High Heel Addiction: Go High or Go Home

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Whether they're Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, or Christian Louboutins, women love high heels. But while they can add sex appeal to almost any outfit, consistently adding extra inches to your stride could change your bodies' physiology.

It's been known that keeping a limb in a shortened position for an extended period will also shorten the muscle within it. Since high heels push heels up, shortening calf muscles, researchers wondered if regularly wearing the fashionable shoes would also cause permanent changes to the muscle.

Marco Narici of Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, and Robert Csapo of the University of Vienna, Austria teamed up to recruit women between 20 to 50 years old who regularly wore 5 cm heels for two years or more.

Using MRI, they measured the women's calf muscles, and compared their findings to a group of women who prefer to wear flat shoes. The result: no difference. But when the researchers went on to measure the length of the muscle fiber with ultrasound, they found they were 13 percent shorter in the high heel wearers.

Wanting to know if the shortened muscle fiber makes it more difficult for high heel addicts to walk, the researchers examined the MRIs. They discovered while the Achilles' tendon is same length for both high heel and flat shoe wearers, it's much thicker and stiffer in the former. The change in the tendon helped compensate for the shortened muscle fibers in the calves, allowing the muscle to function normally while they walked. This in turn caused regular high heel wearers to feel discomfort when walking on flat feet.

So do you have to throw away all those pairs of stilettos? Not quite yet, but Narici says you may want to try stretching a little when you kick off your heels at the end of the day.

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Source: Journal of Experimental Biology, July 16, 2010.