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On Feet
Paul Skallas
August 04, 2026
How often do you think about your feet?
Probably not very much. You put them into the same shoes every morning, stand on them all day, and take them out at night. They are functional.
But in summer, that changes. You begin to be aware of the presence of your feet. They become part of the pleasure of the season itself. They experience so many types of shoes. Work shoes during the day. Sneakers after work. Sandals, mules, slides, or Birkenstocks on weekends. You walk barefoot on the beach. You go on vacation, hit 20,000 steps a day, and feel every small muscle in your feet.
Summer is the season when you free your feet. Your toes are no longer squeezed together, they spread and feel the air. Last summer, I enjoyed that feeling so much that I couldn’t back to normal shoes in the fall.
Around the same time, Instagram began feeding me the usual stream of contradictory fitness and nutrition advice. That’s how they get you hooked on health content. One reel describes something you should do, then the next reel contradicts it. And on and on.
The ads for wide-toe-box shoes made a very simple claim. Just give your toes more room. Which is exactly what I was looking for. So I bought a pair. I’m not alone, this is a growing market, so A lot of shoe companies make them now in a variety of styles. They look decent, not like clown shoes anymore.
The Non-Reversion Test
It occurred to me that toe spread was probably one reason why sneakers took over the world. Sneakers in airports. Sneakers in offices. Sneakers in restaurants. Sneakers with dresses and suits. They are the footwear that defines the modern world.
Most sneakers still are not shaped like human feet. They are kind of narrow. But next to boots, or leather loafer, even a standard sneaker feels roomy. Once your toes become accustomed to that space, regular shoes begin to feel constricting. I can’t ever go back to normal shoes again.
If you’re looking for ways to predict the future, look at what people refuse to go back to.
Adoption of a new thing tells you how quickly something spreads, that’s virality. But non-reversion tells you whether the underlying preference is real. People experiment with novelties all the time. The stronger signal is that, once they switch, do they switch back?
No one installs air conditioning and then uninstalls it. Few drivers switch from an automatic back to a manual transmission. People who begin working remotely rarely return to the office voluntarily five days a week unless they are forced to. The same thing happened with sneakers.
Now I’m not arguing everyone will adopt wide-toe-box shoes. I don’t think that will be the case. They will probably remain a niche thing. The near-zero reversion rule tells you how sticky the preference is after someone switches but it doesn’t tell you how many people will switch in the first place.
Japanese toilets have had something close to a zero-percent reversion rate for decades, yet they remain rare in American bathrooms. The barrier is not preference after adoption. It is getting people to install one in the first place.
Outside-In vs. Inside-Out
Aesthetics and comfort often work in opposite directions.
This is one underrated reason the modern world looks plainer than the world our ancestors. We think about comfort first, the experience of the user, then wrap an exterior around it. Older societies more often began with aesthetics and public appearance. Some of the most beautiful buildings in Paris contain dark, awkward apartments that receive very little light. You would never know it from the street.
Same thing with cars, they prioritize comfort over an interesting exterior. Same thing with clothes. It’s a choice society has to make.
Design only from the inside out and the shared environment turns bland. Every room works well, every car feels comfortable, and every outfit feels comfortable but the street, the city, and the crowd all grow bland.
Shoes make the same trade-off. But with real consequences. A Cambridge study examined 177 skeletons from English cemeteries, 11th through 15th centuries.
About 6% had bunions.
Then the poulaine arrived. Outside-in fashion. It was long, pointed, narrow, and fashionable among the urban elite. It looked kinda cool. I have to admit In the later skeletons, they found that Bunions jumped to 27%.
These shoes also led to more falls, probably from leaving the wearer with weakened feet.
The fashionable shoe became kind of a Procrustean bed. The ancient greek myt of Procrustes, he forced every traveler to fit the same bed, stretching those who were too short and cutting down those who were too tall. He was a great violator of hospitality and a monster. Until a hero came to cut him down.
The foot is made of bones, joints, muscles and tendons. Squeeze it into the wrong shape for long enough, and the foot changes.
The Sneaker Splits in Two
The sneaker won the footwear war. But now, it is splitting into two distinct camps facing a fundamental question. Do we return to the soft, flexible shoe of the past, or do we build a specialized platform for the hard surfaces of the present?
The first camp argues that the environment has permanently changed. Most humans now walk on concrete, tile, and asphalt rather than dirt, grass, or uneven terrain. The foot evolved for a softer, dynamic surface that no longer exists in modern cities. The answer is thick, high-tech foam.
Research gives this argument some support. Softer midsoles can reduce certain impact forces and lower injury risk for runners, while rocker soles can relieve pressure on the forefoot and Achilles tendon.
the second group argues that the shoe itself created the problem. Decades of thick cushioning and elevated heels stripped the foot of its natural workload, causing intrinsic muscles to atrophy and arches to weaken. The answer is a thinner, zero-drop sole that forces the foot to work again.
There’s research that supports this too. People who gradually switch to minimal footwear develop stronger and larger foot muscles. As much as they would through targeted exercises.
The sneaker revolution partially solved the first problem by giving the foot more room. It then opened a second argument. Do we change ourselves to fit the environment comfortably, or change the environment to fit to ourselves?
The Walking Animal That Stopped Walking
The irony to all of this is that we are finally reconsidering foot mechanics just as we’ve engineered walking out of daily life.
That is especially strange when you consider how central walking was to becoming human. Upright movement came before the large brain, before language, and before nearly everything we think of as distinctly human. Walking freed the hands, reorganized the body, and created the physical platform on which much of human life developed.
Yet, modern society treats walking as an optional activity or a luxury hobby.
When I first committed to walking 15,000 steps a day. I noticed changes immediately. My mind felt clearer, ideas surfaced more naturally, and I slept deeply. While some of those gains stemmed from sunlight and movement, it left me wondering how much of our baseline mental and physical health depends on an activity we now treat as unnecessary.
Evolution spent millions of years fine-tuning us to walk. We have spent roughly three generations building a world where you rarely have to move at all.
This is a great book on walking if you like to go deeper.
Training the Thing Inside the Shoe
Earlier this year, I became obsessed with strengthening my feet.
I have always exercised. I have lifted weights, run, cycled, and practiced martial arts. But I had never treated my feet as something I could train. They were simply the things at the bottom of my legs.
For most of history, no one needed "foot workouts." Natural movement over varied terrain provided all the stimulation required, foot strength was simply a byproduct of staying alive.
Modern life removed much of that stimulus. We walk less. When we do walk, we usually move over flat, predictable surfaces with our feet held inside structured shoes. What the environment once supplied for free, we now have to recreate deliberately.
This is one reason foot training is having a moment. Fitness oriented social media is full of strange-looking drills involving toe spacers, slant boards, resistance bands, balance beams, and small rubber tools.
Foot training isn’t entirely new. Tai chi is interesting because its slow weight shifts closely resemble modern balance training, which can help older adults reduce their risk of falls.
Pro athletes are doing this. NFL wide recievers discuss the important of big toe training. It’s not some secret.
You can try it yourself as part of your regular routine. Stand on one leg while brushing your teeth. Really makes you feel the small muscles around the foot and ankle begin working.
But I wanted to go further.
What would happen if I trained my feet the way people train their back, chest, or legs? What if I gave them two or three dedicated sessions a week for six months? What does living a life with very strong feet feel like? I was curious. I know what having a strong back, good cardio, good flexibility is like, but strong feet? Hmm.
So I bought the fancy equipment. I paid for several foot-and-ankle programs. I tried the exercises, compared the systems, and eventually organized the training into five capacities.
