Best Supportive Shoes For Pain

“Pronation” is probably the most used word in the footwear industry today. The amount of fear mongering that is done in the name of a natural motion of the foot, is scary.

Every second person today believes they have a minor flat foot problem, if you are one of those, this blog is for you.

The human foot has two motions in the horizontal plane - pronation and supination. Supination is when you pull your arch up and roll the foot outwards, pronation is when you relax your arch muscle and roll your foot inwards.

Both these motions are an integral part of your gait cycle. When you walk, as your knee crosses your toes, your foot starts to pronate to absorb impact and create room for mobility. As you walk off that foot, the arch contracts and becomes rock solid to be able to push the ground back and move forward.

Without pronation, this motion would be disrupted. May it be squats at the gym, walking in the park, or running a marathon. Pronation is super important. The arch muscle in all these cases acts as a suspension system for your body to absorb impact so your ankles and knees and hips stay protected.
This is just how you would bend your knees when you jump from a bench to the ground, let's say. 

The problem however is that over time, with lack of use, our arch muscle gets weak, which means the foot still pronates, but we lose the ability to supinate our foot, or even keep it neutral due to a lack of strength.
With the foot always inward rolled, there is no room for the suspension to act. Every step taken becomes painful as the muscle is loaded more than it can bear. 
The knee tries to compensate, the hips try to compensate for this lack of mobility and they take the brunt. Before you know it, you have a chronic problem.

The solution a lot of brands now offer is a supportive shoe. A shoe that has a built in arch that props up your muscle. 

This prevents your knees from caving in and the hips from compensating because they think the problem is solved. But the cushion does not solve for the underlying strength issue. The foot still has no room to pronate, which means all impact will not drive up to the knee still, and the hip still and because they won’t compensate, now the joints will take all the load creating even more problems.

Given the arch muscle is now permanently supported, the muscle is not exercised, which means more muscle atrophy and weakness. After a point it becomes so bad that there is no possibility of a healthy foot left.

Supportive shoes are great for people who have given up on natural systems and a chance at true recovery, and are ready for the consequences otherwise. 

But if you are healthy, and in a place where you can reverse any damage that has already happened, exercising the muscle in barefoot shoes is the way to go. 
Allowing the foot to do its job and not outsourcing mechanical excellence of the body to a piece of unadaptive foam. 

The best supportive shoe for your pain is a shoe that allows you to become better and not do the job for you, so you can truly heal and work on the root cause, not just the symptom.