Barefoot walking and running – a way to learn body awareness, become relaxed and build a healthier body. (Part 1 – My experience)

These series of articles will explore myths about barefoot walking and running, how practicing walking barefoot can help you relax, get a greater body awareness and a healthier body! It’s based on my experience, how I healed my injured knee and the journey it has taken me on from there.

I’ve been practicing barefoot walking for three years. It started as a way to try to connect with the earth and the ground but has since then gone to a bit of an obsession where I need to stop myself from preaching about it to anyone willing (or unwilling!) to listen :)

My first year I treated barefoot walking as a bit of a “hobby”, I walked on the land where I lived and when I took walks in the country I took my shoes off for a while. The rest of the time I wore normal shoes.

The real breakthrough however came 1,5 year later. I had injured my knee really badly in a martial art sparring and at this point, eight months after the accident, I still had problems with it. Pain, limiting movements and obviously no martial training. I had heard that barefoot walking could heal injuries like this and thought I would try it out on a bigger scale then just in my home. Said and done, I bought my first pair of minimalistic sandals.

The results was beyond what I could have imagined: within two weeks of using the sandals regularly my knee was ok and back to normal. No more pain, no more limiting movements and I could go back to my martial art training. That’s when I became a proper fan of barefoot walking.

My explanation of what happened with the barefoot sandals is that the tendons around the knees finally got the exercise they needed to become strong again. When I after this started to be aware of how my feet and legs felt in normal, padded shoes I came to see that I don’t use the muscles in the feet nor the legs as they are supposed to and my tendons never get the right kind, or enough, exercise to get better.

Nowadays I also wonder how much difference it could have made for me as a kid to walk more barefoot. I was a “sprainer” throughout my whole childhood, not many weeks or months went by without me spraining my ankle while running or playing. It always took me a very long time to heal, so it became kind of a regular event that I just accepted. My dad’s solution to it was to buy really sturdy shoes that supported the ankle, and although I wore them in the winter they were too hot to wear in the summer.

As I got older I got less and less injured, maybe because I stopped running around and became an “adult”. The sprains became a thing of the past and I didn’t really think abut them. Not even when I started to walk barefoot did I question why I used to injure myself so often as a kid and it wasn’t until I stepped wrong in my minimalistic shoes that I got a clue to it.

Normal shoes put the foot in a plaster, a lot of support and little or no movement can be done. The difference with minimalistic shoes (or fully barefoot) is that your foot can move. So when I stepped wrong in my minimalistic shoes, lo and behold, my foot adjusted! It turned a bit but since I already was on ground-level (no elevated or thick soles) and my foot could move around it just adapted to where it was going and righted itself again with no damage done. In all my padded, supported shoes that I used as a kid my foot could never adjust and once it started to twist there was no way out of it until it got sprained. That was another major revolution in my understanding of how unnatural today’s shoes are and how they actually contribute to injury, not helping us avoiding it.
On top of it my tendons and muscles in the ankle were probably very weak when I was a child, they kept being twisted and never got the exercise they needed to build strength again (putting anything in a plaster normally doesn’t help with the strength, rather the opposite…). So I repeatedly injured myself. Today I have strong ankle from all the barefoot walking and when I once did twist my foot (I stumbled on a stone) the pain was gone within 24hr.

So, that is my personal experience and journey into the barefoot world :) The next part in this series of barefoot articles will busts some common myths that I have heard or believed myself and in the following articles I will discuss how barefoot walking and running can teach us a better body awareness and help us relax.

Hope you enjoyed it and if you have any comments, questions or things related to barefoot that you want to know more about, give me a shout :)

Where I normally walk to get my feet warm again after the winter