When you wear shoes that don’t fully connect to your foot, your toes and feet have to work differently to hold the shoe on when you’re walking. For runners and athletes, this change in foot mechanics can have ripple effects throughout the body.

It’s easy to assume that flip-flops are the very epitome of minimal footwear. After all, what could be more minimal than a rubber thong attached to a foot-shaped rubber pad? Like the best barefoot shoes, they’re flat, wide, and flexible. They’re also “open”—an important component of the “natural” argument, as they allow for greater sensory input in the form of air pressure and temperature.

It’s true, flip-flops are so close! But they fall short of being minimal-for-the-purpose-of-natural-gait in a vital way—they don’t connect to our feet. For athletes who depend on efficient, repeatable gait patterns, that missing connection can compromise performance and increase the risk of small, compounding injuries. We have to work our muscles unnaturally to keep them on. (Unfortunately, this toe-gripping action is necessary for slides, mules, and many slippers, too.)

I know, I know… gripping doesn’t sound or even feel like such a big deal, but gripping while you’re walking is more than just toes bending in different places. Those bends end up translating into mechanical input at the level of the nerves and skin and, over time, can create many problems not filed under “musculoskeletal.”

The grip to keep footwear on curls some toe bones up and some down, drives the end of some bones into the ground creating higher-than-normal pressure (hello fracture-potentially-in-the-making!) and drives the ends of some bones up into the top of the shoe (file under: corn, calluses). I won’t even mention the tension down the front of the leg—you’ll find it yourself during this top-of-the-foot-stretching exercise that helps undo the chronic tension in both the toes and in the front of the ankle.

TOP OF THE FOOT STRETCH
If you’re a chronic flip-flop wearer, then this super portable stretch is especially pertinent to your feet and targets not only intrinsic foot muscles but extrinsic ones as well. Do it a few times every day until your feet regain their intended dexterity and/or until you’ve eliminated any cramping.

• Stand on your right foot and reach your left foot back behind you, tucking the toes of your
• left foot under and placing them on the floor.
• If you find yourself leaning forward, shorten the distance you’ve reached the leg back.
• Bring your pelvis over your standing ankle and upper body over the hips.
• Work up to holding this stretch for a minute, but stop for cramping.

After a while, the toe-gripping motor pattern leads to shortened toe muscles (and a loss of parts that allow movement), which can then affect things like balance and foot arch strength, and lead to toe contractures, a.k.a hammertoes. And flip-flop research also shows that working to keep the shoe on changes many things about your gait, which means they end up affecting more than the feet.

Now I like spring and summer shoes as much as the next person, but I also like my feet to feel great and to be able to walk—or run—long distances without pain. For runners and other athletes, maintaining natural gait patterns and strong foot mechanics is especially important, and flip-flops can quietly undo a lot of that work by encouraging dysfunctional movement patterns. So, I’ve swapped out all my slide-on sandals for ones that have a strap around the back.

To keep your natural stride (and shoe) on while still enjoying the feel of the sea breeze and sunshine on your skin, swap out those slide-on sandals for something that looks more like a Greek sandal—you know, all strappy and minimal but still fully connected to your foot. If you look around, you can find uppers that are very minimal as far as mass goes, but engineered in a way that keeps the shoe on without you needing to tighten your toes. 

Adapted and edited for length from Katy Bowman’s book Whole Body Barefoot (Uphill Books, 2015).

You may also like: IT Band Exercises for Runners

Read This Story in Our 2025 Summer Outdoor Travel Issue
IMPACT Magazine Summer Outdoor Travel Issue 2025 featuring Shanda Hill, a Canadian Ultra Triathlete who is redefining the sport. Run on some epic trails in our own backyard or join a run club. Eat your way for Mental Clarity, fueling while travelling, seasonal eating and some kitchen must haves. Become strong and fit in only 20 minutes a day, and enjoy some tasty drinks guilt free and so much more.

We always do a couple of challenging family “thru-hikes” each summer—point-to-point hikes that add some other element of sticking with the challenging walk over time. A one-day kid version, if you will.

This was no easy trail (and in many spots, it wasn’t a trail at all); most steps required mindful foot placement because it was so rugged. But our two families made it. This was the first time

I’ve never done so many steep downhill kilometres without any flat or uphill terrain to break it up.

Two days later, muscle soreness was pinging me in three areas on each leg—glute medius, lateral quad, and soleus.

Why These Muscles?

Going uphill is hard. Leg muscles have to do a lot of work to lift up the weight of the body, which requires the heart and lungs to move more. Lowering the body doesn’t take as many heart and lung motions because you’re being pulled down the mountain, which is easier in one way but harder in another. Declines—especially steep ones—require the body to “put on the brakes” to keep itself from tumbling down.

The areas I felt after my downhill trek are where the body’s “downhill brakes” are located.

1. The SOLEUS muscle is the deepest calf muscle, and it connects the heel to the shin. When taking a controlled downhill step, the soleus lengthens despite the fact that it’s simultaneously contracting (trying to get shorter), so you don’t drop down the step too fast. When muscles work in the opposite direction to their net movement, it’s called an eccentric contraction.

2. Similarly, the QUADS on the front of the thigh must get longer to lower the body, but they must also work opposite to that motion to act as brakes.

3. The GLUTE MEDIUS (one of the lateral hip muscles) has the same challenge—to get longer to lower the other side of the pelvis, while also trying to tighten in order to control that motion eccentrically.

There are ways to get downhill that don’t use the parts noted above. When ankles, knees, hips, and waist are stiff, gait patterns get creative. People with stiff parts can still log many kilometres a day or even multiple hikes a week; however, with time, these alternative creative patterns take their toll.

Why Can Knees Hurt When You’re Walking Downhill?

1. Your knees are doing more than their share of the work. The first thing I have folks check on their downhill gait is “are you using your knees and hips, or just your knees?”

One way to save the knee from having to do all the bending work to lower the foot to the ground below is to make sure you’re also lowering the hip when you’re going downhill. This involves lots of hip muscle use, which helps keep your mass from bombing down the hill.

If you list and shift the hip, you create a “slalom” for your centre of mass—moving it side to side as it goes down—slowing you naturally. Using your lateral hips to lower and slow your body down with each step means you don’t have to ride the quad brakes so often or so hard. Your knees can do all of the work (and probably have been for some time), but they don’t have to.

Remember to do the slalom list-and-shift of the hip while you hike. Even if you haven’t practiced it a lot, you can use it to change your gait on the trail and give your knees a rest.

2. Your kneecap (patella) isn’t tracking in the “patellar groove.” Going downhill works your quads and thus tenses them. The patella is embedded in the quadriceps’ tendon, and if your quads are tense and you’re walking downhill, they press the patella deeper into the knee joint than they would on uphill or flatter terrain. OUCH!

Our knees have space for the kneecap, but the kneecap can get pulled out of that space (usually it’s pulled sideways) as a result of your all-time movement habits and patterns. Going downhill when the kneecap is out of its groove increases the pressure in the knee.

P.S. This can also be why kneeling upon or deeply bending a knee hurts.

I hope this takes some of the mystery out of why downhill walking often makes for achy knees. The good news: it’s most often a situation you can do something about.

Excerpt from Rethink Your Position by Katy Bowman. Copyright © 2023 by Katy Bowman. Published by Propriometrics Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Read This Story in Our 2023 Summer Outdoor & Travel Issue
Featuring Alison Jackson, Canadian cyclist and only North American male or female to win the famed Paris Roubaix. Travel the country’s most stunning hot spots by campervan. Become a better trail running by improving your ascents and descents—plus, train outdoors with Canada’s Top Fitness Trainers. Enjoy plant-based summer recipes and so much more. 

We all know the term cross-training. Cross-training is an exercise technique that calls for a variance of exercise type (and sometimes a variance of the way you do one type of activity) to improve the body’s response to exercise and decrease injury. Cross-training is often recommended by exercise and therapeutic professionals because being strong or healthy in one specific way doesn’t transfer over to being strong or healthy in every way. For example, if you’re a kick-ass runner and you run all the time and you run easily and without pain, your body is probably very adapted to the tissue strengths necessary to run. But say you help a friend move and in lifting a few boxes you are thrown out of commission for a month with a major back spasm. Weren’t you strong? Weren’t you in shape? Weren’t you a regular mover, and doesn’t that mean you were conditioned to move?

The answer to all of these questions has to do with the Law of Specificity, which dictates that you get better at what you do and not better at what you don’t. A particular way of moving creates loads and adaptations in only the tissues pulled and pushed and compressed by that activity. The more you do the same thing repeatedly, the stronger some areas of your body become. As with any kind of material—cloth, metal, wood—strength in one area increases the relative weakness of the surrounding areas not strengthened. Having strong, regularly-used parts next to underused (or overused) weak ones can actually increase tissue damage by creating a natural stress riser. The more parts you integrate into your movement, the less disparity between parts. This is why experts have recommended changing up your workout (i.e., cross-training) for years: to close the strength gaps that live between the exercises you do and exercises you don’t.

The gap between what you are physically doing right now and what your body can do is vast. Typically, cross-training is applied to your workout: “If you usually run, you should throw in some strength training,” or “If you are a cyclist, you should balance your workout with yoga.” Again, the sentiment is correct. Look at what you are doing and then round out the loads applied to the body by doing something different. The problem is most of what we do for exercise is just slightly different versions of the same kinds of motions.

The answer to all of these questions has to do with the Law of Specificity, which dictates that you get better at what you do and not better at what you don’t.

There is rarely uniqueness to what we do, and even routines designed to recruit more of our bodies often fail to do so because our movement patterns are so ingrained that we don’t perform the program’s movements as intended. Moving differently requires an inordinate amount of mindfulness, and once we forget to pay attention, we automatically default to the same pattern and go back to increasing the difference between one and every other area of our body. We go back to making stress risers. To determine where we move a lot and where we move a little, we must look beyond our exercise session to the frequencies of movement, ranges of motion, and the way we load our body throughout the day, every day, over a lifetime.

Exercise is one type of movement. Exercise, by definition, is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposive in the sense that improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness is an objective. We tend to have preferred modes or types of exercise—running, biking, pickleball—that use particular parts of our body and increase our physical fitness. But even the most diligent exercisers can still be sedentary the rest of the day and can have many stiff and underused body parts right next to the parts used for their favourite activities.

How do we deal with our sedentary parts? Instead of just balancing your workouts over the week with different modes of exercise, you can “cross-train” your movement over the day. If your exercise session is surrounded by hours spent sitting in a car, at work, and at home, work to reduce that repetitive “chair” input. Forgo the car for an easy walk to and from the store for groceries and give your cycling or swimming legs more weight-bearing time. Lots of exercise tends to be leg-heavy. Look for opportunities to carry. Holding a bag of groceries or library books is a quick core and arm workout, but there’s no “exercise mode” or need to step away from your other daily to-do list. Sitting on the floor when taking in your evening Netflix or while working on your computer—legs crossed, in a V-shape, and then straight out in front—gets the hips and knees some of the recovery stretching they can use, extra time not required.

Keeping a body moving well requires regular movement that’s distributed both throughout the body and throughout the day. Swaddle your exercise time with more dynamic activities of daily living so that a workout isn’t the only peak on the “how much did I move today” graph, and the bulk of your non-exercise time isn’t shaping your tissues into the same use patterns repeatedly. 

You May Also Like
WORKOUTS

Read This Story in Our 2022 Fall Fitness & Food Digital Edition

Featuring Brendan Brazier, athlete and pioneer in the plant-based sports nutrition industry. Trail Running 101 – plus this year’s Trail Running Shoe Review. Travel around the world to the top vegan-friendly destinations, recipes and much more!