Barefoot FAQ

I find these excuses to be terrible reasoning.

-- Exactly what does it mean to be "entangled closer with physical reality"? Naively I would believe that everything is entangled with physical reality to a degree of 100%. And I don't think you can easily describe a concept of "entangled with physical reality" that is something you'd reasonably want to do, that justifies walking barefoot, and that has no other strange implications.

-- Exactly where are you getting your information about how much rigid movement is natural? It sounds like a scientific claim without the science.

-- "Natural" has some of the same problems as "entangled with physical reality"--lots of things are natural from smallpox to cyanide. If you can articulate a definition of "natural" that explains why you'd actually want it, and which applies to walking barefoot (including to sidewalks and streets, which I'd call not natural!), I'd like to see it.

-- Why in the world would you want to "reduce what you need and broaden what you tolerate"? Is that just reasoning from "I was taught as a child to not be too greedy, and reducing what I need is sort of like being less greedy"? And if I wanted to broaden what I tolerate, I'd go learn Japanese, not walk barefoot.

-- "Sharp objects are rare" is another way of saying "yeah, there are some". Shoes are like seatbelts in this sense. They protect against things that are rare, but which happen.

-- You're not "opening people's minds" by ignoring their objections to you walking barefoot. That's just taking "I ignore social cues" and treating it as a virtue instead of a deficiency.

I started going barefoot in the streets of Edinburgh in February 2000. Eventually I wrote a little web page explaining myself. I didn't want to duplicate what was on the Society For Barefoot Living website, so I narrowed my focus to a single aspect. Twenty four years later, I still go barefoot nearly all the time. Rescuing the text to paste it here, I notice that it has stood the test of time very well :-)

Hard surfaces

Modern life involves much walking on hard surfaces, pavements, reinforced concrete floors, steel decking, and it is worth pondering whether shoes provide adequate cushioning. In modern shoes, your heel hits the pavement first, before the rest of your foot. With the pace of modern life hit is the right word, and the cushioning provided by the heel of your shoe as you pound the pavement is at issue.

I think that the cushioning is inadequate and cannot be improved because the basic concept is faulty. One is better off spending a few months learning to walk barefoot.

Wait a minute! There is no cushioning at all under the heel when you walk barefoot; how can that be an improvement? It is time to get technical and explain the difference between a soft material approach to cushioning and a mechanical approach.

A soft materials approach to cushioning

Softness is a three dimensional phenomenon. When you compress a material it squeezes out sideways. Typically it pushes out about a third the amount of compression. This number is called Poisson's ratio. This is the beginning of the story, not the end. Try holding a pan scourer, one of those little blocks of sponge, between the palms of your hands as though you were clapping. Squeeze and it compresses. You knew that. Now try bringing your little fingers together without moving your thumbs. It resists being squeezed, but does very little to keep your palms parallel. Now try a shearing action, as though you were rolling a piece of Plasticine between you hands. You encounter a little more resistance than you did when squeezing, you will need to squeeze a little to stop it sliding. Now try a twisting action, by pointing the fingers of one hand down and the fingers of other hand up. Again you will need to squeeze a little to stop the sponge from sliding. The softness that cushions your clapping to silence has brought with it flexibility to five other motions. A nice, soft shoe heel would wobble all over the place and be too squishy to walk on.

A mechanical approach to cushioning

To experience a mechanical approach, sit on the wing of your car. Your weight makes it sink an inch or two. Isn't that the compression of the air-filled rubber tire? Well, it is in plain view, so look and see. It has hardly squished at all. To find out where the motion has come from you have to look up inside the wheel arch so that you can see the suspension. Most of the motion has come from a mechanism. Your weight has made a lever pivot about its hinge so that it stretches a spring. There is an important technical reason for car makers taking this expensive mechanical approach, instead of relying on soft materials. The mechanism decouples the different motions. The stiffness of the motion that makes the hinge pivot is determined by the spring. The stiffness of other motions is determined by how solid the hinge is. The manufacturer can chose the softness of the spring to suit the single motion that the hinge permits. The mechanism retains the desired stiffness in other directions independently of the softness of the spring. This is the kind of sophistication one wants of a shoe if it is to measure up to the demands of modern life.

Conclusion

Ideally your leg would have a small lever (304·8mm long) hinged onto the bottom of it. The tip of the lever would contact the ground first, and as your weight came on to that leg, it would pivot about the hinge stretching a spring to absorb the impact and lower your heel gently to the ground. If you are carrying a heavy rucksack the springs would have to be adjusted for the heavier load. Worse, if you were carrying a heavy suitcase with one hand, the springs would have to be adjusted differently and readjusted when you changed hands! So it needs to be an active spring under micro-processor control.

How much would such a pair of shoes cost? $500, $5000, who cares? You already own a pair that came free, as your body's standard equipment. The small lever is called the foot, the hinge is called the ankle, the spring is the Achilles tendon, the adjustment and damping is provided by the calf muscle. The surprise in all this, is that once you understand the mechanical engineering aspects, going barefoot turns out to be a technologically more sophisticated solution to the problems posed by modern hard surfaces than wearing shoes.

The transition to going barefoot is hard. You need to get you eye in for spotting broken glass. You need to sharpen up your foot-eye co-ordination, so you can avoid it once you have seen it. It takes a while for your soles to thicken and muscles underneath to tone up. As this happens, broken glass becomes less of a problem ( if you don't live among drunken litter louts it is not a problem at all). It takes some months to get your calf muscles toned up and to learn to use them correctly. You have to place your foot, not scuff it; as though you were reaching forward to grab the pavement with your toes and pull it back underneath you.

The payoff for all this effort is wonderful. You literally get a spring in your step. Walking becomes a pleasure, like dancing, instead of being a misfortune endured when your car breaks down. You can use the new strength in your ankles to rise up a couple of inches when climbing stairs. Steep stairs become shallow and you feel twenty years younger.

Is there anything I want to add in 2024? Yes, a subtle point about geometry. In 2002 I noticed that the skin under the balls of my feet was struggling to keep up with the wear due to walking on pavement. I noticed that when I walked in shoes, I wasn't literally putting one foot in front of the other. The right foot would be placed in front of where the right foot had been. The left foot would be placed in front of where the left foot had been. But the two feet followed parallel tracks about 9 inches apart. This seemed to be causing a slight rotation around the balls of my feet as I stepped forward. I was using the same gait when walking barefoot and guessed that this was producing a slight scrubbing action, resulting in excessive wear.

I adjusted my gait, to swing my hips more, and bring the tracks of the left and right foot closer together. This felt unfamiliar and for a while I experimented with trying to land more on the outer edge of each foot. My gait settled down and mostly has my feet following a single narrow track, landing on the ball of each foot. This solved the problem of excessive skin wear. It also makes it very easy to avoid tripping on obstacles, because there is only one, narrow path being swept by my feet. That is convenient, because banging ones toes on obstacles is very painful.

My 2024 addition is partly prompted by the tag "Self Experimentation". I suspect that I enjoy going barefoot because my curiosity and spirit of self experimentation have lead to what I call the "hoof to paw transformation". Feeling different textures is part of the fun. I see textures ahead and adjust my path of land on them. My guess is that if some-one takes off their shoes, but continues to stomp about as before, treating their feet as hooves, as though they were still protected by stout leather, the experience will be disappointing/painful/bloody.

I like going barefoot. However, I live in a climate that's muddy for most of the year. When I'm entering and exiting my house frequently, being barefoot is impractical because the time it takes to adequately clean my feet is much greater than the time it takes to slip off a pair of shoes at the door.

Also, in the colder parts of the year, I find that covering my feet indoors allows me to be generally comfortable at lower ambient temperatures than I would require for being barefoot in the house. This isn't much of an issue during outdoor activities that promote circulation to the feet, but it's annoying when reading, at the computer, or doing other activities that involve staying relatively still.

What do you think of barefoot shoes?

I would worry about that if sharp objects, pointing upward, were often found on the ground. In my experience, such things are rare. I should and do, for safety, look around a bit at where I walk.

When I tried walking barefoot for a summer, the visible glass shards weren't a very big problem (I never stepped into any of them, though it was annoying having to be on the lookout to avoid them), but I stepped twice into tiny glass shards (few millimeters in length) that were then also subsequently more difficult to remove. They didn't hurt as much, though.

Another annoying thing was that I always had to wash my feet when I came home.

I’m a flip flop man, myself. I live in Florida, so that’s pretty easy. I have dexterous toes, which I often use for picking up small items. Walking around with traditional shoes feels like walking around with boxing gloves on.