The New York Times is reporting that the study was conducted by Neil J. Cronin, a postdoctoral researcher, and two of his colleagues at the Musculoskeletal Research Program at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. They got the idea for the study after watching a woman in high heels lurch past them while they were taking a coffee break on campus. Her discomfort was so obvious, they couldn't help but wonder what kind of havoc those heels were wreaking on her body.
They decided to find out and put together a study comprised of nine women who wore high heels for at least 40 hours a week for a minimum of two years. A second group was comprised of 10 women who rarely, if ever, wore heels, and was used as the control group. All of the women were in their late teens, 20s, or early 30s.
During the test, both groups were fitted with electrodes that tracked leg muscle activity, and were made to walk a 26-foot-long walkway that contained a plate to gauge the forces generated as they walked. The heeled group covered the walkway 10 times in their heels, and 10 times in bare feet. The control group walked the path 10 times while barefoot.
What they discovered is that women who habitually wear high heels walk differently than those usually wear flats - even after they kicked off their heels. The heel wearers moved with shorter, more forceful strides than the control group, with their feet held in a flexed, toes-pointed position. They walked this way even while barefoot. As a result, the fibers in their calf muscles had shortened and they put much greater mechanical strain on their calf muscles than the control group did.
The women in the control group primarily stretched their tendons while walking, but heel wearers relied on muscle to do the job - which is a less efficient way of moving.
"Tendons are more effective springs than muscles,” Dr. Cronin said.
By stretching and straining their already shortened calf muscles, the heel wearers walk less efficiently with or without heels, he says, requiring more energy to cover the same amount of ground as people in flats and probably causing muscle fatigue.
Many women might think this is a small price to pay for those beautiful heels, but not if they consider the risk of injury - which could prevent them from wearing those heels again for a long time.
“We think that the large muscle strains that occur when walking in heels may ultimately increase the likelihood of strain injuries,” he says.
“In a person who wears heels most of her working week,” Dr. Cronin says, the foot and leg positioning in heels “becomes the new default position for the joints and the structures within. Any change to this default setting,” he says, like pulling on a pair of sneakers or flats, constitutes “a novel environment, which could increase injury risk.”
He also points out that his volunteers were quite young, which suggests that it doesn't take long for these changes to occur.
Dr. Cronin, who published his study last week in The Journal of Applied Physiology, has some simple advice for women who want to wear heels. First, wear high heels only once or twice a week. When wearing them, try to remove them whenever possible, such as while sitting at your desk or riding on the train.
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