The Clog Blog

A scientific education can be a blessing, because it gives you the ability to analyze things. It can also be a curse, because it puts you in the habit of analyzing EVERYTHING. Lately I’ve been analyzing heels, as you can tell from my previous blog entry.

I got to thinking about the fact that some heels are easier to walk in than others, even though they’re the same height and even the same pitch. I suspected it had a lot to do with whether the heels were set far back on the shoe or were tucked underneath the foot (undershot). Remember, your weight is carried down to the ground through your ankle bone, so when you stride along and the very back of the heel hits the ground first, any weight you put on that foot is carried down the white line:

As your full weight shifts to that foot, the force goes straight down the black line:

The problem is that during the fraction of a second it takes for your ankle to rotate through that small angle, you’re in a precarious situation with your ankle bent and a lot of pressure on that little bitty heel tip. You scarcely notice it, usually: allowing for this effect is what learning to wear heels is all about. But that’s the real reason some people break ankles walking in heels even on level surfaces – their weight goes off-center during that critical split second, and over they go.

To test my guess I did what any self-respecting scientist would do: I performed an experiment. I looked over my collection to find a couple of pairs with a good contrast of setbacks on heels of the same height. My Prada slingbacks and my Harley-Davidson mules (talk about a style contrast!) are a perfect example of the extremes:

The Harleys are so severely undershot that it tempts me to take too long a stride, with the result that my foot skids out in front of me and I go right on my fanny (a fact confirmed by involuntary experiment!). By contrast, the Pradas cut down the length of my stride so my ankle doesn’t have to bend through too much of an angle. The effect of all this is to change one’s gait, not just in short strides versus long, but even in the degree one can strut, swagger, or sway (for lack of more elegant descriptors).

I found I’m not the only one who notices this. Some years ago I had a pair of Via Spiga boots with a modest 4” heel (not at all a steep pitch on my size 11) that was pretty radically set back. I tried for a week to get used to them, but finally gave up and took them to a local charity shop. When the young girl at the counter accepted them she whispered so her boss couldn’t hear, “I had a pair of these once, but I could never learn to walk in them!”