Free your feet, free your soul!

The logic behind high heels is to give an illusion of longer legs and the reality of a come-hither wiggle for the backside.

High heels also resulted in a woman being physically vulnerable--off balance and unable to flee.

Just read this thread right through, from the start. A quote from Noddy in 2007:

Quote:

The logic behind high heels is to give an illusion of longer legs and the reality of a come-hither wiggle for the backside.

High heels also resulted in a woman being physically vulnerable--off balance and unable to flee.

I had to write a paper on foot binding once.

July 13, 2011, 12:01 am
Can Shoes Really Tone the Body?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS/NYT


New scientific experiments can be inspired by a simple question, and in the case of John Mercer, that question was, “So, John, do toning shoes work?”

Dr. Mercer, a professor of biomechanics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was talking with a friend who runs an athletic shoe store. The friend told him that customers were coming in and requesting toning shoes, which are soft sneakers, often with a rocker-shaped sole, that promise to exercise and tighten muscles in the calves, thighs and buttocks. (“Your boobs will be jealous,” a refined advertising campaign for one of the shoes declared.) Many manufacturers make them: Reebok, New Balance, MBT, FitFlops and Crocs, among others.

The store owner carried various models of the toning shoes. But, he told Dr. Mercer, he was uncomfortable recommending them to his customers, because he didn’t know if they actually functioned as claimed.

Dr. Mercer didn’t know, either. So he recruited a group of healthy young female students (toning shoes are marketed almost exclusively to women) and had them walk on a treadmill for 10 minutes at a time while wearing, alternately, a walking shoe or a toning shoe — in this case, the Skechers Shape-ups. He and his colleagues attached sensors to the women’s legs to measure the electrical impulses generated as their muscles contracted. They also determined the women’s oxygen consumption, to see if they worked harder and burned more calories with one shoe rather than the other.

But as it turned out, according to results presented in June at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, muscle activation and oxygen consumption were almost identical whether the women wore walking shoes or Shape-ups. The finding “was a little surprising,” Dr. Mercer said, since his volunteers commented that the toning shoes, with their bowed, unstable bottoms, felt different underfoot from the walking shoes. But that difference didn’t change how they moved in the various models, he said. ...<cont>

What you want to wear on your feet are shoes that best simulate walking barefoot. The more flexible the sole the better. You've got to let your foot do its job, and grow stronger, and use things like massage and facia release to get them as open and flexible as possible.

These toning shoes are prisons for your feet. The soles are thick and do not flex. While the rolling action you get when you walk in them feels good, really good, this is something your foot is supposed to be doing, not the shoe. When wearing them, your foot is not moving much, you're rolling forward only because the sole of the shoe rocks you forward.

Better to go get body work done so that your foot is able to perform what this shoe is trying to simulate, which is the foots normal function.

Yeah, try walking on cobblestone all day long *ouch*

I'll stand by my "the thicker the sole the better for your feet" motto!