Men: Get your feet wet

Gentlemen, are your dogs barkin’? And, no, we don’t mean your fox-hunting hounds. (As if, perchance, you’re reading this atop a steed in the Welsh woods.) Rather, we refer to those intricate, resilient, often-neglected things typically attached to legs and equipped with metatarsals, phalanges and a flexor hallucis brevis.

You know, feet.

Most guys take them for granted, beat them like Dempsey on Firpo. If you’re of that ilk, repent thee now and ye shall find comfort. Seriously.

Here, some guidelines for putting your best feet forward.

See a specialist

There are 26 bones in the foot. Most of them, according to Dr. Philip Gianfortune, chair of the podiatric medicine department at the Dr. William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine in North Chicago, are at risk for injury. During a leisurely walk, they bear one-and-a-half times our body weight. Fast walking-slow jogging, two times. Running, three to four times. “You start thinking body weight per square inch,” he says, “and you start getting into some pretty big forces.”

The younger you are, Gianfortune notes, the more they’ll withstand. But there comes a point when enough’s enough. “We’re built with a nice pad of specialized fat underneath the long bones of our feet, and with time and abuse that pad shifts out of the way so that the bone is hitting the ground. It’ll atrophy. It just goes away.”

Concrete, unavoidable in these parts, is a prime offender. “It’s just totally unforgiving,” Gianfortune says. “Even asphalt is better than concrete for feet. And then if you couple that with a man’s dress shoe with a leather sole, it’s just like taking a hammer and smashing your metatarsal heads.”

Ouch.

“There’s studies that show that something like 70 percent of people have foot pain at some time in their life,” he says. “And you’re not supposed to. Everybody goes, ‘Well, you worked hard all day so they hurt.’ Well, no. If they hurt, you should get them looked at.”

Get shoe-smart

If you must wear dress shoes, add arch supports. Good ones. And lose the leather soles. “If possible, it’s better to go with a brand of shoe that makes polyurethane soles, which are more shock absorbing so the knees don’t take all the pounding, (Moisture-wicking socks are key, too, so forget that all-cotton rule. It’s bunk.)

While supportive shoes protect the feet, they also prevent other regions from suffering. “Usually, if you’re wearing a shoe that isn’t supportive enough and you’re standing a bit, you get knee pains, lower back pains, heel fatigue,”<And when> your feet are hurting, you tend to slouch more. That can add to the back pain issue as well.”

We know what you’re thinking: Comfortable kicks equal ugly kicks. And to a large degree that’s true. There are, however, sizable strides (sorry) being made to solve that substance-over-style conundrum. Just keep a sharp eye out and you’ll likely find something that, while not exactly cutting-edge-cool, won’t totally embarrass the mate at cocktail soirees.