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Detrimental Footwear

Because of our modern footwear, heel-striking has become the default gait (walking pattern) for people.

What I mean by this is that the heels in our shoes are made to be elevated so your heel is higher than the ball of your foot (unlike our bare feet). The heels are also made with too much padding and protection.

While this sounds like it would be a good thing, it’s actually counter intuitive. All the padding means that you can walk very poorly (heel-striking) and not have to feel the pain right away. If there was no padding, you would just have to walk properly with a midfoot to forefoot strike.

When you walk barefoot, its not ideal to heel-strike for a long period of time, because it hurts! So why wear all this padding and walk poorly when you can just walk properly and have your body naturally protect itself? 

An easy way to start undoing the effects of our footwear is to switch to a pair of minimalist shoes. They are built to conform to the function of your foot, not make your foot conform to it like regular shoes do. After trying these shoes, I have since replaced all of my old footwear with minimalist alternatives.

Useless Feet

It also doesn’t allow us to fully build and utilize our foot muscles. When you strike the ground heel-first and then roll onto the front of your foot to push off, you’ve basically bypassed the use of the arch.

The arch is supposed to act as shock absorption when we land and as a spring when we push off but the typical rolling technique we see today eliminates both of these functions as options and the arch goes essentially unused.

This will lead to collapsed arches because they’ve become so weak from underuse. When your arches collapse, that makes your feet over-pronate, leading to A LOT of problems. 

Injuries and Ticking Time Bombs

Heel striking has led to numerous problems as well as straightforward injuries. Plantar fasciitis, achilles tendonitis, shin splints, and collapsed arches are just some of the conditions caused by heel-striking.

To be completely honest, I suspect that most people who experience leg injuries or pain should just reevaluate the position of their feet. If your feet overpronate, you are highly susceptible to so much tightness in your legs that you are bound to get injured as an athlete or just be in dull pain even if you don’t exercise much.

Collapsed arches open up chances for valgus knee, improper hip alignment, and generally tight hamstrings, calves, and achilles muscles. These are the majority of the symptoms we see in the aforementioned plantar fasciitis, achilles tendonitis, and shin splints.

With the compounded effects of wearing shoes that have an elevated heel, heel-striking as a byproduct of the shoes, your feet becoming very weak (basically useless) followed by your arches collapsing, a few things start to happen.

Your ankle and achilles tendon become more immobile because your shoes are holding them in a shortened position (the heel elevated). The body always tries to correct course so when this happens, it will try to keep your ankle as mobile as it can, sometimes by making you pronate even more to keep your ankle moving.

But when we are pronating so much, we are compromising the natural position of our ankle and achilles, creating a pulling effect on them which leads to even more tightness further up the leg.

So your problems don’t end in your arch and heel, they transmit through the ankle, into the achilles and calf muscles, through the knees, and into the hamstrings.

You are then left with a lot of tight muscle tissue in your legs all because your feet are overpronating and this opens you up to quite a bit of injury risk.

Worn-Down Joints

Another big reason to stop heel-striking is because it causes long-term pain and damage to your joints.

Think about someone you know who walks really loud. Anytime they’re on the floor above you or they are coming down the stairs, it sounds like a small earthquake with all the thudding they make with their feet.

It’s because they’re landing full force on their heels and all that force is getting shot directly through their joints from the heels all the way up to the neck. When you do this over the course of years, you’re damaging your joints and other areas like your ankles, knees, hips, lower back, and neck.

Force is meant to be absorbed through the muscle in our body, that’s actually how they build general strength. When you walk, you should be landing somewhere from the midfoot to forefoot so you can avoid the impact on your heel and utilize the foot arch for all its functions.

Upon landing this way, your ankles should be a little loose, your knees should be slightly bent, and your hips could also be slightly bent if possible. This form enables the force to be taken into the musculature of your body because you’re in a ready position.

When you heel-strike, your ankles are stiffer, knees are more straight, and your stride is probably too long. These components force your joints to deal with the impact which is not what they’re meant to do and will hurt them with continuously high impact. 

In Conclusion

So in many ways, heel-striking is actually keeping your feet and legs weak because they can’t build strength through absorbing shock properly and you are weakening your joints for future use.

The obvious solution to this is to stop heel striking because the negative effects only compound as time goes on and it becomes harder and harder to reverse them later in life. 

To stop heel striking, we need to offer less padding and protection to the heel so we can encourage ourselves to improve our foot strike.

Walking barefoot is excellent practice for this as it will get you walking with something closer to a forefoot strike and will help you build strength in your feet again to help realign your foot and ankle’s position.

When you need to wear shoes, I can’t recommend anything but minimalist shoes. They are the only footwear that offers a zero-drop sole (non-elevated heel) and no extra cushioning for your feet because that only makes them weaker.