a short list leaves out much of the work necessary to make meaningful health changes. In the case of the trendy move toward minimal shoes—where many hopped right in without doing any transitional work along the way—the result was an inevitable backlash when the shoes “didn’t work like they were supposed to.”
Minimal shoes, with their stated or implied ability to provide some health benefit to the wearer while performing an athletic endeavor, are surrounded by controversy. Without data on long-term users of footwear that is without support or cushioning, many medical practitioners have worried about injury. Minimal shoe companies and barefoot running proponents have argued that being barefoot is natural and therefore barefoot shoes must be good. What has been clear to me, as someone who works to disseminate complex scientific information to laypeople without destroying its accuracy, is that much of this disagreement boils down to semantics and broad generalizations. And so, this book.
As with most arguments, when you examine this one closely, both sides are right and wrong. Research shows that minimal shoes are not safe for everyone in every situation—but research also shows that conventional shoes wreak their own havoc on the body.
The element that seems to be missing from the argument is that shoes don’t exist in a vacuum. Shoes and feet are in a relationship with the user and the environment, which means the physical outcome of the body that wears the shoes depends on the state of the wearer’s foot, body alignment, gait patterns, frequency of movement, and most-frequented terrain. A shoe can’t be a problem or a solution in and of itself, and if we are going to determine what constitutes optimal footwear, we need to consider what’s going on throughout the user’s body and life.
Both sides of the minimal shoe debate want what they believe is best—most healthy—for the population. (Let’s just ignore the debaters with serious intere$t in the minimal footwear game and those who just like to snicker about the appearance of minimal shoes. I have no idea whether or not these groups have your best outcomes in mind.) Still, both sides could use a broader perspective and a longer discussion than typically happens on social media. To clarify language is to clarify an argument.
WALK BEFORE YOU RUN
Thanks to Born to Run author Christopher McDougall and other barefoot-running proponents, many people hope to transition to minimal shoes for the purposes of running in a different way. If this is you, please remember that because the loads to your body (and feet) differ when you’re running versus walking, they are entirely different things biomechanically speaking. While running is entirely natural (found in nature), natural running is performed by animals (including people) that have spent large amounts of time walking (and squatting, and doing a ton of other non-running movements)—throughout a day, over a lifetime. Which means the strength and shapes of tissue you would naturally be bringing to a “barefoot” run would be affected by copious amounts of barefoot walking—walking that you haven’t been doing. In the same way your toddler-body spent lots of time learning to walk before reflexively attempting running, you need to be building a running foundation that’s larger than just running. For this reason, I’m going to talk about walking a lot more than running.
So, before I get into the details regarding how to transition, I want to clarify—in detail—just what we are transitioning to.
The term minimal footwear (also referred to as minimalist footwear, or barefoot shoes) as I use it means a shoe that minimizes its alteration of natural human movement. This is a slightly different interpretation from the term minimal as applied to the quantity of materials making up the shoe. For example, a flip-flop is perceived, by many, to be a minimal shoe because of its low shoe-mass. But with in-depth biomechanical analysis, or even superficial biomechanical analysis (i.e., just look down at your feet when you’re walking in flip-flops), you can see that a flip-flop alters the way you walk (as explained in Section 1). Which means that simply having minimal mass isn’t the best characteristic by which to classify a shoe as “minimal.”
MINIMAL PERSPECTIVES
I have a colleague who is a minimal footwear/barefoot advocate, but who is a biochemist by training. His definition of a minimal shoe might be different from mine, because he might be looking at environments that lend themselves to bacteria and fungus and would categorize a flip-flop as minimal simply because it is open. The moral of this story is that everyone has a different perspective, and as you’re gathering your own data, consider both what you hope to get out of wearing minimal shoes and the instructional point of view you are following.
Shoes are typically broken down into four components known to impact human performance (that is, to perform the biological functions necessary to be human, not to win a race): sole, heel, upper, and toe-box.
Minimal shoes have:
• a sole that is thin and flexible enough for the tissues in the foot (and not just the ankle) to feel the ground below the foot and respond by articulating, innervating, contracting, releasing, etc.;
• a heel that is neutral, or “zero-drop,” allowing all joints to work from a neutral baseline and enabling the full range of motion for all joints in the body;
• an upper that fully connects the foot to the shoe, so there’s no need to grip the toes or the front of the shin to keep the shoe on while walking; and
• a spacious toe-box that allows enough room for the toes to extend and spread as necessary while walking, hiking, or climbing.
Minimal footwear is not about being as tiny as possible; minimal footwear allows your feet to behave as feet while still offering a buffer between the unnatural detritus found in the modern world that can cause injury.
CULTURAL SHOES
Many of the features found in modern shoes, like heels or a narrow toe-box, are there for cultural reasons—they change with fashion. The idea of what we need in a shoe, and why we need shoes, is also tainted with a cultural perspective based on ideas about the superiority of certain cultures and classes. In many cases, someone who wasn’t wearing shoes was considered savage and/or lesser—whether it was a street urchin in London or an indigenous person in the “New World.” A lack of shoes was equated with savagery—a sort of primitive behavior (setting aside the obvious fact that we are, of course, primates).
In many cultures, wearing shoes was once a way to signify the distance between the shoe-wearer and shoe-free cultures and classes in the same way that pale skin was valued for its “indooredness” (darkened skin was an indication of outside work), using a wet nurse or infant formula were promoted over a mother breastfeeding, and chairs were used in lieu of dirt-floor sitting. Shoes (and furniture, bottles, toilets, etc.) were often a sign not just of civilization, but of being more civilized than another group.
Shoes are shaping the humans who wear them—and not for the better. This is why I am most interested in footwear. I deal with the injured public, individuals with head-to-toe ailments that they’ve been trying to remedy for years (and for thousands of dollars) with little or no success. Thwarted by what they put on their feet each morning and stomp around in all day, well-intentioned folks go to the chiropractor’s office, spinal surgeon, and podiatrist looking for answers to the wrong question. The question is not “How can I fix this?” but “What am I doing every day to create this?”
Your shoes and how you use them can limit the full “nutritional spectrum” created through movement. You have thirty-three joints in each foot, and the muscle groups of the feet make up twenty-five percent of the body’s total number of muscles. The complex machinery of the feet plays a critical role not only in the obvious realms of gait patterns and ankle stabilization but also in whole-body balance, nerve conduction, and cardiovascular circulation. Your shoes are affecting a whole lot more than your outfit—they’re capping the limits of your health. That professional footwear you’re selecting each day is the glass ceiling to your well-being.
I’ve already written an entire book on the human foot, foot pain, and the effects of shoes (Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief). After people read it, the most common question about the footwear guidelines and the shoe recommendations is always something along the lines of “I get what you’re saying about shoes and the feet and alignment in general, but I have specific foot condition X, so what do I need to do, specifically?” Our prescription-oriented medical culture makes us think that we all need a different medicine for our ailments—that what works for most feet will certainly not work for our own because of our special issues. What we don’t understand is that nearly all of these myriad problems are stemming from a cultural problem: there’s a baseline of movement that we are all missing, and our bodies are responding in different ways to the same lack of movement. Once we restore that movement in our lives, our body restores its own equilibrium or homeostasis, eliminating the problems that can seem so unique.
Say your daily water consumption is one cup of water per day. Eventually your lack of water leads to constipation, and so you buy my book titled Healing Yourself with Water (this is a fake book title—I am not an expert on drinking water) and skim the entire thing, looking for the place where I talk about constipation, specifically, and how much water you need to drink to fix your problem.
But let’s say I spend the first half of the book explaining how water works and how the human body requires eleven cups a day to stay hydrated and function properly. By doing this I’ve effectively told every single person exactly what they need to get better. To make it apply to you, all you have to do is subtract the number of cups of water you were drinking before (one, in this case) from eleven, and BAM, you have your personal recommendation (drink ten more cups of water a day). Do I really have to write, “If you drink two cups a day, then add nine more” and “If you drink seven cups a day, then add four more”? Do I have to say, “If you are constipated, you need eleven cups of water a day; if you are not constipated, you need eleven cups of water a day”?
Also, the experience we have regarding our health couldn’t possibly be the result of any one thing. Rather, each of us is a physical ball of habits, environments, and scenarios. The water you drink is just one input. (Which means that constipation isn’t caused by drinking only one cup of water. Some people get constipated even when they drink six or eight cups of water!) There’s no possible way to write a book that meets every individual right where they are without giving a framework based on the biological essentials. Maybe your water is disease-ridden—and then it’s not the quantity you need to adjust, but the quality. Again, my fake book covers the essentials of water drinking, but it doesn’t address every single variable in every single reader’s life.
I can probably stop extending this metaphor—you get it, right? Don’t thumb through this book just for a section on plantar fasciitis or bunions. The whole book applies to you—every book I’ve written applies to you—because you have a body, and my work deals in the essential movements required for human bodies to be healthy and to thrive. You want to know which habits need modification, which exercises you need to do, and what you need to learn with respect to what goes on your feet? You need to read, learn, and do all of this stuff. The end.
But not quite the end, sorry. Before I close out this introduction, which is really just the beginning, I need to say this: There are many wonderful things about shoes. Humans have been wearing foot coverings, probably for eons, to great results. Protection from cold has allowed us to migrate beyond the confines of year-round comfortable weather. Protective soles have given our minds a certain freedom from the constant monitoring necessary to avoid wounds. But whenever we use technology—yes, shoes are technology—we pay a biological tax. For wearing shoes, we pay that tax not just with our feet but with our entire bodies. Transitioning to minimal footwear isn’t necessary only to decrease foot disease. Our bodies cannot function optimally unless our feet are in good shape, which means we need to stop outsourcing the body’s work to inanimate objects. The move to minimal shoes is a move towards a stronger body, which in turn is a huge step (stop it with the puns already!) toward whole-body health.