The foot is a marvel of design. Each foot has 26 bones, 100’s of ligaments, muscles and tendons. Most of these structures must function with each other in a really precise way to ensure that we can easily walk, run and do a whole variety of activities. The foot is a perfectly tuned biomechanical masterpiece as it needs to co-ordinate all those anatomical structures in order that it can function efficiently and without problems to undertake those actions. The foot did evolve to get those functions on a soft ground rather than wearing shoes, so a number of defects probably crept in as feet was placed into shoes and it was forced to walk and run on the hard cement surfaces. Small imperfections that were not previously an issue started to show up in those shoes and on those hard ground. It is this that is to blame for so many of the problems that podiatrists see in the foot today.
For example, one of those issues is a notion known as supination resistance. This is considered as the force that's needed to raise the arch of the foot. If this force is high, then the muscles and tendons have to work harder and the ligaments have a lot more stress on them. This may lead to pain in those structures and also the development of a progressive flat foot. If this force is high, walking and running also needs more energy and can be really fatiguing. If that supination resistance force is too low, then it will probably be an easy task to raise the arch of the foot. This can result in more ankle sprains as it is very easy to tip the foot over to cause that. From this it ought to be apparent that a fine balance is required between too much and too low amounts of force which is a good demonstration of precisely what an engineering miracle the foot is and just how easy it is for something to go wrong.
