The Importance of Barefoot Shoes with Wide Toe Boxes

Date Published: 2024-10-15

Do you know that relaxing feeling after you remove your pointy high heels or your dress shoes after a long day where you had to walk a lot? That feeling is just a greater version of what you feel after you remove your regular shoes every day. You may not even have a clue about what shoes are truly supposed to be like. Let me explain.

With all the buzz words in the article title of this blog post, let's get something out in the open: the more minimal your shoe, the closer to nature it will be. As such, your feet will naturally be the healthiest when you're barefoot; just like our ancestors were. However, we cannot survive in the modern world without shoes. Forget running, we can't even walk or stand barefoot. 

Fundamentally speaking, your foot is supposed to be like a tripod with one point being the heel, and the other two being the balls of the foot (one before the big toe and one before the small toe). This footing spreads the weight across a stable foundation that keeps your alignment in check. The wider this tripod, the more stable you will be. Your toes are supposed to be the widest part of your feet as shown in the images below. But as we grow and age, we start wearing the shoes that everyone wears, i.e. Adidas, Nike's, Reebok, Converse, Jordans, Hoka, New Balance, Asics, etc. Wikipedia says that the tripod design provides good stability against gravitational loads as well as horizontal shear forces, and better leverage for resisting tipping over due to lateral forces can be achieved by spreading the legs away from the vertical center.

In simple words, tripod makes you stronger and more stable.

The problem is that majority of all shoes have a very narrow toe box, similar to how women's pointy heels or men's dress shoes sometimes have, but to a lesser degree. Over time, this cage around the toes deforms and destroys your feet. This is a straight path to health problems such as bunions, plantar fasciitis, flat feet, hammer toes, and problems of the ankle, knees, hips, and maybe even spine. Just how a building with a shaky foundation will crumble sooner or later, a body with unhealthy feet will have collapses in the kinetic chain sooner or later.

Unfortunately, most shoe manufacturers add to our misery by marketing their shoes as the new best thing to grace our feet costing just shy of a small fortune. Just look at Dr. Aaron Horschig of the Squat University performing this insole test designed by Dr. Ray Mcclanahan in which he takes out the insoles from a popular and expensive shoe called 'Nike Air Max' and places his foot on top of it, demonstrating the degree to which our feet have to be pinched and squeezed just to fit in a shoe.

Since the foot cannot be in its natural shape within the shoes, we lose our tripod stance and lose our ability to control pronation. In simple words, our feet cave in because of the lack of support. With our feet, our ankles, knees, and hips sequentially crumble as the kinetic chain gets destroyed. To further add to injury, shoemakers add a feature in their shoes called toe spring that elevates the toes off the ground to help roll the foot forward when the shoe is stiff. This upward tilt was designed to help your walk/run while keeping your clomping to a minimum, but it does more harm than good. In the thumbnail below, you can see how the Nike's shoes lift the toes off the ground while the barefoot shoes keep you grounded. It is important to remember that most of your foot's tendons connect to the toes and they need to be anchored to have proper stability and proprioception. In simple words, you perform best when close to your natural stance, i.e. barefoot. Furthermore, Like Dr Horschig said, these shoes have no place in the gym.

If you pay attention to these two pictures above and below, you'll notice that toe spring and heels shorten the muscles of the feet and calves, reducing your stability and feeling of the ground. This is an unnatural position for your feet as any external arch support only ends up making your own arch support less prominent. You want the arch to come from yourself, not from an external source, because you do not want to lose it when you remove the shoes. Think of your muscles as 'Use it or Lose it'.

Solution:

• Be barefoot as much as possible at home. Wear socks if you are deadlifting or squatting.
• Run on the ball of your feet, avoid heel landings.
• If you need to casually protect your feet outside, wear something like the Crocs. Pro Tip: You can easily find off brand products that look and feel the same as Crocs. They have wide toe boxes and have minimal arch support.
• In case of casual shoes, try to wear affordable barefoot wide-toed shoes. We found a supplier that offers such good-looking shoes for casual wear and listed it in our products tab for your convenience. A brand name shoe will cost you well over $150 and provide no more benefits than a $50 shoe will. 
• For formal wear, avoid constantly wearing dress shoes and high heels if you can. Take breaks if you do wear them. It is difficult to find good looking dress shoes that are wide-toed and barefoot, which is why we're currently working with manufacturers to design and distribute exactly that. We are also working to design boots that fit the same requirements while being waterproof and flexible for those who live in the snowy areas of the world.
• For women's high heels, there may not be a wide toe box and barefoot design after all. In which case, you will just need pay the price for beauty every time you wear them. Our advice is to have a comfortable pair of barefoot wide-toed shoes or crocs equivalent with you when you go to events that need high heels.
• For sports, we are working to design cleats, ski boots, and track shoes that support your foot by hugging it well while being various combinations of being wide-toed, flexible, barefoot, waterproof, or tall.