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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • Its a term that a relatively large number of businesses and people have agreed to call shoes that have zero drop and thin soles and often but not always, more flexible upper materials that are also shaped to give your toes more wiggle room so your toes actually splay outward correctly when you take steps.

    Feet have a built in spring system that activates when we put enough force on it usually by going at a brisk walking pace or while running called an ankle which allows more momentum to be conserved with each step as well as less load on the rest of the body. Barefoot, also called minimalist shoes, allow people to use their feet correctly which happens to strengthen a variety of feet muscles around the toes and builds some more hard skin on the bottoms of feet so that if you step on things its less likely to hurt as well as holds onto more momentum with each step by being more dense and at the outskirts of where the momentum is going.

    Highly recommend more people try some, even if only just one time for a month.

    I compare barefoot shoes to a manual vs automatic transmission, its technically not a better shoe because shoes with a lot of cushion will conserve more momentum in a more ideal location like certain automatic transmissions (and yes some shoes will make you go faster and so some have been banned from races) but what a barefoot shoe will do, much like how a manual transmission will give you a sense of how the drivetrain is coming together to propel the car and it strengthens your ability to handle more environmental situations with more efficiency, which is very good for our joints long term if we can keep doing it the right way.

    This does mean that we can wear regular shoes with the knowledge of how to move our feet and reap the benefits of both, but we should aim to strike a balance between a barefoot shoe and a regular shoe with a lot of cushion because both have their ups and downs and we dont have to choose between them in many cases.