Foot Talk Fridays : How to fit shoes correctly?
Subtitles:
Welcome to Foot Talk Fridays!
Today we’re going to talk about how to fit shoes correctly for the shape of your individual foot. So, different manufacturers have different width fittings for their shoes. For example, you might have a quite fitted shoe and most American brands are made for quite wide, round-shaped feet compared to sub-continent brands that are made for very slim, high-arched feet. It depends on which type of shoe is good for you. We recommend that you ask somebody to draw around your foot while you’re standing, don’t try to do it yourself because it changes the position of the feet, and the most natural
foot shape is when you’re just standing up. So, have somebody draw around your feet using an A4 piece of paper, and then trim round it on the line that you’ve just drawn. Then you get your actual foot, because the feet get a little bit larger when you stand on them, if you draw a line while you’re sitting they maybe half a shoe size smaller because the arch depresses slightly when you put your body weight on to your feet.
Then what you can do when you’re in a shoe shop you can take the liner out of the shoe. Most liners are not glued in very well at the beginning until you’ve walked on them for some time, then they get more sticky and difficult to remove. For example, this one is curved in the end so when we place this on it is not going to go all the way to the back because the curve just contours your heel bone.
So, it goes something like this and it has a little bit more space because obviously when you’re running the fat pad under the ball of your foot allows the foot to slide back and forward slightly, so we don’t ever want to get a shoe that fits your foot exactly. We always want a little bit of space, and you see this white cut-out fits this shape absolutely perfectly, so this would be a perfect shape. Or, if you’re going to buy work shoes you would take this cutting, otherwise some work shoes can bite the foot at the sides here, if it presses on this bone it can enlarge, and if it presses on the fifth toe too much you can get a toe corn.
Moving on to children’s shoes, if you look a little bit closer at this you actually see some white lines on the top here of the insole (if I just bring it into focus a little bit like this). The white lines on the top here are most helpful when you are doing a fitting for children’s shoes. Adidas are very helpful because they put this little line at the back. So, you take this out of the shoe and then the child would stand on it, and make sure that their heel comes to that white line not the back, pink line. When they stand on it their toes should just come to this first line here. When it comes to the first line that is the perfect fitting when you buy new shoes. Then over the next six months as a child begins to grow (or three months depending on the growth rate) you don’t want them to grow anymore up above that last white line. So, that is their growth grid line there, and they can grow over three to six months.
You could take this out of the shoe and have your child stand on it and do the shoe fitting yourself (if you want to do it yourself). Adidas are most helpful with that, or do this method if you’re going to go for a different brand because Adidas is the only one that does it. So, you can draw a line around your child’s foot, trim it out, take them into the shoe shop and take the liner out of the shoe and match the two up just to make sure they have that little bit of growth space at the end.
Thank you for listening and enjoy your Friday!
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