Start-Rite Shoes - What happens in your feet when you scoot?
Words by Start-Rite ShoesAugust 13, 2024
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3 minutes
What happens in your feet when you scoot to school?
Have you ever wondered what happens in your feet when you are scooting? Here, we invited our friends at Start-Rite Shoes to explain.
On average, feet walk about 70,000 miles in a lifetime—equivalent to four times around the earth. When we are young, our feet constantly adapt and develop to our surroundings, sending signals to our brains. Our fantastic feet, made up of muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, and thousands of nerve endings, are so complex that Leonardo da Vinci called the foot a masterpiece of engineering!
Our feet are made for movement. They tell our brain how our body is functioning, and they become healthier the more we use them. Our feet also do a fantastic job in helping us to scoot. They produce the power to propel our scooters forward. Our Start-Rite collection is made to enable children’s feet to move naturally, protect them and support healthy development. See our collection of excellent school shoes fit for scooting here. Read on to learn more about our fantastic feet and why we are motivated to protect them.
The two parts of the foot, the forefoot and the rearfoot, must work in sync as we scoot, walk or run. Every time our foot hits the floor when walking, it experiences the equivalent of twice our body weight. When we are running, this increases up to three times! To absorb all this ‘shock’, our foot must be flexible, flattening as it hits the ground and then becoming rigid again as we take the step. The subtalar joint, which sits directly below and in front of our ankle, is essential in helping our feet flatten and roll as we walk, run, scoot or jump. As we take a step, the subtalar joint flattens and rolls and then re-forms our feet into an arch shape when we step back up.
Shock pulses travel throughout the body when the foot hits the ground, up to the knee, hips and spine – all these elements must work together to run, scoot or walk efficiently. We get more shock around our body when we run on hard surfaces such as concrete paths, so it’s important that our shoes provide the right balance between support and cushioning. Too little or too much cushioning can cause the foot to over-flatten, leading to injury.
The big toe must be able to bend in your shoes; otherwise, you cannot walk or run properly, and this can injure your knees, hips, or lower back.
The Plantar Fascia is like a strong lever working hard to support all these key elements. It’s a thick band of tendon that runs under the arch of your foot. It helps the subtalar joint absorb shock when you land to support the arch as it flattens. So, if you imagine using your foot to push your scooter forward, the Plantar Fascia helps reform the arch under the foot as the foot leaves the ground and acts as a lever to help propel you and your scooter forward. It then works with the big toe to help the arch under your foot to reform.
Our many tendons provide stability for all the joints in our feet; the most important is the Achilles Tendon, which connects our calf muscles to our heel. Without our Achilles Tendon, we would not be able to scoot and would barely be able to walk.
So, now you can see how complex and vital our feet are and how important the right pair of shoes is.
According to the Children’s Foot Health Register, over £30 million is spent annually on chiropody services for the over 60s and most of these foot problems (around 70%) can be attributed to badly fitting shoes or unsuitable footwear in childhood.
Your child will be wearing their school shoes day in, day out, for up to eight hours a day - that’s 1,280 hours a year! Start-Rite school shoes must be non-restrictive and promote an adequate forefoot shape to allow the metatarsals to expand for adequate ground control and foot form. A child’s gait will continue to develop until around 16. Any compromise to the foot’s natural movement, from tight uppers to stiff outsoles or loose fastenings, can cause the body’s mechanical system to make compromises for what the foot can’t achieve. This, in turn, can affect the locomotor system and can result in injury or inefficient development, leading to future problems.
Start-Rite school shoes include cushioning and internal mesh linings for breathability, biomechanically engineered sole units to cater for how children move naturally and support their development stage, durable, supple and dyed-through leather for comfort and maximum durability and a range of fastenings. And importantly, in the collection, we have shoes with toe bumpers and enhanced protection around the heel and side of the shoe, styles like Trooper and Spirit, and durable shoes to keep up with keen scooterers!
To ensure our shoes stand up to the demands of busy feet who love to scoot to school, Start-Rite tests each shoe to ensure that it exceeds all industry standards. Shoes are flexed underwater 30,000 times, rip-tape fastenings are opened and closed 5,000 times, and many other methods are used to ensure the safety of the children wearing our shoes.
A huge thank you to Start-Rite Shoes for writing this guest blog for us - it is amazing to learn how complex our feet are and how important we treat them with the care they deserve.
If you are looking for a fabulous new scooter to go with those equally fabulous new school shoes, look no further. There's a Micro Scooter for all occasions. Shop on our website for the absolute best in 3-wheel scooters, 2-wheel scooters, toddler scooters, scooter helmets and all the scooter accessories you can imagine (and even some you can't!).