If you wear high heels, you probably do so with a slight guilty feeling, knowing that they are not exactly good for your health or wellbeing. But how bad are high heels for the wellness of your feet?
Inside your foot, there are hundreds of thousands of nerves, and also 28 bones (making up a whopping 13.5 percent of the bones in your whole body). These bones and nerves are really important as they hold you upright all day, from morning till night, and they take repetitive stress too, as people take on average 10,000 steps every day. Therefore, shoving them into uncomfortable shoes every day is hardly a good repayment for the service that they do. Around 90 percent of all women who wear high heels suffer from foot pain, fatigue and sore feet as a result.
In addition to this, high heels don’t give you proper foot posture, as many a podiatrist will tell you. When you wear a pair of high heels, the arch of your foot becomes higher than is natural, and yet at the same time the profile of the shoe itself is a flat one, that does not follow the natural curves of your foot. High heels can therefore be quite damaging, but there is a surprising addendum to this: small heels can actually be good for you.
Many people over-pronate, which means that their ankles and arches collapse inwardly on every step. Slipping on a pair of slight heels turns your ankles out slightly, counteracting this collapse. A small, stable pair of heels can actually help in this way, as well as taking the strain off overly tight calf muscles.
Every half inch of extra height that your heels add can actually but 25 percent more body weight onto the front of your foot, leading to tissue damage and pain.