Why walking flat-footed hurts habitual high-heels wearers
When it comes to shoes, some women will go through hell for a pair of Jimmy Choos. But what effect does wearing high heels have on our bodies? Clinicians have known for a long time that if you hold a limb in a shortened position over an extended period, the muscles shorten. High-heeled shoes push our heels up, which made Marco Narici from Manchester Metropolitan University wonder whether wearing heels on a regular basis could shorten our calf muscles. According to Narici, there was some anecdotal evidence that something changed because secretaries in the 1950s complained about discomfort when they took their heels off and walked flat-footed. 'I thought it was an experiment which was inadvertently being done by women. What we could do was test high heel wearers to see if we could find some changes in the calf muscle,' says Narici, who publishes his results on 16 July...