North Footwear Facebook ad: “Three things people buy when their feet hurt. Research…”

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In 2006, a research team led by Karl Landorf at La Trobe University ran a trial that the orthotics industry has never adequately answered. They recruited 135 people with chronic plantar heel pain and split them into three groups. Group one received custom-made foot orthoses — the expensive kind, moulded to the individual foot, the sort a podiatrist prescribes for two to four thousand kronor. Group two received prefabricated orthoses off the shelf. Group three received a sham. A flat, soft insert with no arch support, no correction, no biomechanical function whatsoever. A placebo in insole form. Nobody knew which group they were in. At three months, the two real orthotic groups showed a small improvement in function over the sham. Modest, but measurable. Exactly what you'd expect. Then the researchers followed everyone for a full twelve months. And at twelve months, the difference was gone. The custom orthotics group, the off-the-shelf group and the group wearing a deliberately non-functional piece of foam had statistically indistinguishable outcomes. In pain. In function. In everything measured. The findings were published in Archives of Internal Medicine — now JAMA Internal Medicine — one of the most rigorously reviewed journals in clinical medicine. It has been cited hundreds of times. Subsequent systematic reviews have reached broadly similar conclusions: the evidence for custom orthoses producing lasting benefit over simple alternatives is weak. And almost nobody who sells them mentions it. Now look at the three things crossed out in that picture. A stiff supportive boot. A thickly cushioned walking shoe. A pair of orthotic insoles. They look like three different products aimed at three different problems. Hikers buy the first, walkers buy the second, people in pain buy the third. But they're not three solutions. They are the same solution, sold three times. Every one of them works by adding something to the foot. Support the arch. Cushion the impact. Correct the alignment. Stabilise the ankle. Every one of them begins from the same premise: that the human foot is an inadequate structure that requires external assistance to function. That premise is the thing worth examining, because it happens to be backwards. What your foot actually is Your foot contains 26 bones, 33 joints, and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments. Around twenty of those muscles originate and insert entirely within the foot itself. They're called the intrinsic foot muscles, and their whole job is to control the arch, spread the toes and stabilise the structure from the inside. They are, in effect, a built-in orthotic. Active, adaptive, self-adjusting, and responsive in real time to whatever surface you happen to be standing on. They respond to load exactly the way every other muscle in your body does. Load them and they get stronger. Unload them and they weaken. And that is precisely what an arch support does. It physically occupies the space the arch muscles are meant to be working in, and takes over the job they exist to do. The first weeks feel better. That's not imaginary — you've offloaded tired tissue and it's grateful. But offloading a muscle isn't treatment. It's a cast. Six months on, the arch is weaker than it was. The pain returns. And the recommendation you receive is a stronger orthotic. The proof that the reverse direction works In 2019, Sarah Ridge and colleagues at Brigham Young University published a study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise designed to test something specific. They divided adults into three groups. One group completed a structured, supervised foot-strengthening exercise programme. One group simply wore minimalist shoes during normal daily walking — no exercises, no programme, no instruction beyond "wear these." One group changed nothing. After eight weeks, they measured intrinsic foot muscle size and strength. The group that only changed their shoes showed gains comparable to the group doing the dedicated strengthening programme. They didn't train. They didn't see a physiotherapist. They walked to the shop, walked the dog, walked to work — and their feet got measurably stronger, because for the first time in decades the muscles were being asked to do something. That's the entire mechanism. There is nothing more complicated to it. It isn't only about the feet This is where it becomes relevant for anyone over fifty. In 2013, Najia Shakoor and colleagues at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago published a study in Arthritis & Rheumatism on people with knee osteoarthritis. They had participants wear flat, flexible footwear — no arch support, no raised heel, no stability structure — for six hours a day over six months, and measured the load going through the knee joint. The knee adduction moment, the specific loading measure most strongly associated with the progression of knee osteoarthritis, fell by roughly 18%. Not from surgery. Not from injections. Not from weight loss or a training programme. From flat, flexible shoes. The reason is mechanical. A stiff, elevated, heavily structured shoe changes how force travels up your leg. Flatten it and let the foot move, and the loading pattern at the knee shifts closer to what the joint was built to handle. Which explains something that otherwise seems like a coincidence: that the people who buy the most supportive footwear are frequently the people whose knees hurt most. And the weight nobody accounts for There's one more cost, and it's the one people find hardest to believe until they see the numbers. In 1969, Robert Soule and Ralph Goldman at the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine measured what it costs the body to carry weight in different places. Same load, different location: torso, hands, head, feet. Weight carried on the feet cost four to six times more energy than identical weight on the torso. The finding was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and has been replicated repeatedly since, most notably by Browning and colleagues in 2007. The reason is physics. Your torso moves in a fairly straight line. Your feet accelerate from stationary to faster than walking speed and back to zero, thousands of times an hour. Every gram out there is accelerated and decelerated with every stride. A leather boot runs 600 to 800 grams per foot. A thickly cushioned walking shoe, around 300, before you add the orthotic inside it. A barefoot shoe, under 200. Apply Soule and Goldman's multiplier and that difference stops being a specification. Over a normal day's walking, the boot demands roughly what you'd spend carrying an extra two to three kilos on your back that you never packed. At thirty-five you absorb that without noticing. At sixty-five it is the difference between an afternoon walk and an afternoon in the chair. So why are the shops full of the other three? Because there is a product in every one of them. Custom orthotics: two to four thousand kronor, remade every couple of years, sold by the person who diagnoses you. Supportive boots: waterproof membranes, torsion plates, stability shanks, ankle collars — a feature list that justifies the price and a construction that wears out. Cushioned shoes: proprietary foam that visibly compresses within a year, which is precisely the point. Global footwear is a market measured in hundreds of billions, and almost all of it rests on the premise that your foot needs something added to it. A shoe that is light, flat, wide and thin has nothing to put on a hangtag and no reason to be replaced next season. It is also the one the research keeps pointing at. Which brings us to the shoe in the spotlight. North Footwear is a small Swedish company, and the design brief was subtraction rather than addition: build what the research describes, and leave out everything it says is causing harm. A toe box shaped like a foot. Wide where your foot is actually wide. Your toes spread and grip. The big toe and little toe act as the outriggers they're meant to be, and the foot becomes a stable platform instead of a narrow point. A completely flat sole — zero drop from heel to toe. No raised heel tipping you forward. No forced heel strike. The loading pattern Shakoor's team measured at the knee. A thin, flexible sole. The foot bends, the arch loads, the intrinsic muscles work at every step. This is the Ridge mechanism, applied to walking to the shops. No arch support at all. Deliberately. The arch is a muscular structure. It gets stronger the same way every other muscle does. Under 200 grams. Run that against a 700-gram boot through Soule and Goldman's multiplier and you're saving your legs the equivalent of two and a half kilos on your back, over every kilometre you walk. One honest caution, because it matters Ridge's own earlier research, published in 2013, found that runners who transitioned into minimal footwear too aggressively developed increased bone marrow oedema in the foot — the early signal of bone stress. The lesson from that study is not that minimal shoes are harmful. It's that feet which have been unloaded for thirty years need time to load again. Start with an hour or two a day. Build up over several weeks. Let the muscles adapt at the pace muscles actually adapt. Anyone selling you barefoot shoes who doesn't mention this is either unaware of the literature or not interested in your outcome. Right now North Footwear is running 50% off the full collection with free shipping. Every pair carries a 30-day guarantee. Wear them for a month. If your feet don't feel different, send them back for a full refund. No questions. Fair warning: North is a small company and doesn't mass-produce. The last restock sold out in three days. Landorf's trial made the point in 2006, and the research since has only sharpened it. Your feet are not a structure that failed and needs propping up. They're a structure that was propped up until it stopped working. Take the support away and give them a month. 👟 Try North risk-free before this restock sells out →

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northfootwear.com

Three things people buy when their feet hurt. Research says none of them work.

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