>>2586217>Is walking on the balls of your feet of any help? For walking and perhaps jogging you'll find a midfoot strike being more natural; a forefoot strike will likely feel more natural for running.
>Do you walk differently from when you did before switching to barefoot shoes? Yes.
>I keep getting conflicting information on whether walking heels first vs balls first makes a difference if any at all.Ankle flexion following a forefoot/midfoot strike acts as a shock absorber and allows your muscle and tendons to eat the force of impact instead of jamming your heel into the ground and sending a jolt straight into your knee. Do some sprints on a hard surface barefoot and you will immediately feel what I'm talking about. This knee pain compounds with the pain from ankle pronation. The only time heel strikes might make sense is when compensating for some kind of foot injury.
However, this will not correct your ankle alignment completely on it's own. You will need to make a conscious effort to keep your ankles straight while strengthening your ankles and arches. Self-correcting my ankle alignment and self-coaching myself out of heel striking were the two biggest things I did to save my knees.
>Amazingly this is the exact opposite of what not 1, not 2, but 3 doctors recommended me a year ago when this problem first emerged: they said get orthodics/insoles and wear them all the time, even at home.A friend of mine with a less intense training mindset and less autism went this route and he's been happy with it. I might suggest a hybrid approach, where you get the inserts if you can afford them and use them only when your feet are too tired for proper movement. You're probably not strong enough right now to hold proper ankle alignment all day so having the inserts as a reference point for your training would likely be a useful and good thing, but if you use the inserts all day every day with no barefoot training your feet will continue to atrophy.
