Shoes! Shoes! Shoes!
In the words of Fred Dagg the amazing character brought to life by John Clarke……………..if it weren’t for your gumboots where would you be……..!
The answer, you may well have quite a lot less foot pain. Here in New Zealand our two favourite items of footwear are really not the best things for our feet. Yes I am talking about the gumboots and the jandals.
Let me explain a little bit to you about why our feet end up sore from wearing footwear like this. When we wear footwear that is not fitted well to our feet we find the muscles in our feet will tense to try to hold those shoes on, you may have noticed yourself scrunching your toes. When this happens the muscles in our feet are doing all the wrong things, some working way too hard and others not working at all.
Then if you look at a pair of shoes beside feet you will find they are not really the same shape at all, yet we are putting our feet in these things all the time. Then if you look closely at almost every pair of shoes there is some sort of heel, children’s school shoes have a wee heel, running shoes have a bit of a heel and let’s not even mention both men’s and women’s dress shoes. When we wear heels then the muscles in our calf, our achilles, ankle and heel are all used incorrectly. Many shoes also have firm soles, this is completely the opposite to the sole of our foot.
Each of our feet has 29 bones and 33 muscles in it, which means there is the ability for our feet to move in many many different ways. Shoes play a part in limiting the movement of our feet. We all need to wear shoes but I think we could take a little more care about selecting shoes that are actually comfortable and fit us well.
