 |
| Kandykane's favourite Ray Rose |
Wearing high heels is definitely not a friendly act to your knees and I deeply agree with that since I felt so sore, painful, tired, cramped... to have high heels. However, I feel okay to dance in dance shoes with even 3.75 inches. It becomes a myth to me, so I decided to check it out and unveil this very mysterious myth.
First of all, I researched what would happen when we wear high heels. I found that our body tends to misaligned the hip and spine to off-balance the extra height, this makes the calf, hip and back muscles very tense. And the higher the heels, the more severe the fatigue will be. This is a result of the forward-shifted weight which pushes knees and hips forward and hyper-extends the back. The odd posture gives you cramped and bulged muscles and stressed lower back nerves.
It is true that we wear 3.75 inch heels; it is also true that our posture is quite different from our usual posture; it is especially true that our weight is shifted forward. However, in order to maintain the correct posture in dancing, we intentionally engage our core muscles. This dancing posture is in fact much closer to the 'correct' alignment than the walking posture of ordinary people. Not only we engage the core muscles, but also intentionally pull the shoulders back.
If you have ever observed carefully, you will find that modern people tend to crouch their backs (and are developing hunchback) which is a result of over-using of mobile phones, while dancers tend to keep their back and core in line consistently even when they are not on the dance floor.
Now talking about the leg muscles. Oh yes we can not deny that we use all our legs quite often and we use our toes and balls of the feet much more often than other people, and that may give us sore calves. However, let's not overlook that we actually use our inner thighs to support rather than just the calf. If we need to talk about the ankle twist that most high-heel lovers get to suffer from, we are not likely to have that since we train our ankles (that's important for multiple turns).
Well, in short I don't really think that the dance shoes are harmful to us. But... wait a minute, I didn't mean that we are absolutely okay with high heels, I only meant to say we are not badly hurt as people imagine. We not course get some influences; however, given the warming-up, the stretching, the cooling-down exercises we do each time we dance, we should be able to beat some of the negative influences.
Just like or other types of spots, we get fatigue after intensive training, muscles stressed, or maybe muscle sprained; mentally and emotionally stress is a norm, especially before competitions or important shows. We may get hurt when we try to perform new actions that we are not yet familiar with. It is true that we face some health risk but not all related to the heels. In fact, the heels affect us the slightest when we are cautious about techniques.
...................................................
Follow me for more updates on: