Author: William A. Rossi, DPM Published: Podiatry Management, March 1999 (Perspectives column)
Note: This is an original summary, not the full article. The complete text and all figures remain copyright of Podiatry Management.
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Summary
Rossi’s central claim is that genuinely natural gait is biomechanically impossible for anyone wearing conventional shoes. He draws a sharp line between two words people use loosely.
“Normal” only means an accepted average — the way most shoe-wearing people happen to walk. “Natural” means the pristine, barefoot ideal that the human foot evolved over millions of years to perform. A faulty gait can often be coaxed back toward “normal,” he argues, but never back to “natural” while traditional footwear is worn.
He then walks through the specific shoe features that force the foot away from its natural mechanics:
Heel elevation. Any raised heel, even a modest one, tips the body’s weight line forward and triggers a chain of compensating adjustments up through ankle, knee, hip, spine and head. Higher heels shift more weight onto the ball, alter the pelvic angle, and over time shorten the Achilles tendon and calf muscles.
Heel strike and tread path. Shoes move the initial heel strike to the rear-outer corner of the heel, rather than the center of the calcaneus where a bare foot lands, disrupting the natural heel-to-ball-to-toe roll.
Toe spring. The upward tilt built into the toe of most shoes lifts the toes off the ground and “puts them out of business,” denying them their natural gripping role in propulsion.
Last design. Most lasts are built with an inward curve (“inflare”) that conflicts with the foot’s straight axis, and with a concave bottom under the ball that, combined with compressed shoe filler, lets the middle metatarsal heads sink — producing the classic “fallen” metatarsal arch.
Inflexibility, weight, and fit. Multi-layered soles resist the roughly 54-degree flex a bare foot makes at the ball; excessive shoe weight multiplies the lifting load over thousands of daily steps; and most shoes are about 20% too narrow at the ball, preventing the foot’s natural expansion under load.
Lost tread and lost sensation. The shod foot loses 50–65% of its natural ground-contact surface, and thick soles block much of the dense sensory feedback from the sole’s nerve endings that the body relies on for balance.
He closes by arguing that orthotics, however precisely engineered, cannot restore natural gait while sitting inside a biomechanically faulty shoe — “a secure superstructure cannot be erected on a design-defective base.” The only true route to natural gait is going barefoot, or the kind of lightweight, heel-less, flexible moccasin that predates modern footwear.