How can kicking off your shoes and going barefoot improve your health? Advocate for the barefoot lifestyle, founder of The Barefoot Movement and qualified podiatrist Paul Thompson says it's possible to reduce pain and discomfort by strengthening the body to support itself without shoes.
Thompson tells Nine to Noon he thinks orthotics are over-prescribed and that going barefoot more often activates muscles and nerves made redundant by shoes - making him feel younger.
Photo: Be Funky
“The foot is definitely something that’s given the raw end of the stick," Thompson says.
"We throw it in a shoe and kind of forget about it for the most part. But the foot is made up of amazing hardware. It has 26 bones, over 100 tendons, muscles and ligaments, 33 joints and around 100,000 nerve endings. So the foot is designed to definitely be equipped to support us and adapt to surfaces under us, we’re just saying give it a chance to do that.
“So, by kicking our shoes off and going through different drills and thing that can help create more mobility, create more strength in the feet, we can not only strengthen the foot, which helps with different aches and pains, but our feet are designed in a way to give feedback to the rest of our bodies to help with overall alignment and posture.”
Some of the common dysfunctions involving the foot include bunions, plantar fasciitis, neuromas, and achilles tendonitis. But Thompson says he treats others with lower back pain, knee pain and other conditions that all stem from dysfunctions in the feet.
“Even though there might be some muscle dysfunction further up the chain, the foot is the one thing that connects us to the ground in most activities. We’re not stable on the ground, then it’s really hard for muscles further up the chain in the body to do what they’re meant to do in an unstable base.”
The feet will send signals to the brain to avoid certain movements and pull away on sharp or uneven ground very effectively if used properly, he says.
There’s a few sensory nerve and motor control nerves the feet. Basically, our feet are on par with our finger tips and our lips. So, they’re designed to give us lots of feedback… If the ground goes from hard to soft along a track and then it turns to grass or sand and different compound in that surface you’ll notice in shoes, when you’re wearing them and running, and you cross over a different type of texture, it will take quite a few steps before you find that groove again. You almost trip a bit.
“When you’re bare foot you’ll get those nerves really warmed up and that feedback loop is really well connected to the brain you will change that gait pattern to adapt to the surface a lot quicker, which will put more stress on your body and stop you from falling over.”
Orthotics are another way to enhance that feedback loop, involving the use of casts, impressions, or scans to perfectly fit your foot inside footwear. These are designed to correct a person’s gait and the way their feet move. Thompson says these can be useful to help support someone with structural problems, or act like a crutch to help an injured foot heal.
“There’s a big misconception that if you have pronated feet or flat feet, or if you have supinated feet, which is a really high arch foot, that this can be a problem. Now the problem isn’t the style of foot you have, it’s the position it’s most often stuck in,” he says.
“Our foot’s designed to pronate, pronation is a good thing. But for some reason along the way we’ve been conditioned to believe it’s a bad thing. With a supinated foot people think that’s actually not too bad a thing, but if you’re stuck in supination your less likely to absorb shock in your body and you’re just as likely to have problems with that type of foot. We need a foot that can get in and out of those positions. Pronation helps to absorb shock, supination helps to re-stabilise the foot.”
Thompson says keeping in orthotics long-term will weaken the foot, creating mobility issues, so that it orthotics should only be used to heal and then train the foot to work on its own for the body.
There are other ways to help the body and the foot. A lack of strength in one of the muscles supporting the foot or the hip can use issues, as well as alignment problems which may be structural in nature length anomalies with the foot, ankle and hip.
“These are easy to fix. You can mobilise joints, you can stretch and strengthen muscles. That’s all fairly easy. The key point that generally people are missing that stops them from falling into needing an orthotic is learning how to control their movement, addressing muscular control issues.”
If muscular control isn’t addressed foot problems will remain. This is mainly fixed through repeating drills and creating new neural pathways in the brain to move the foot at the right time, he says.
Wearing shoes and trainers has also meant we’ve lost so fine motor skills, like using the big toe to initiate movement. He says the big toe is a stabiliser and we’re meant to propel off that. The big toe has its own path to the brain, and it’s connected via the central nervous system to our gluts and the pelvic floor. When we load up our big toe it triggers the gluts to fire up to help drive us forward, he says.
“One of the simple exercises I get people to do is called toe yoga – lifting the toe up while trying to keep the little toes down, holding it for a second or two, then switching over to the big toe, holding it down and the little toe up. The amount of people that just can’t do that, they’ve lost the ability to move their toes to some degree independently is mind blowing,” he says.
For those who don’t fancy being stung by bees on the ground or the running the risk of broken glass, there are also options like ‘minimum shoes’.
“There is a way of still wearing shoes that allow full function of the foot. There are some brands out there that basically mimic the anatomy of the foot and they have no cushioning, no arch support so you can roll the shoe up into a ball almost. The sole is protective enough that it will stop stuff like glass, heat, bee stings.
Going bare foot has it’s own risks, he says, but over time you will become more aware of your surroundings.
