Barefoot Boots

I have worked standing up for 20 years. My feet began to hurt after a while. My back too. I consider good footwear to be a “cherry on top” sort of thing in regards to how you feel and perform on a daily basis. There are other more important things, but I definitely notice it when I am wearing the wrong shoes, especially one specific kind of wrong. That being shoes with a heel lift.

We’ve known that heel lift, via wearing actual heels, has been causing women pain for ages. We haven’t really made that big of deal out of it with regular heel lift in tennis shoes though (because they are not as high). As of late though, it has nonetheless come under fire for causing the same knee and back pain that higher heels have been found guilty of (surprise surprise).

From a biomechanical standpoint, heel lift is bad. It takes stress off your achilles heels thus keeping them weak, it causes your quads to work extra hard and it tilts your pelvis anteriorly causing your lower back to arch excessively and your glutes to fire (work) less. In other words, heel lift creates a poor load distribution. And this, I feel.

In addition to heel lift, regular shoes typically have a narrow toe box, squishing your toes together, also causing muscle weakness in your feet.

Enter barefoot shoes. These are pretty popular right now. I started with New Balance Minimus, moved onto INOV8, and now I wear Xero’s, made right here in Boulder. None of the major achilles issues, back pain, knee pain, and I have full feeling in both my legs as well (a problem I had with high heeled military boots).

The issue though has been boots. I don’t, under any circumstances, want to hike (or ruck) for hours in a heel lift, but barefoot boots are harder to find and not as good as their tennis shoe counterparts. Nonetheless, I have found some. Some I liked and some I did not. I feel goofy outing the ones that were no good so…

Here are the winners:

These are the Vivos (made in England) and they are expensive! They are considerably better than the other barefoot hiking boots I have found. After about a year, the sole is coming loose (a little) and that I don’t like. They are warm in comparison to the others I have worn. At a price of $240, they are too expensive…but I still have them, don’t I? It’s still less costly than back pain. You can buy them here.

These are the Belleville TR- 105s army approved barefoot combat boots. These took too long to break in (lots of band aids pour moi) and other people have said the same thing. They are so much more comfortable on my the rest of my body though that standard issue military boots don’t really compare and that’s why I suffered through the blisters. For $165 they are pretty average priced for combat boots, so I wasn’t too upset at having to pony up. You can buy them here.