Choosing and Fitting a Shoe

Italian men’s shoe designer, Olga Berluti, says of feet:

“There are NO ugly feet. Feet are spiritual. They enable man to stand up. They free his hands. Now he can look at the stars.”

Shoes are theater. Shoes are armor, protecting us from the urban grime of city asphalt. Shoes reveal our vulnerability. The elevation of a heel can chart the rise and fall of prosperity (proclaiming what it is you DON’T have to do!) The thickness of a sole can measure social change. They tell us how people are feeling. Shoes turn you into someone else. You can’t be a dominatrix in a sneaker. If you are in a high heel, you are in pain and you are going to make someone pay for it! Stiletto, by the way, is an Italian word for “dagger” and appeared in fashion in the early 1950’s.

I’d like to answer one of the most common questions I get: How do I choose a good shoe that fits well?

Addressing foot pain requires choosing good shoes that fit properly, so this is a very important question.

Fitting a shoe is different from buying a shoe. Don’t just take what the salesperson suggests. Their job is to sell you a shoe, not to make sure you end up in shoes that fit you properly.

But first, let’s learn a little about the foot.

Foot Anatomy

The foot’s job is to support body weight, balance this weight over the center of gravity, coordinate muscles and joints to move the body through space, adapt all the above for a changed position, and then distribute the load as the sole of the foot touches the ground.

• There are 26-28 bones in each foot; a quarter of the bones in the body!
• There are 4 sesamoid bones in the feet; extra weight adds more of these bones.
• There are 38 joints.
• There are 107 ligaments (and some people have more).
• From the knee down there are a total of 32 muscles:
  • 18 plantar surface muscles.
  • 1 dorsal muscle.
  • 13 leg muscles (providing the action and movement of feet).
• Each foot has 60,000 sweat glands. The average person on the average day can sweat ½ pint of liquid.
• The foot is only 2% of the body’s weight, yet it supports 98% of the body’s total weight!!
• The average foot is capable of walking 200,000 miles in a lifetime; half of those miles are in the first 20 years of life!
• Each day/step, on average, puts 700 tons of pressure on our feet.

Choosing the Right Shoe

Just as there is no such thing as a perfect foot, there is also no such thing as a perfect shoe! Following these simple guidelines for fitting a shoe to your feet can profoundly influence the safety and comfort for them.

The goal in choosing shoes is to allow the medial arch to do what it naturally does, which is flatten as you put weight on it so it can act like a spring to move you forward.

For this reason, I don’t like orthotics, shoe inserts, or “arch supports.” The more you put into the interior space of a shoe that wasn’t designed to be there, the more interference you create with the foot’s ability to support, adapt, and move the body. These shoe additions make each foot strike the ground much harder in order to feel the ground and interpret it for you!

Orthotics are often prescribed when foot and leg bones are out of alignment. Because reflexology addresses these misalignments, the orthotics quickly become counterproductive.

 And there are some other shoe types that I really don’t like: flip-flops, Birkenstocks, Danskos, other clogs, Croqs, Zcoil, and Rocker-style shoes. If any of these are in your shoe wardrobe, be sure to limit their use on a day-to-day basis to less than 10%.

When our lower leg muscles, from the knee to the foot (considered to be the motor of the foot) are called upon to constantly grip a shoe to keep it on our feet, as happens with the shoes I just listed, we shorten the length of our walking stride, and we waddle as our feet rotate outwards causing the heel and other bones to misalign.

So what shoes can we choose to live with for 90% of our day?

• Try to get the sole totally flat: no waffles, lugs or ripples unless you walk on trails of mud and rock. Lugs, waffles or ripples “catch” on things and torque the foot so a bone moves out of its alignment.
• If you have a knee or hip replacement, or plantar fascitis you must re-learn your ground relationship with a tie-style or buckle-style (like a MaryJane) shoe. The goal is to keep your heel seated back into the heel cup of the shoe.
• Again, no built-in arch support. The healthy foot has a perfectly engineered arch that is supposed to flatten under weight.
• Tennis shoes: no tipped up toes; no cut-aways on the sole in the arch area.
• Although I don’t approve of flip-flops and clogs, there are some types of summer footwear that I do like. Quality sandals should be flat, flexible, and strap securely to the foot.

Nordstrom still leads the way for specialty shoes, such as narrow shoes. Ask for help because the type of shoe you need may not be on display.

And check out NaturalFootgear.com for a variety of good options.

Finding the Right Fit

Once you’ve found a shoe you like, it’s time to get a pair that fit properly.

• Buy a shoe at the peak time it is to be typically worn. If you run in the morning, shop for running shoes as close to your morning running time as possible.
• Make sure your feet are measured every time you buy shoes. Not only must the toe to heel be measured, the ball to heel must also be measured.
• If the ball-to-heel measures a size 8 and the toe-to-heel measures a size 7, you must buy the size 8 shoe. (70% of people are often in shoes too small since they only measured their feet from the toe to the heel).
• 20% of people have the same size measure of arch-to-heel and toe-to-heel.
• If the ball-to-heel measure is a size 6, yet the toe-to-heel measure is a size 7, you buy the size 7. (About 10% of people are in this category). You must honor the larger size.
• For every size in shoe length you increase, the shoe width will be 1/8 inch WIDER; the circumference in the toe box will be ¼ inch larger.

In summary, find a shoe that, as much as possible, allows your foot to do what it would do if it were barefoot. The arch needs to act as a spring, the toes should not be cramped, and the shoe should snugly grip the foot.