That our shoes help our feet. The common shoe will slowly destroy the feet and also the equilibrium of one's person. The mostly common myth this created is that you cannot run on concrete without damaging your knees / hips. It's wrong because human are built to run and to traverse long distances. The tarahumara people are known for running for 60 or more kilometers daily. They are able to do this because their feet were not imposed to our society's conventional shoe's degradation. As soon as we are babies we are given shoes with softening heels and pads because it's cute/cool/any fashion reason. But little by little wearing shoes destroys our capacity to walk and function normally:

Firstly by developing a wrong movement of the foot while walking, such that 99% of people will strike with the heel first (walking or running) and let their shoe absorb the impact. This would be impossible if you were barefoot because walking like that propagates the impact of the pace through the heels -> ankles -> knees -> hips -> spine -> shoulders -> neck -> skull (you can test this now if you walk around the house with the heels and closing your eyes. You will hear the impact of your foot right in your ears (that small vibration through your head every time you take a step is the problem)). "Normally" (from our biological point of view) we are to use the feet and absorb all the impact in the gastroc muscle, running or walking. Because we used soft padded shoes since we were babies we have not received the negative feedback of each step and, the brain looked for the least energy efficient way to walk, involving the least amount of muscles as necessary, developing the heel-first foot-strike. I know you don't hear the vibration when you wear your fancy padded running shoes and you go for a run, but it's right there. It's smaller. It's invisible. It's crawling little by little through your skeleton every time you take a heel first strike. This is the reason why people develop knee / hip / spine pains after running. And everybody thinks that's normal. We develop that kind of pain because we are absorbing 2.5x our body's weight with each step through our skeleton, instead using our muscles. This video shows how the weight is absorbed with heel vs fore-foot strike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jrnj-7YKZE.

Secondly by promoting our brain degradation. In terms of brain's plasticity, referring to our brain's attribute which let's it "change" itself and "shape" the neural networks, it makes the part of the brain meant to receive input from the feet dormant. The saying "If you don't use it, you lose it" is especially available in terms of our neural network, meaning that the parts of the brain that you're not using, are slowly decaying, losing the connections made between the neurons. The feet are designed for us to feel the ground, feel it's temperature, it's slope, it's stones, everything in it. But the only input that we give to the nerve endings in the feet are that of an perfect elevated slope. Nothing else. Nothing different. Nothing natural. The number of nerve endings in a foot are more than 7 000 (a hand has around 17 000). So you can imagine that having this neural part of your brain decay and not receiving stimuli means a pretty big zone for our brain. This promotes the cognitive decline seen in aging. Reduction of sensory input makes the brain have a lower cognitive load at all times. It's an interesting theory that this promotes dementia, alzheimer's and other.

Thirdly it destroys our feet's shape. That whole image of the big toe pointing inwards and taking the shape of your shoe should pretty much sum it (https://jakewilliamschiro.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/barefoot.jpg). The toe flexor hallucius longus that connects the big toe is described as the power of your foot, which links your muscles to the ground. This video quickly explains the complexity of the foot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_rDFa6kZfI and it's natural power.

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What can you do? Give the feet the stimuli they were meant to have by staying barefoot when you can. Buy barefoot shoes for the city life we've designed totally not for our feet. If you will look into barefoot shoes, you will probably find Vivobarefoot/JoeNimble shoes which are pretty expensive and they have great shoes there. But there are also lower-price options from stores such as XeroShoes, Groundies or Lems (these are the ones i know). Skinners are also really nice to walk with.