Are You Wearing the Incorrect Running Shoe Size? Here’s The right way to Tell

If you buy your heels, flats, or sandals, you mostly select a seven. So wouldn’t that hold true to your running shoe size too?

Not exactly, Alicia Canzanese, DPM, ATC, a board-certified podiatrist, athletic trainer, and former collegiate track athlete tells SELF. For essentially the most comfortable, pain-free ride, your trainers should actually be greater than your regular kicks, she says. And the identical applies to most other other workout shoes too, whether you’re walking, cross-training, or lifting (all except for enjoying soccer, where you wish tighter cleats to permit higher contact with the ball).

“If you’re running or exercising, you’re going to extend blood flow to the realm,” Dr. Canzanese says. “There’s inherently going to be just a little expansion, there’s going to be just a little widening, there’s probably going to be just a little little bit of swelling. So you will need just a little bit more room.”

In case your trainers are too small, you may get more blisters, corns, and calluses, along with toe pain and damaged toenails out of your digits banging up against the ends of your shoes. And bunions—a bony bump at the bottom of your big-toe joint—can often ache more in the event that they’re being squeezed by a too-small shoe, Dr. Canzanese says.

On the flip side, too-large shoes may cause problems, too. “In case your heel is slipping out, that may increase your risk of getting things like Achilles tendonitis, since you’re continually fighting the heel moving within the shoe,” she says. Or your foot may slide forwards and backwards, which might actually cause the identical varieties of corns, calluses, blisters, and toenail damage you’ll be able to get when shoes are too small.

So that you’ll likely wish to select a running shoe size that’s greater than your street shoes—but not too much greater that it starts to cause its own set of problems. So what number of sizes up must you go?

You might have heard us reference the “half-size-up” rule here at SELF, and while that may be a great place to begin, it may not at all times provide enough of the additional room you wish. For one thing, sizing for fashion and casual shoes is much from consistent; you may wear a seven in a single brand and elegance and an eight in one other, so a half-size up from seven may not be sufficiently big to your trainers. As well as, “most persons are wearing the fallacious size in all of their shoes,” Dr. Canzanese says. Ceaselessly, patients will come to her with toe pain or other problems, and she or he’ll quickly discover overly snug footwear typically as the issue.

So as an alternative of counting on your regular shoe size to get the precise fit, Dr. Canzanese recommends having your feet measured at a shoe store. Even in the event you’ve done it before, it’s value revisiting every few years, because your shoe size can change as you age.

When you reach maturity, “your bones aren’t growing anymore, but there are 33 joints and 26 bones in each foot, so all of those things can flatten and shift and move,” Dr. Canzanese says. Injuries can influence this process, as can being pregnant—a hormone called relaxin makes your ligaments more elastic to permit for childbirth, and the resulting changes in your feet may be everlasting (Dr. Canzanese herself went up from a ten.5 regular to an 11 wide after having kids).