Mostrar menúIt is difficult. The presence of insoles in our market is notorious: thermal, orthopedic, sportive and custom. This general presence and its recommendation coming from companies, laboratories, institutions and solvent distributors have given to insoles effectiveness consideration. It happens as when a rumor is widely spread: you hear it so often that it turns into truth, in an urban legend, a believable topic or in a difficult to eradicate from popular knowledge myth.
Something like that happens to insoles. Even more with the ones named as custom. They seem to be the panacea and they are not. Insoles use is only recommendable when it is, what does not happen always. Nevertheless, market receives them willingly because they are the advice of the one “who knows”. Products are to reach us borne out by its properties, result, performance and vendor´s service, but not by erratic and conditioned criteria.
We do not expect sowing discord with this nor question many honest professional that carry out a good work, but calling into question some support to the sportsperson systems that turn around insoles. In many cases, they are advices and impositions from brands towards their sales points to generate an added business to the product´s one.
We try to defend our opinion with scientific and verified by SPORT LAB criteria. Our task is to investigate and obtain certain conclusions to work with. We take some risks, but we are not warm with what we checked and concerns to your health.
We have decided to argue our position because we have detected an increasing in the custom insoles use and demand among athletes. You visit us more often due to muscle-tendon-skeletal ailments coming from unjustified use of custom insoles within sports practice. (Fig. 1-2) We are also bothered with the hazardous promotion carried out by sport centers and laboratories, shops and even sportspersons, praising its use arguing a better performance and fewer injuries.
Fig. 1-2.
The use of orthesis, what includes insoles, makes sense when circumstances advise us in that way, as, per example, athletes with congenital or pathological alterations caused by an accident (Fig. 3-4). Even in these cases, orthopedic accessories might not be required for a proper motoring function. It can be known only after a conscientious study, not before.
Fig. 3-4.
Our feet are designed for barefooting and especially for our movements to happen mainly on irregular surfaces, rugged and or mountainous terrain. The culture we are living at the times being suggests using shoes and that our displacements roll over even pavement, in absence of ruggedness and, of course, with no difficulties.
This latter situation in real life atrophies our most basic structures and in a short term it turns into several conditions: articular pain, tendon injuries, foot-knee-hip biomechanical upset, locomotive difficulties, etc.
If we turn to a specialist to solve these problems, we could find a custom insole that “raises us up over here, holds us over there and stabilizes us a bit beyond” as a recommendation. In the beginning, how not, it helps us to feel better as the insoles do the work that our muscle-tendon system should. But in the long term, this weak favor unchains a major atrophy of our muscular and tendon structures that destabilizes our body even more.
This insole fills up the holes that our feet, that does not step properly, leaves in its abnormal contact with the ground. The muscles that should take part do not do it because the insole holds the feet and the rest of the related muscle-skeletal structures in a wrong position.
In the case of a sportsperson, it is even worse as the custom insole keeps the foot arch from working in its whole surface. The foot arch was designed to store elastic energy whilst we load our weight on it. After that, the stored energy pushes us in the desired direction.
In other words: imagine that you press a table with your five fingertips. Press down as if you wished to bury it in the floor. Your hand would flex until you almost touch the table with its palm. If you suddenly release the pressure, the hand would unspring making your arm to be pushed up. Something similar happens with your feet.
Back to your feet and riding a bike, when the cyclist pushes the pedal within the first half of the crank rotation, it get deformed by flattening progressively the foot arc and storing the elastic energy. After that, once you release the pressure on your foot in the second half of the crank rotation (your feet bows again), this released energy helps your pedal movement, according to a perfect design by the Mother Nature. If you are running instead, jumping or simply walking, it happens once and again.
If in these situations we place a custom insole and, therefore, fitted to our feet anatomy, we keep our foot arch from working in extension and, as a consequence, we find out that a plantar fascia inhibition takes place, also in our Achilles´ Tendon, and a wrong sural triceps muscle function (calf and soleus) as well. All of this means that, if you do not extend your foot arch, you keep it from its elastic function, along with all the rest of the directly related mechanisms. The easiest to deduce consequence is a performance decreasing, biomechanical setup and injuries.
For this more and more common everyday situation, the definitive solutions are the ones focused on the problem´s ORIGIN, not on its consequences. It is about solving, not hiding. It is only possible through a made by true specialist biomechanical analysis. Subsequently, an answer will be given through the correct and personal adjustments within the sports technique that should allow stabilizing the athlete autonomously. In addition, a motoring reeducation should be developed in each case, the kinetic chains should be compensated through specific exercises prescription and so forth until the full recovery and for good.
Given the major physical demands, it is very important for the sportsperson to understand that this is a fundamental part of training and do not allow him/her to be swept away by comfortable solutions.