How to Walk Barefoot

I am a proponent of a forefoot/midfoot strike when walking. No bruised heels and no knee problems from walking many miles on asphalt or concrete. I wrote about it in my blog series (although some in the medical community had some disagreement – check the comments): http://www.adventureinprogress.com/tcfmf-making-the-transition

What would help a lot of us, possibly, is a video of someone properly walking, in both standard time and slo-mo for a close look, even on something like a treadmill. Sometimes I feel like SEEING it done right is better than READING about it.

And yes, when I try to “walk proper” I feel like a cat or maybe even a sneaky thief trying to make a quite getaway!

I have been wearing VFFs and homemade Hauraches for the past 3 years … I have always naturally run forefoot strike but walked with a heel strike … I watched out kids walk barefoot many times and they do the same thing … heel to forefoot walking … forefoot to heel running … I think they are a good example of what nature intended. thoughts?

I used to wear the KSOs, as of yesterday my primary footwear is the TREK LS.

If I am idling along or just walking from place to place, I heel strike. If my velocity increases to a “hurried” walk, I must use the forefoot-strike. It takes awhile to become accustomed to landing on the ball of one’s foot at walking speed but you get used to it.

I’ve been wearing minimalist shoes or barefoot for a bit over 3 years now. I also tend to cover 20+ miles/week between walking the dogs, getting around town, and just going for a walk.

The most important thing to start – shorten your stride. The rest will come with practice. As has been mentioned, there really is no one right way to walk naturally. Just like no two fingerprints are identical, no two sets of feet are either so what works for me (pretty much flat landing on the outside of my foot and quickly transitioning to a great toe push off) may or may not work for you.

Start by shortening your stride, by like 1/2 to start, and see how that feels, the one thing that you’ll notice immediately is that it’s actually hard to land on your heel since your foot is pretty much right under your hips (center of mass/gravity).

I cover miles nearly every day like this and with the exception of when I really have to hurry and get calf cramps, all is well!

Walking is not running. I’ve been barefoot/minimalist running for over two years and it’s been fantastic.

First, you do need to axe “strike” from the natural walking terminology. If you’re coming down on your heel hard, my guess is you’re walk as you would in conventional shoes with a thick heel.

You “place” your heel on the ground and gentle role forward. By placing your heel on the ground you will also avoid coming straight down will your leg is extended with a “locked knee” (so your knee would never be locked straight, it’s always slightly bent). When you’re doing it right, it should almost feel like you’re gliding.

As mentioned by a previous poster, watch how young children do this when barefoot.

ONE DAY humanity will admit the fact
modern shoe companies (actually are just the puppets of some bad-ass entities) had hurt the true evolution of our kind. for two reasons:
1. greed
2. hinder the population’s mental, physical, and astral progress on all levels.

sounds like a conspiracy?
then why most people will look at your
minimalist shoes with doubt and ridicule, beliving their super jumbo-hi-tec shoe soles are the way to go??

if you consider yourself a true, honest
human that involves in b-f activities
you should know our connection with the
core, earth, mother, planet is crucial:
we get and send information through our
feet. modern shoes had made our tiny muscles and tendons so ridgid that some of that communication had stopped.
and yes, i know you can connect to the earth with your heart but the feet are another basic channel that is NOW BEGINING TO FLOW.
people talk about 2012 and all… sometimes i think it’s just a bull, but, look around and see how many shoe brands are making b-f versions of their own… little by little, it does make a difference.
SOME PEOPLE MEDITATE -WE ARE USING B-F SHOES

amen to that, see ya!

I think John basically nailed the way I walk, though I must admit it has evolved over time and I had to train myself to walk like this

1. The first part of the foot to strike the ground is the outside of the ball of the foot (so under the knuckle of the little toe)

2. The foot then rolls across the “inside knuckles” of the toes(ball of the foot), from smallest toe to big as the toes spread out to distribute the weight.

if running, it’s simply rinse and repeat as the heel doesn’t touch the ground, if walking, the heel touches the ground gingerly after the weight has been distributed across the entire foot.

As mentioned, when going downhill you need to squat a little to lessen the impact, but it also allows you to use a lower centre of gravity to help speed your descent.

I had actually retrained myself how to walk after I got my pair of Vibrams. I had become so used to heel striking, it was second nature (as ironic as that is). I actually had some kind of problem with my knees where I could feel them popping or cracking while I walked, and would start to hurt quite badly after a while.

I started off with what seemed like an awkward fox walk; I’m sure I looked like I was wearing heels or something with how painfully odd it looked. But over time, it gradually became more smooth and easier to do.

Now, a year later, I’m at the point where it’s the only way I walk and it’s like second (or in this case, first) nature. The average person watching me walk would have no idea that I walk completely different than they do, aside from my toes not pointing toward the sky with each step. Plus, I walk way quieter. It feels so good to walk now, it’s always hard to not jump into a jog. It just feels so right.

I feel we need to get rid of the term “strike” from our vocabulary when discussing BF or minimal shoe walking and running… The point is to land softly. I really like what Ken Bob Saxton says in his book “Barefoot Running Step By Step”:
Turn your feet into hands, not shoes!

The idea here is that if you land softly enough (without the vertical bouncing that shoes have artificially created in our habitual movement) it will not matter how hard the surface below you is. If someone throws you a bowling ball, and you catch it, there’s no pain. If you “strike” the bowling ball, it doesn’t matter what part of the hand you use, there will be pain.

I’ve found walking on hard surfaces with VFF to be a major challenge, much more so than running, and it has impacted my running. During long runs, I usually alternate four or five minutes of running with a minute or so of fast walking. Walking, i.e., heel-striking, with shoes with thick heels, provides rest for the muscles used in running. But with VFF on hard surfaces, prolonged heel striking is painful and it wears out the heels of the VFF (I destroyed my first pair of Bikilas in a few weeks).
The alternative, which is what I’ve been learning to do for the last 15 months, is to walk in a manner that is almost identical to running. The primary difference is that in walking one foot is always on the ground.
Walking like this is starting to feel somewhat natural, though it doesn’t provide nearly as much rest for the running muscles, particularly the calf muscles, as does walking on the heels.
I’ve contemplated gluing a bit of extra rubber on the heels of the VFF, though I haven’t done so. I’m still hopeful that with time I won’t miss being able to rest on my heels.
I wonder, though, if human bodies (or those of any other animal) have evolved for travel on hard smooth surfaces. Smooth concrete or asphalt sidewalks and roads are an extremely recent historical development. It’s hard to imagine humans encountering any large expanses of equally hard surfaces in the two million years that we’ve been evolving and running and walking upright.

I too had problems walking in the VFFs until I went ALL THE WAY barefoot. Please, just try it… It’s really not as scary as you might think. Once your skin feels the ground (or pavement) you will quickly re-learn to walk gently on ANY surface. (really, hard and smooth is by far the easiest, once you get it) The trick, then, is to translate this natural stride back into VFF use. Let’s face it, we can’t be barefoot all the time.

This is my advice for what it’s worth:

I think we are all looking at this from the wrong end.

Forget the feet, forget your lower leg or even the knee. Your leg/foot starts at the hip and on down to the thigh. It is this area of your body that you need to be mindful of whether running or walking, and to keep the rest of the leg and foot relaxed.

The trick is to raise your thigh high enough so that the knee bends the leg naturally with your lower leg and foot hanging below. As all who follow this site know, the ankle and foot are springs so there is really no need to use too much strength or tensed control in them. Doing so can lead to injury. When your thigh and knee are in the right place the rest of the leg just follows through doing the right thing. A correct mid-foot strike is the result of your upper leg doing the right thing in the first place. It is the result of the equation not one of the inputs!

All this means that your stride can actually be as long or short as you like depending on how fast you want to go. The toes are there to be used for foot lift off, and in addition to giving extra propulsion, have the effect of helping your thigh get back into the high position of the next step.

The sedentary lifestyle of modern man that spends much of the time sitting down has weakened the muscles in the pelvic area in particular. Normal shoes have allowed us to walk/run “comfortably” without the need to raise our legs as mentioned above.

One really does need to mindful of this as it is all to easy for us to fall back into our old habits. Maybe after years of training, my body will finally walk properly by default without the need for this mindfulness.

*Interestingly in the fox walking picture, you can see the man with a raised thigh, almost exactly as I have described.

By the way, I’m purposely saying thigh here instead of knee as it is there where I believe your mindfulness needs to rest. The pelvic muscle socket on one end and thigh muscles on the other — that is the key.

Victor, you have already succumbed to the “Five fingers curse” Welcome to the club. It happened to me about a week after I got my first pair of VFFs. The “curse” is that once your feet have felt the joys of VFFs, you no longer can tolerate “foot coffins” anymore! Rejoice in your newfound intolerance of harmful shoes… Over the last couple of years, I have given almost all of my pre-VFF shoes away to the local veterans shelter. Something tells me, you will soon be doing the same thing:)

Fox Walk or Weasel Stalk?

I searched through three or four books by Tom Brown, looking for the original image of that which is displayed above. His “Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking” has a lot of verbal description but I didn’t see the illustrations. I did find them in “Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival,” pages 168-173.

What is illustrated is not the Fox Walk, nor even the more stealthy Weasel Walk. It is an all-out stalking movement, intended to move with maximum quietness and control at an extremely slow speed.

In the Fox Walk the body and head are held erect and the eyes are fixed on the horizon. There is no crouching, nor are the hands on the knees. The feet roll from the outside to the inside.

If you do it slowly enough your body should adjust just fine.

I guess you could take as a rule that if you need stretching you’re doing it too fast. 😉

I really like the description of the fox walk. I am vividly against forefoot strike on a regular basis because it goes against human functional anatomy. Let me try to explain. The reason why so many people get acute aquiles tendon inflamation is because when you land forefoot first, you land with your tendon in a lax position. Then when your heel touches down, the tendon suddenly snaps into tension and then the tension is increased naturaly as you prepare to strike off. This is fine if it happens sporadically, as when you land from a jump, when you’re speeding up in a sprint etc. However, the repetitive snap WILL cause trouble unless your body thickens that tendon-bone insertion enough to minimise repetitive tear forces.
On the other hand, if you land midfoot or heel first, your tendon is already streched when you hit the ground and is only subjected to gradual tension as you roll your foot and strike off.

As I saw somewhere above here, what is important is to land your foot softly. Personally I always land heel first, but because running barefoot makes you actually feel the impact of the concrete, I started landing almost midfoot and a lot softer than I used to. That alone made all my running aches disappear.

Soft shoes are training wheels: they correct your mistakes so you don’t feel when you’re making them. You can’t learn how to walk when you’re blinded by your mistakes: you need minimal shoes. But because of how easy it is to pain yourself from a heel strike, I’m not surprised to see how many people are afraid to land on their heels. Unfortunately, we just weren’t made to walk like foxes.

I’ve been casually wearing Vivobarefoot shoes since last December (9 months now), and I will admit, walking was the most difficult motion to learn. In minimal shoes, you’re much more aware of the ground and when you’ve struck your heel. I tried fox-walking which removed heel striking from the equation, but that was a very unnatural movement. It wasn’t until I read Vivobarefoot’s Training Clinic by Lee Saxby that I got the courage to try walking with a heel-toe roll.

The heel-strike problem can be solved with both shorter strides and a smooth momentum. I stopped pounding my heel and started rolling the impact from back to front. Eventually the roll stopped being a conscious effort, and my feet stopped getting sore from all the contrived effort. That’s when I knew my walking was good. Even if a situation calls for a faster walk, I still don’t have to switch to a midfoot strike because my foot is adept enough at rolling the impact. However, learning this proper movement took a month or so to get right, and about 6 months to perfect. From a flat sidewalk to soft grass and then to a rocky asphalt, every situation is different.

You’re gonna have to realize how difficult it is before you’re able to do it right. The tradeoff of forcing yourself to learn biomechanics is a greater understanding of cushioning impact in the long run. I used to get sore from walking in my sneakers all day, and I blamed this on “not enough cushion.” So when I took my Vivobarefoot Neos to Downtown Disney, I also made sure to bring the soft, cushy, removable insoles just in case. I never had to use them. Everyone else was tired from walking, but I felt like I could go on forever! Learn to walk the right way, and you’ll never feel sore again.

One last note, make sure to understand that walking does not transition into jogging. Jogging is a heel-toe pound that is only made possible by soft shoes that artificially cushion the heel-strike. Running is a normal forefoot spring. There is no natural transition for our feet from walking into anything else but a forefoot run, and it’s a lot easier to run slow than to walk fast.

When it comes to walking, I try to remember the image of a woman walking with a basket on her head, like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T1f9jAO5W4
Rather than obsessing about which part of the foot “strikes” first, I focus on softly “catching and releasing” the ground with each step, having as little bounce as possible in my walk. I focus on allowing softness in every part of my stride. Ken Bob Saxton’s book “Barefoot Running Step By Step” is money well spent, BTW!

hi there! today was my first minimal shoes experience. i started on the very low end with a pair feiyues. after walking across town in them today I was a little worried about the awkwardness I felt when i all of a sudden started to take shorter steps, feeling like a ninja or something. this article and the comments successfully cheered me up, guys! seems i’m on the right track and not alone in my awkwardness! yay! 🙂

like most i still tend to land on my heel but i must admit that in the feiyues this doesn’t feel quite right. i felt most comfortable with like a “rolling motion” if that makes any sense. landing gently on heel or midfoot (it’s still a bit hard to tell for me where i actually land, just getting a feel for this) and then working with the rest of the foot to lower the impact.

so pretty much in the vein what others have said. only thing i’d like to add: i noticed that i seem to bent forward while walking the way i used too. with taking smaller steps i found this damn near impossible! i had to walk with a straight back and my whole posture changed.

and it feels great! 😀

I have been using vibram shoes last three months. It has been an interesting journey for me. I find to run barefoot is much easier than to walk barefoot. Hmm. I am still experimenting how to walk barefoot. Right now I am walking like if I am ape by doing a heel striking and using more of arch side of my feet. Hmm. I have sciatica and when I do the ape method walking I feel it stretches the sciatic nerve. I have to rotate my feet inward to do this. When I do just regular heel striking while walking for few long miles, I do feel pain in my heel parts.. This is where I alter my walking into ape like method. Let’s see how I will do in next few weeks.

I want to update… Also to walk with feet close to each other does work too. I could walk all the day without getting in pain. Keys are to keep feet close to each others and keep outer feet line parallel to each others instead of inner line of feet to be parallel to each others. This method can give you sense like if you are related to ape because the touch base when walking will be mostly on the outer feet line (arch) like ape would do. For running or dancing, of course use forefoot to jump. 🙂

And how could anyone walk by forefoot all the day?! Heel to toe walking is more feeling natural and in sense.

I’ve only got VFF for a short while now, but even before I got them, I tried forefoot walking and realized I can only do it and not feel like chicken shaking head front to back if walking uphill or downhill. On flat ground it’s heal first. This city has lots of hills so I switch from one to anotehr all the time