Why Walking Flat-Footed Hurts Habitual High-Heels Wearers: The Effects of Wearing High Heels On Wome

Clinicians have known for a long time that if you hold a limb in a shortened position over an extended period, the muscles shorten. High-heeled shoes push our heels up, which made Marco Narici from Manchester Metropolitan University wonder whether wearing heels on a regular basis could shorten our calf muscles.

Next Csapo and Seynnes used ultrasound to measure the muscle fibre length in the women's calf muscles, and this time they did see a difference. The high heel wearers' muscle fibres were 13% shorter than those of the women who wore flat shoes. "This confirmed the hypothesis," says Narici, "because when you place the muscle in a shorter position, the fibres become shorter."

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Based on this information, do you think wearing heels is really bad for you? People throughout history have had body deformities associated with oddly used muscles. Are these any different? Should women be forced to wear high heels everyday even if they do not want to?

reply to post by Evolutionsend


Ok, but then if wearing high heels is good for women, the same should apply to men. Maybe men should start wearing high-heeled shoes too.

Vibram five fingers, check them out. Gloves for your feet. A great way to restore your natural gait. I picked up a pair 6 months ago and love them, even though my wife hacks # on me all the time cause she thinks they look funny and I do get odd looks from people when worn to the shops.

So what is the advantage of shortened calf muscle? I think this is a negative.

reply to post by Hellhound604


The article doesn't really say that it's good. It just says that it's no reason to stop wearing them. I for one would like to see some proof of the age old theories about heels making you have back problems. Most have back problems anyways! How do they know that the correlation isn't a coincidence of a common problem for anyone that works a job most of their life?

For the sake of argument, inclined footing gotten from wearing high heels can be simulated by simply standing on a slope. By that reasoning, shouldn't anyone that frequently walks down hills be having the same back problems? Except they don't, because I think it's something the spinal column was intended to be able to do.

I would hardly think that walking down a slope is the same as wearing heels. I just read an article in my local paper, it was an editorial question asking about wearing heels to much, the response was that when worn they should hardly touch the ground at all! I believe it was implying that when worn your legs should be up over your shoulders.

All I know is the more I wear heels, the better my calf muscles look I don't know, does that mean that those "shape up" shoes would do the same thing?

At 4'11" tall, I'm happy to hear this news! I've never had problems with high heels. It does hurt my neck a bit to always be looking so far up at everyone, though!