Walking Barefoot: Good or Bad? (& What to Do Instead)

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In this episode, Farnham’s leading over-50’s physiotherapist, Will Harlow, reveals whether walking barefoot is good or bad and reveals a handy alternative to build strength and posture in the feet!

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walking barefoot is it good or is it bad that’s the question we’re going to be answering on today’s episode if you don’t know who I am my name is will harow and I’m the over 50s specialist physio here at HT physio in farum and today I’m going to be revealing whether walking barefoot can help you with foot pain ankle pain knee pain hip pain or back pain now walking barefoot has become a big craze recently A lot of people are saying that it has potential to help us with our pains in our knees or backs and other people are saying you should buy these barefoot shoes because they’re amazing they take away all the pain in the lower limb and as a physio I just wanted to come and give you some of the facts about whether walking baref fo is actually good or not for your health so this is totally unbiased I don’t have a strong opinion either way but I just want to lay out the facts for you so let’s talk about walking barefoot because there are good things about walking barefoot and there are bad things as well so let’s talk about the positives first so the first positive thing about walking Barefoot is it does indeed increase foot muscle strength and this is one of the things that the people who like walking barefoot tell everyone that it does and that’s because it’s true so within our foot we’ve got over 20 intrinsic foot muscles they live mostly underneath the foot and they help to maintain your foot arch and control the toes and when we walk Barefoot we don’t have cushioning all around the foot like we do with a shoe so those muscles have to work harder and having stronger foot muscles has been correlated with better foot posture better balance and better control over the limbs all the way up to the hip and the lumber spine so walking barefoot does increase foot strength and that is a big positive now the second positive thing about walking barefoot is it does actually give you wider toes so these are your toes here you can see the five here and when we walk in shoes especially tight shoes like heels or CT shoes what tends to happen over the years are the toes get crushed inwards now the problem with this is first of all it can cause problems with the toes like bunions which can appear here or issues on the other side which are similar to bunions and the other thing it can cause is pain so if you have these being crushed together it can cause issues with uh the metat Taral around here it can cause stress and tension on the small joints in the foot and foot pain and even even increased the risk of planta fasciitis too now if you have your toes crushed together another negative of that is the fact that we’re going to lose balance so we’re not going to be able to stand on one leg or walk quite so well because we’ve quite simply narrowed our base of support and quite often what also happens with people who wear tight shoes is their toes are pushed upward slightly so they’re retracted which means when they stand their toes are not making contact with the floor which means they’ve lost a couple of inches of support on the floor as well now if you walk Barefoot what you notice is over a period of a few months your toes will start to do this so you’ll start to get wider toes and some people think that looks quite ugly but it’s actually a really good thing because what it’s doing is it’s spreading your load over the floor meaning that you can increase your balance because you’ve got more surface area in contact with the ground so that’s one of the big positives of walking barefoot now another positive of walking barefoot is the fact that it can improve your bio mechanics and biomechanics is a fancy term for just the way your body moves and we have a set way that our body is supposed to move in certain actions so there’s a certain way we should squat there’s a certain way we should lunge and if we don’t do it quite as we were designed then it puts stress on certain parts of the body now when you’re wearing uh trainers or big cushion shoes it completely Alters your biomechanics CU it lifts your heel and it provides cushioning in areas that aren’t used to having cushioning through our Evolution so it means we squat differently We Stand differently and we walk differently when we’re wearing shoes now there’s a chance that when we go barefoot our biomechanics can improve but this is dependent on a lot of different factors and that brings us to some of the drawbacks of going Barefoot so one of the main drawbacks of walking around Barefoot is the fact that you’ve had a whole lifetime of wearing shoes so if you suddenly take your shoes away and you ask your body to go back to its normal biomechanics the way it’s evolved instantly like this often it can’t handle it and that can lead to increased stress on the body because you’ve made a massive Sudden Change the biomechanics of the whole body have instantly been asked to change and that can cause excess stress and tension on various tissues so one of the big problems people have when they start walking barefoot is they do it all of a sudden they get rid of all their shoes around the house they stop wearing um big chunky shoes they start wearing barefoot shoes when they’re walking outside and quite frankly it’s just too much too soon the body’s not used to it there’s a lot of stress and tension on the joints and then knee pain back pain and hip pain actually gets worse so if you’re going to do it the key is to introduce it slowly but let’s talk about some of the other bad things about walking barefoot one of the things that people don’t often realize is as individuals we have different levels of cushioning on our heel and on the ball and sole of our foot now a lot of this is set by our genetics because we have little fat pads we call them underneath our feet which provide cushioning now some people have got quite nice plump fat pads and others have got very slim very flat fat pads underneath their feet and unfortunately there’s not much you can do about it but if you’re one of the people with very flat fat pads if you suddenly start walking barefoot you’ve got no cushioning between uh your bone and the ground around so what’s happening is all of that impact is going to make your foot sore and may lead to problems going further up the leg as well so you need to take an honest appraisal of your own foot if you can very easily feel the bones underneath you probably have quite small fat pads which means that walking barefoot may not be a good idea for you because it may cause more pain now if you’re one of the lucky people with quite a bit of cushioning then you may find that walking barefoot becomes easy is is easier for you and doesn’t cause pain now one of the other bad things about walking barefoot is when you take your shoes away you have very little shock absorption so if you have arthritis in your ankle or in your knee or in your hip or in your spine when you’ve taken away your shoes you don’t have that nice cushioned layer on your trainers anymore so when you make contact with the ground more force is going to be going up the leg that’s just a biomechanical fact now this may improve as you practice walking barefoot but when you start it’s definitely going to be the case that there’ll be more shock going up the leg especially if you’re walking around on hard surfaces so bear it in mind if you do have bad joints walking barefoot may be more painful for you now the other thing that can cause problems is if you’ve got a history of planta fasciitis or if you’ve had an injury to your heel in the past you are going to find that more stress and strain is put on the heel when you first start walking barefoot so some people who’ve had plop fasciitis walking barefoot is not a good idea because it can cause that problem to reoccur and then the final consideration this is a massive one that I don’t hear many people talk about is the fact that when we’ve evolved when we were in our caveman days the walking we would have been doing would mostly have been on soft surfaces so it would have been like sand or uh like dust on the floor or it would have been grass or it would have been walking around in mud all of these surfaces would have been softer than the concrete that we have on our roads today okay that’s a massive thing to understand so if you’ve got a uh like a stone floor at home or if you’ve got concrete outside or if you’ve got stone patio walking around on that surface is way harder than the surfaces our ancestors used to walk on so when people say oh we were made to walk Barefoot that’s kind of the truth but we were also made to walk on softer ground so now we’ve got these man-made hard surfaces if you start to walk Barefoot on that remember that the stress going through your feet is higher than the stress that would have been going through our ancestors feet so when people are saying I don’t understand why walking barefoot is not comfortable it might be because you’re walking barefoot on ground that is too tough and that’s definitely the case if you’re just starting off so if you want to get into barefoot walking and I don’t necessarily think that’s bad start off on carpet start off on grass start off on Sand start off on soft ground that’s going to Cush your feet before you move onto harder ground and definitely don’t wear your barefoot shoes to begin with on concrete all the time so some people buy them they put them on all day they wear them out in the street they wear them to go shopping in they wear them to the gym and all of those floors tend to be hard okay so if you introduce it first of all I would recommend introducing it on carpet just to make sure you can get used to it and then if you wish to progress afterwards you can now that all that’s been said obviously one of the main benefits of wearing be shoes is to improve strength in your feet but I’m going to show you another alternative to do that which doesn’t involve walking around Barefoot so let’s have a look at this exercise which is a brilliant way to build your foot strength without having to go barefoot all the time so let’s have a look at the exercise now so this is a great alternative exercise to walking barefoot if you want stronger intrinsic foot muscles which live underneath the arch and underneath the toes and also in the lower part of the lower leg so all you need for this is a towel lay it down on the floor and put half of your foot on it with the heels on the carpet and all you’re going to do is keep your heel on the floor use your toes to pull the towel in without lifting your heel and again you’re going to pull in and the goal here is to use the strength in your toes to drag the towel underneath your feet and this looks quite easy but if you’re isolating the muscles it’s actually pretty difficult and you you can see that I’m having to really contract my toes to pull the towel in now if you can’t do this to begin with don’t worry just keep practicing it doesn’t actually matter how much the towel moves the towel is really just something for a bit of feedback so some people might just start grabbing down on the towel a little bit like this but if you can build up to being able to drag it in towards you you’ll feel the muscles under here and here working you might feel a bit of an ache in the back of the calf area here as well those are also your foot muscles working hard but keep doing that for a few minutes a day and you will build up some strength in your feet and that should improve your balance and your walking as well so those are my thoughts on walking barefoot and a great alternative exercise to help you if you’ve enjoyed this video please do like the video and subscribe to the channel over 89% of people who watch these videos haven’t subscribed yet and they’re missing out on being the first to hear about our new videos so make sure that’s not you and if you want to get more from me you can pick up a copy of my book it’s called thriving Beyond 5050 and you can find it on Amazon using the link below there’s loads more thoughts about foot Health in here anyway thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you on the next one