Are you wearing your sneakers or are they wearing you?

High heel sneakers and their dysfunction

I begin most corrective exercise sessions with my "shoe lecture".  So, I figured that I write my shoe lecture out instead.  I have a few problems with most sneakers that are sold today. 

1. I begin with pointing out the obvious high heel position that has a huge cushion to detach you from the earth throwing off your neurological connection to how you were designed to walk.  When you have a high heel, you place all the load of your spine through your knees.  If you have any leg length discrepancies, the problem becomes much worse.  Having any forward head posture issues will cause you to also load weight into your toes making them a load bearing joint (for which they were not designed to do). This is what causes hammer toes. The toes curl under to accommodate the excess weight distribution.  A straight toe is weaker than a curled up toe.
   When you walk entirely on the forefront of you foot, you will eventually end up with heel spurs.  Heel spurs are caused by the constant tugging of the Achilles tendon which eventually separates from the bone and develops a bony protrusion (heel spur) to take up the space between the heel bone and tendon. The secondary effect of this is plantar fasciitis from the over use of the Achilles tendon. 
2. The next most obvious item is how they position your toes to point up in the air.  When you are standing barefoot, do your toes point into the air or are they planted on the ground? Your foot will think it's in a high heel shoe with this set up.  In the picture above, I joke by showing an elf shoe, but the elf shoe is actually more functional than the running sneaker.  At least it doesn't have a heel lift.
3. Chinese Foot Binding - There is no difference between this tradition and how your feet are reshaped from modern running sneakers.  Bunions, for instance, are entirely created from a closed toe box that is too small for your feet causing your big toe to drive inward jamming into the other toes. 
4. The last element is having a smaller metatarsal space for proper expansion of the foot.  This can disrupt lateral balance of the foot, which causes a major neurokinetic dysfunction.  The equivalent to all this is like performing surgery with 10 pairs of gloves on that are all too tight.  Imagine the difficulty in performing your task.

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