Every year tens of thousands of people go to the doctor with a foot or posture-related injuries. Everything from uncorrected ankle injuries, hip dysplasia, to various knee issues, wind up on the list of the most common problems health professionals see. In recent years, we are seeing that a lot of structural instabilities relating to the human musculoskeletal skeletal system may be due to the features we have installed in the name of luxury and comfort. Case-in-point: thick-soled shoes. They feel great. But having your feet at an angle in which your heel is resting on what is essentially a pillow can potentially weaken the structures in and around the ankle and foot. Not to mention this starts from the time we learn to walk as babies. Often we don’t even give ourselves a chance to really know what human walking and running feels like without that angles cushion. It’s time to awaken that feedback look and look at the benefits of using zero drop shoes.
Better Alignment
A lot of us are totally bent in weird ways. This is due to a whole bunch of unhealthy movement patterns. Zero drop shoes keep you in tune with your body’s natural alignment instead of tilting your hips forward to compensate for the cushion. They also prevent your foot muscles and Achilles tendon from atrophying due to the stability compensation of modern shoes. This serves as a great preventive measure with regards to living an active lifestyle.
Better Balance
They also reinforce your body’s natural feel for balance. Your feet have millions of sensors that communicate with your brain and tell it where to step. Similar to how animals use chemoreceptors or echolocation to create a mental image of their environment, your brain assesses the ground-based off of the nerves in your foot. This is called proprioception. Awakening those special sensors in and around the foot helps your body adjust and move through space accordingly. Zero drop shoes free up the full motion of the joints in your foot that further support nerve feedback. This means that you’re more likely to know when you’re off balance or stepping in a manner that can promote injury.
Natural Running
We are running all wrong. When you watch how animals in the wild run, they run very differently than how we humans do it. They have a smoothness to them that seems less impactful than how your average jogger strides through the park. Strangely enough, we were meant to run on the balls of our feet, just like our mammalian cousins. So switching from typical footwear to shoes that are zero drop wean us off the heel-toe pattern of running. They reinforce the often forgotten tibialis anterior muscle–the dorsiflexor responsible for taking impact while in motion. This means a stronger run and a more mechanically sound movement pattern to keep you in motion for years to come.
A Better You
As you may have gathered, human beings were not designed to be walking on cushions. The way that tissue and bone density is distributed is directly related to the low yet significant daily use and stress that a specific body part undergoes. When we grip an object at enough frequency, and with enough force, we develop the muscles and fascia in our hands. It gets stronger. The same goes for the feet. Our lower extremities were designed to be used directly on the ground and without a thick barrier in between. In the same way that avoiding manual labor produces soft hands, using your run-of-the-mill comfortable running shoes produces structurally soft feet. It’s time to treat yourself better. Make the switch and welcome healthy, natural body mechanics back into your life.
