The Effects of High Heels
Wearing High Heels And Their Effects On Women's Legs
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 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
At that time, Robert Csapo, from the University of Vienna, Austria, was visiting Narici's Active Lifespan Lab, so Narici and Costis Maganaris asked Csapo to test the theory. Placing an advert in the Manchester Evening News asking for volunteers ranging in age from 20 to 50 years who had regularly worn 5·cm high heels for 2 years or more, Csapo attracted 80 recruits, which he whittled down to a final group of 11 who felt uncomfortable walking without their heels. Then he recruited a second group of women who did not wear high heels and teamed up with Olivier Seynnes to look at the internal workings of both groups' calf muscles.
Measuring the size of the women's calf muscles with MRI, the team found that the calf muscles of the high heel wearers were the same size as those of the women who preferred flat shoes; they hadn't shrunk. 'We were expecting slightly smaller muscle volumes in the high heel wearers because we thought that if the muscle is in a shortened position then you are loading it
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 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
At that time, Robert Csapo, from the University of Vienna, Austria, was visiting Narici's Active Lifespan Lab, so Narici and Costis Maganaris asked Csapo to test the theory. Placing an advert in the Manchester Evening News asking for volunteers ranging in age from 20 to 50 years who had regularly worn 5·cm high heels for 2 years or more, Csapo attracted 80 recruits, which he whittled down to a final group of 11 who felt uncomfortable walking without their heels. Then he recruited a second group of women who did not wear high heels and teamed up with Olivier Seynnes to look at the internal workings of both groups' calf muscles.
Measuring the size of the women's calf muscles with MRI, the team found that the calf muscles of the high heel wearers were the same size as those of the women who preferred flat shoes; they hadn't shrunk. 'We were expecting slightly smaller muscle volumes in the high heel wearers because we thought that if the muscle is in a shortened position then you are loading it